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Finding the right click: Should you buy a camera in 2024?
Summary
Mirrorless cameras or smartphone photography? The choice ultimately boils down to how you want to tell your visual stories
“You press the button, we do the rest."
The advertising slogan was coined by George Eastman, the founder of Kodak, after he developed the first consumer camera in 1888.
Smartphone photography is finally delivering on that 130-year-old promise. It has progressed incredibly in the last few years, and the demonstration of that is not just limited to flagship smartphones or a few top-tier brands. Often, it is hard to tell the difference between a photo taken with a smartphone and one captured with a camera – be it a DSLR or mirrorless camera.
Even photography enthusiasts are now leaving their digital cameras behind for vacations and special events. And there’s an entire crop of mobile photography aficionados. One rarely sees a digital camera at an Indian wedding, apart from the hired professional photographers. A lot of professional content creators and video producers also use smartphones as their primary tool for imagery and videography.
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Frederic Guichard, CEO and CTO of DXOMARK, an independent benchmark that scientifically assesses smartphones, lenses, and cameras, believes that the rapid rise of smartphone photography got a lot of people more interested in their photographs and more demanding about capturing high-quality images. Smartphone makers responded with increased emphasis and substantial investment into improving their imaging capabilities.
That doesn’t mean cameras are redundant or going extinct. There are counter currents as well.
Compact digital cameras, geared towards photography enthusiasts and content creators, are apparently trendy again. Both the Fujifilm X100 series of cameras and Ricoh GR III continue to be in such high demand that it is difficult, if not impossible, to acquire them right now. Then there’s Leica Camera, the premium manufacturer of cameras and sports optics, which saw its best financial year ever in the brand’s 100-year history in 2021-22 and continues to increase its sale revenues since then. There’s also the Instax lineup from Fujifilm that has made Polaroid-like photos quite a rage among the younger generation.
The hardware edge
The raw imaging capability of digital cameras is, obviously, beyond smartphones.
The general rule for a sensor – the most important component of a camera – is: the bigger the better. While modern smartphones feature multiple camera sensors, there’s little room for either of them to be very large unlike a camera, which have much more space to house a dedicated sensor – several times larger than in any smartphone.
That said, smartphone sensors too have been improving and we’re already seeing 1-inch sensors, that were previously only seen in compact cameras, from some smartphone brands. In good lighting conditions, such smartphones manage to satiate photography needs of most people. In tricky light conditions or for highly detailed imagery, that large sensor on a camera makes the gulf quite apparent.
Moreover, some of the latest smartphones now sport sensors that offer quite high resolution, up to a whopping 200 megapixels (via pixel-binning, mind you, which is an image processing technique that combines the data from multiple pixels into one to simulate the larger pixels that bigger sensors have). However, high resolutions are also unforgiving. Camera shakes, which are more pronounced in case of smartphones because of the way we grip them while clicking a photo, often distort the focus or cause blur and makes it a lot more obvious when captured in high resolution and printed or viewed on a larger screen. Zooming into such an image often exposes the noise, lack of sharp edges, and loss of detail.
Additionally, most smartphones these days feature an array of lenses, including ultra-wide and telephoto lenses. While this gives a good degree of flexibility to capture varied images, DSLRs and mirrorless cameras allow interchangeable lenses, giving you a diverse set of options to suit your shooting needs, including some specific use-cases. Of course, carrying a bag full of different lenses isn’t convenient for most people.
And that goes for the camera as well.
Smartphones are always on one’s person, but a camera is an additional carry. While professionals and serious enthusiasts would lug it around often for planned events and activities, they would still encounter moments that they’d like to capture but would only have a smartphone handy.
But if one has a camera with them, the tactility and ergonomics of a camera – with dials and buttons – make it much easier to use, quickly and precisely if you’ve learned to use them over time. And the feeling of pushing a physical shutter button is akin to the smell of books that readers often refer to when dissing reading on tablets or e-readers.
Controlling a smartphone camera via on-screen controls is quite an awkward experience. The touch experience is imprecise and often a time sink.
The magic of software
Smartphone cameras cannot escape the laws of physics governing photography, so they piggyback on computational photography – the image capture and processing techniques that use digital computation instead of optical processes – to up their game.
Computational photography compensates for the limitations of the optical setup in a smartphone. That, coupled with sophisticated optical and electronic stabilization systems, significantly improves the imaging quality on smartphones. Of course, this has been made possible by the dramatic increase in the processing power of modern smartphones.
Apart from the image capture, smartphones – inherently smart, connected devices – also offer better ways to store, manage, and share photos instead of the multi-step workflow that cameras require. Additionally, using location data, continuous bursts of photos, machine learning, et al, latest smartphones offer myriad AI-powered experiences around facial recognition, curating albums and collections, and generating creative imagery – surfacing memories for us in very convenient and inventive ways. Of course, camera owners can shoehorn their images into those services, but it is quite a drill.
Smartphones are, in effect, more than a tool to capture photographs, and build an experiential layer around those photos.
Choosing a way to tell your stories
For Akshay Sharma, founding member at a Gurgaon-based tech startup, photography is primarily a cathartic activity and a source of joy. “Consider a game, it is enjoyable because it is a bit complicated and nuanced and there are little rewards with the progress. You get that from a camera, not a phone which is churning out clinical crisp images in almost all scenarios," he explains.
Sharma is a passionate motorcyclist and prefers a camera because of the flexibility it offers in shooting action and motorsports – areas where the gap between a proper camera and phone widens.
Digital cameras let the photographer tell a story. For Guichard, the secret to the longevity of digital cameras is trust. In the hands of someone who knows how to use it, a camera can be relied on to render a scene in the way the photographer envisions. Moreover, if one intends to print images at larger sizes for posterity or journal their travels in the most compelling fashion, one is inclined to get a digital camera – still the king when it comes to image quality as well in the flexibility it offers.
Famous American landscape photographer Ansel Adams once said, “There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer."
Smartphone cameras automate the photographer. You cede the control to the phone’s camera subsystem and moreover, computational processing is not just susceptible to making mistakes, but also simply misunderstanding the intention of the photographer.
That said, a smartphone shot is better than no shot at all.
In 2009, Chase Jarvis, popular American photographer and entrepreneur, published his ode to smartphone – particularly iPhone – photography. Titled ‘The Best Camera Is the One That's With You,’ it asserts why casual snappers prefer smartphones – after all, the simplicity of operation of a smartphone camera is appealing, there’s no additional device to charge, carry, and maintain, and it is always cheaper to cross the delta between the smartphone you need and the flagship one that offers the best camera experience than buying an additional expensive gadget altogether.
Like many other things in life, this conundrum too can be confronted by knowing what you need.
Abhishek Baxi is a technology journalist and digital consultant. He posts @baxiabhishek
