Created: 2019.10.18
Cell phones are great, they are my main 'camera', but replace a 'real' camera? Not even close yet...
I have from time to time (If I was Trump I would say "dozens of people a day") had people ask: Is there any reason to use a "real" camera now that cell phones are so perfect? After all, Google says on TV 2019) that their Pixel 4 can see in the dark and has a telephoto (snort, laugh giggle) lens.
My response is along these lines. I'll update it over time.
I own about 10 perfectly working real cameras ranging from a Polaroid, to a film Nikon and film Canon, to several digital Nikon, Fuji, through a 4x5 view camera with really good lenses. I also own about 8 cell phones.
Here is my usage in 2019:
*I change my cell phone every year or two. So a count like that can include 2 cell phones.
I am NOT counting 'test' photos where I'm testing my skills or testing equipment or testing 'technique' to improve. I'm only counting photos I took because I wanted the photo itself.
And as a preamble I can tell you. I have been down to Costa Rica twice on business trips since 2018. I tried taking just my cell phones (because I had so much luggage.) I wanted to take photos for business/marketing purposes. I took 100's - actually 1000's. But most of them are not good enough, they were only 'OK'. Great vacation shots, but just not as good, in some cases - pictures of animals and birds - they were bluntly: terrible.
So my next 3 trips (over the next 8 months) to that area of the world, I have resolved to carry a high end, professional DSLR with a couple good lenses.
Throughout this article I'm referring to 'real' cameras and cell phone cameras. This is to distinguish them, not to disparage the true cameras in cell phones and because so many people refer to them that way - as 'real' and 'cell phone' cameras. My comparisons are made with 'real' digital cameras from 2004/2005. The cell phones they are competing with shipped in 2017 and 2018. Clearly an unfair test for the 'real' camera, but given how well the 'real' cameras did below, I might want to try a newer 'real' camera! But I think my case is realistic. While we throw out our cell phones and buy a new one every year or two - either because we want the latest and greatest, or because the battery is dead, we don't tend to change our 'real' cameras nearly as often, and I don't think I'm the only serious photographer that is using a 15 year old DSLR - the DSLR's really are that good and they do last a much longer time than cell phone cameras.
I would have loved to have had my current cell phone camera as my primary camera in the 1980's. No question - for most pictures of people, my cell phone is much better than that 1980's camera. But there are still some areas that my 1946 camera still beats cell phones and I'm so glad I learned how to take really good quality pictures and that I'm not limited to the, very powerful, very feature rich, but very limited cell phone cameras. Don't get me wrong, look at how many pictures I take with each - clearly I love my cell phone camera.
I use my cell phone for snapshots all the time. I have a modern, high-end, Samsung and a modern high end iPhone. I'm not giving the models, because they keep changing as I upgrade. But the answers are still basically the same.
My cell phone is waterproof! Well, maybe not. I had a new Samsung phone in 2018 that was supposed to be water proof to 4.5 meters. I used it just under the surface (inches/cm's - not meters) and it died in 20 seconds. Samsung wouldn't honor the warrantee because it had 'water damage.' I had to use my wife's cell phone for the rest of the business trip because ... it died the 1st full day of the business trip in Costa Rica. But at least I wasn't bugged by phone calls and texts for the next 2 weeks!
If you are willing to try your phone underwater, yes, there is a reasonable chance that your cellphone that claims it is waterproof, will handle some water better than any 'real' camera will, unless you really make sure you have a truly underwater camera and lens. I'm assuming I was just unlucky that my S8+ died in seconds 3" underwater and I'm still upset that Samsung bragged about how waterproof their camera was and then didn't honor the warrantee, but I did buy a 9+ to replace it - and I have never tried the S9+ underwater - I don't trust Samsung.
So ... Possible win for the cell phone here. But try it before you take it on that once in a lifetime trip, and every time you drop it - decide whether you want to risk testing it again, and if you don't test it again after dropping it, assume it is no longer water resistant.
My cell phone has what it laughingly calls a telephoto lens AND a normal lens, so I can get great close up photos.
My baloney meter is pegged to the red for this. Compare this: On 'normal' camera, a lens that is around 50mm, 35mm film equivalent (sorry for the jargon) is considered a NORMAL lens, and a lens around 28mm is considered 'wide angle'.
On a Samsung S9+ ... the 'normal' lens is actually wide angle, and the 'telephoto' lens is just barely in the 'normal' range. There is NOTHING telephoto about those lenses. It is marketing trickery to claim that it is 'telephoto'. In other words - they are lying to you.
If you want to take any decent photos of animals in the wild, a cell phone just does not cut it. I compared 2 photos of monkeys I took from the same distance away. My cell phone in 'telephoto' mode gave me a picture of a monkey that was a small black dot with 4 black lines (arms & legs probably). My camera with a 200mm zoom gave me a picture where the monkey filled the screen and I could clearly see details about the baby she was carrying. Again - these were from the same distance - as close as I was able to get to the monkeys before they ran away.
So calling any lens on a cell phone 'telephone' is a huge funny joke and Apple, Google, Samsung and the others are laughing when they hear you refer to their lens as 'telephoto.'
And if you have a DSLR with a 'small' (APS-C) sensor (most do - unless your camera says it has a 'full frame' in which case, you know all this and you aren't reading this article anyway.) It takes every lens and makes it about 1.6x's MORE telephoto than the numbers on the lens would suggest. So, unless you bought a really wide angle lens - EVERY lens including your 'wide angle' lenses that you own is MORE telephoto than the 'telephoto' lie on cell phones.
So clear, hands down, no contest win every time for the cheapest "real" camera. (Between them, sure there are fights for which is best - but compared to cell phones, every one of them wins. And don't go telling me that "but what about the blah blah panoramic camera" - when I say 'every one" i don't mean that literally, sure there are special purpose "real" cameras and lenses that don't make this aspect win. But this is a USEFUL article, not looking at technical outliers.)
Clear win for the cell phone. Easy to hold, and everyone expects a selfie to look like it was taken from too close. (your nose is 'too big' proportionally, your arm looks weird - it's holding the camera or the selfie stick.)
Here, the cell phone wins sometimes and the "real camera" wins sometimes. But i'm going to give the win to the cell phone overall. After all, even their telephoto lens is on the 'wide' side of normal.
The problem with most consumer "real" cameras, like the Canon Rebels, is that they have a 'small sensor'. I'm NOT picking on them - they are really nice cameras for the price, and many other including many Nikon cameras have the same problem (which in other points in this article is a benefit.).
A 'small sensor' has the huge disadvantage that it takes every lens and moves it, typically, about 1.6x's in the 'telephoto' direction. As noted above, unless you have a full frame camera (in which case you have stopped reading this article as beneath your level of knowledge, and yes, I own one of these) or you have a really expensive wide angle lens (I own about 3 of those), the cell phone is going to give more 'wide angle' on even their 'telephoto' lens than you have.
A funny event in 2019: “While wide-angle can be fun, we think telephoto is more important,” said Marc Levoy from Google Research (and Stanford University) at the Pixel Launch event. The problem is ... what THEY call telephoto, photographers call at best a 'normal angle of view' lens. But if you ignore him and think about this, you can achieve a slightly telephoto from it: it is a 16MegaPixel image, and you only need 1 MegaPixel for a decent 4x6 print, so you can crop quite a bit on this to get a decent true ''slightly telephoto' image.
So, cell phones get the win on wide angle, even if they claim their lens is 'telephoto'!
A recent ad on TV for a Google Pixel camera brags that it can 'see in the dark' it has such a sensitive sensor. Boy that makes it sound MUCH better than a real camera, my real camera's can't see in the dark! But wait ...
That camera has a f1.5 equivalent f-stop. Yes this is jargon. The smaller the number, the more light is let in. And the smaller the number, the bigger difference a small change is, f22 to f32 is the same as f2 to f1.4.
But I have a f1,2 on one of my lenses for Nikon, and a 1.4 and a 1.8, and a zoom that has 2.0 at the bottom. AND the 'sensors' in my 'real' cameras grab more light per pixel than the Pixel. It is like film ISO of old - some film was more sensitive than other. So it turns out, comparing both specs and real life:
So yes, that Pixel is a REALLY nice CELL PHONE camera - but it doesn't hold a candle to taking pictures by candle light that my real cameras can.
So for convenience, sure the latest Pixel is indeed the best for low light. But compared to a 'real' camera - cell phones still lose clearly. And I don't say that lightly.
(all puns above intended.)
That is not a 'win' for cell phones, that is just a simple matter of physics of light when it comes to wide angle lenses. If I use the same f stop (say 2.8 like mentioned above) on my 'real' camera - I get exactly the same 'depth of field' as it is called.
But wait! Cell phones either have a fixed f stop, or a few in 2019 now have TWO f-stops to choose between.
While Cell phones have 2, my lenses have many over a wide range. And the two f stops the cell phones have are jammed very close together.
So, if there is enough light, take a real camera, and an f22 stop, at the same wide angle, and take it with the cell phone. Then look at the details - you will find that yes, the cell phone is 'equally blurry' over a very wide range (technically it is more blurry the more it is away from the focal) yet my 'real camera' is nearly equally SHARP for that same range. I tried this and I could make out on my cell phone picture that a specific person 30' away had I think they were eyes - or maybe those were sunglasses, but with the 'real' camera stopped down to f22 - I could see the whites of his eyes separate from the eyelids - at the same resolution.
So ... because of the NATURE of wide angle shots and you are not expecting to see details, cell phones are adequate, and usually 'good enough' as long as you don't want to see any details. But 'real' cameras have the creative ability to be MUCH better if there is enough light.
And when a 'real' camera wants the background blurry, it has at least as much capability as the cell phone, and often more.
Like
Cell phones win. But it is a cat and mouse game, if your cell phone is a few years older and your "real" camera newer, the real camera might win. But in general, people upgrade cell phones more than their "real" cameras, so I'm giving the edge to cell phones on this one. After all, as I write this, my 3 most commonly used DSLR's are more than 10 years old and I'm not panicking to upgrade - though I admit I'd love to if the cost benefit justification was there.
Quick: Which takes a better picture? The cell phone in your hand or the camera back in your car or at home?
Take advantage of the fact it is:
Whereas 'real' cameras are:
So what does that mean? It means the cell phone has some huge benefits:
And this is key: You are more likely to have your cell phone when an unexpected photo opportunity pops up - and the camera you have is better than the one in your case back in your car.
The win goes to cell phones for this..
Some people say this number doesn't matter. I beg to disagree. The newer cell phone cameras with more MegaPixels let me crop to 'zoom in' much better than my first cell phone camera (which btw - I had BEFORE the iPhone was invented.)
But be very careful comparing Megapixels on your cell phone to Megapixels on a 'real' camera. They are NOT even close to being the same, a Megapixel on a real camera is worth a lot more than a megapixel from a cell phone. Before you cry 'foul' read my explanation.
Most of the time, unless you are trying to make up for the joke that cell phones call 'telephoto' lens, I admit, you don't need more MegaPixels.
But sometimes you do, and when you do, forget the cell phone.
This following test is a little difficult to do and will likely take you several attempts before you can properly do the test.
*In a test in 2019, I cropped 3 images to the same number of pixels, one from an iPhone 7, one from a Samsung S9+ and one from a 14 year old Canon 20D. There was no question, per pixel, the Canon was far better. Try this yourself. Take the same picture as exactly as you can from each so that when you crop a specific portion of the picture, they are the same number of pixels. If the different phones/cameras have significantly different MegaPixels - you may have to try zooming in or out on your 'real' camera until you get a comparable pixel by pixel image.
*Then crop in a detailed, perfectly focused section of the image to say 1000x1000 (don't resize - CROP).
*Again, you may have to try a few times until image has the same point 'in focus' and to have the same number of pixels in the picture mapping the same real world object. So for example, if on one, an eye is 20 pixels wide, you need to have 18 to 22 pixels for the eye in the other to have a fair comparison - again by cropping NOT by resizing. Once you have achieved that, then look at the quality.
In my test, the 14 old Canon 20D was by far the most crisp, detailed, not-blurry. The 1 year Samsung S9+ was fuzzy/muddy, and the iPhone 7 (3 years old) was no better. It really was amazing, a 20 pixel wide eye was clear on the Canon 20D, but it was just a black and white muddy blurry mess on the iPhone and Samsung phone, yet it was, looking at other things, clearly the 'most in focus' point. (Remember that focus is a range, there is one distance from you that is in perfect focus everything closer or further will slowly or quickly be out of focus, so I did verify that my test was valid and I wasn't testing an out of focus spot compared to a in focus spot.)
I have a hypothesis: the glass on lenses for the DSLR have a lot of good quality glass to get a nice quality image, but the glass on the cell phone is tiny, and even the smallest haze or imperfection has a large impact on the quality of the image.
It will be interesting to see if cell phone manufacturers are going to be able to stop worrying about the marketing number 'MegaPixels' and start to fix their lens so that you are actually getting something USEFUL for your MegaPixels.
There is a rumor that Samsung is going to come out in 2020 with a 150Megapixel cell phone. I'm really curious, if they do, to get my hands on one and see if it gives ANY benefit or whether the tiny little glass effectively ruins it and makes it purely a marketing number.
Based on my tests to date, a cell phone would have to have a 400MegaPixel image to be comparable to a film camera or a 'real' digital camera with 100MegaPixels. But I wonder if due to the problems with the glass quality (my hypothesis - I'm not claiming fact yet) if at 20 to 30 MegaPixels we have reached the point where it doesn't matter how many more MegaPixels you add to the Cell phone - you'll just have more crap, not quality as the MegaPixels increase.
The point is: When you need the resolution, when you want to crop heavily, each 1 megapixel on a DSLR is worth significantly more than each 1 megapixel on a cell phone in my testing. So I will take a 12MP digital 'real camera' image over a 35MP, but I might end up taking a 150MP cell phone over a 12MP real camera - let's seen in 2020.
A 35mm film is said to have about the functional equivalent of 120megapixels on a DSLR (lots of reasonable and accurate ways to argue this number higher or lower.) There are some complex reasons for this, but one is that, while each 'point' on a DSLR (with a few exceptions) stores ONLY one of the 3 colors, each 'point' on film records values for all colors. On the digital, software GUESSES - yes it is a mathematical, calculated, reasonable in many cases guess, but it is still a guess, whereas film actually records it for real. Film can also do 1.5 pixels wide or 1.3 or 1.35, it's like the printing industry vs a 600DPI printer - because the film dots and the printing industry dots are variable in size, they give quite a bit higher quality that what seems to be a similar number with a digital camera or ink jet/laser printer. Am I saying film is better? Well, yes, I guess I am. But despite that, I haven't shot 35 mm film since 2003. Digital has been 'better' for me or at least good enough, enough of the time.
Note there is one Digital technology I'm aware of (Foveon) that does record all 3 colors at every pixel. But for marketing reasons, they multiply their stated megapixels by 3 so that it is a fair comparison. Having said that, there are some real work examples- such as fine black lines, where the 'claimed' 3 Megapixels of a Foven really is better than 3 megapixels of competitor chips. Why? Because the calculations don't do that well on standard chips with things like diagonal lines. They blur the edges or cause clearly visible repeating patterns that aren't there - try taking a picture of in focus thin black diagonal lines with your digital camera and you'll easily see what I'm talking about. But I divert, you aren't likely going to find this type of chip on a cell phone. There were rumors - but as far as know, they never materialized.
If you want to see the 'problem' that most digital cameras: Try the test above. Take a picture of in focus thin black diagonal lines, then look carefully at what you got - it won't be a thin line. Now, if this was the ONLY problem, the software could probably fix it, but it isn't the only problem caused by only recording one of the 3 colors at each point. Note as well, if you do the above test with horizontal or vertical lines, you won't see the problem. The software in your camera does compensate for that correctly.
The only way to 'compensate' for this is to take the number of pixels your camera claims, and divide by three. Then, at a comparable zoom in, the film/foveon and digital will look the same to the human eye.
But film doesn't stop at 35mm. There are larger films available, and wow, what you can do with them.
Let me give you an extreme, but real, case. I had a client that wanted a picture of his room sized equipment. He didn't want to take it with him, but he wanted his display booth to be made up with an image of it. He wanted to be able to walk customers right up to this 11'x 20' image, and have them read the fine print that was on it.
Now ... imagine taking a cell phone image, and then blowing it up to 3 meters x 6 meters, or 11'x20' or anything in that range. You KNOW you are going to have a hard time finding WHERE the text is, let alone reading it. I needed ideally 1,400 megapixels to give me 200DPI - enough for text to be very clear.
A 35mm digital 61megapixel Sony isn't going to do that. 61MP is a little lower resolution than 1,400.
A 100MP Hassablad isn't going to do that. Still only 1/14th the resolution.
35mm film only gives 1/10th the number of megapixels (about 20DPI) so it clearly wasn't going to do that.
A medium format professional camera is also not good enough, but starting to get close - you'll be able to tell that it 'is text' - even if you can't read it.
No, for that, you need a professional 'large frame' view camera.
I had (have) a 4"x5" (about 10cmx15cm) view camera. Not big as far as view cameras go. BUT ... it was JUST big enough - and enough was enough. Now ... how many megapixels is that? Well it turns out, it was
That made the text extremely clear on that 11'x20' print. So THAT is a MEGA pixel camera.
Try THAT with my dinky little 12 or 20 megapixel cell phone camera! You'd need to take and stitch together about 150 pictures with my current cell phone to equal ONE photo with my 4x5 at the best, most generous, rating I could give the cell phone.
And if that isn't enough, you can get a 8"x10" or even larger view camera that has at least 4x's the resolution of 4x5 film.
Unusual case? Absolutely. But when you need it, the manpower needed, even with good software, to stitch and fix up the exposure on 150 photos or 1000 photos in some cases is more $$$ than to buy and use a 4x5 or 8x10 camera - and chances are .... the view camera results will be better.
Cell phones win for convenience and 'snap shots' and 'selfies'
Real cameras still win for 'excellence'
And it means: Even though I've been a professional photographer and own lots of cameras ... I still take 90 to 95% of my photos with a cell phone. But most of my BEST photos are taken with a 'real' camera. (Over the next while that 90% is probably going to drop to about 30% for a year - but none the less, I'll be using my cell phone a lot.)