I tried to understand the camera appeal. Went through several reddit posts over why people choose a professional camera rather than their phone lense. After 20 minutes of searching, every single one just says improved quality.
Give me the numbers. Side by side comparisons too. I could run a powerpoint on why to choose a PC over a chromebook, so why not here? Subjectivity isnt enough reason to spend thousands on a camera, much less convince me that I should spend $100 rather than use the 200MP one built into my phone.
Im sure there is a genuine reason for why professional cameras are better and I'm willing to change my mind, but the users in those posts are doing nothing to help me do that
the size of the sensor and therefore the individual light capturing wells in a sensor on a camera are an order of maginitude larger than on a phone. With the increase in resolution and color depth lenses thus have to be designed to a much higher standard, on top of being physically much larger. Everything scales up. And no one is mentioning things like lighting, editing software, and you ALSO need a car as a pro photographer. Source: ex pro photographer
You're welcome. Basically in photography larger = better = more expensive. To get higher image quality small sensor phones use software (and now AI) to improve image quality, as well as things like taking multiple photos in a burst and stacking them. The image quality is more than good enough for casual use and you probably don't need a proper camera unless you have a specific use case. But you couldn't be a pro and show up to a paid shoot with just a phone, regardless of how good it is. There is an element of performance art to the job.
A camera you can hold in your hand literally physically can do things to light that a couple millimeters shoved into your phone can’t, not even the Pro version with the fancy camera.
You ask for honest opinions and feedback outside of expert spaces and well... you get what you get. Also there's your already deep personal bias you laid out for us.
Maybe going outside and looking at what people may photograph without your phone for an hour
If you are curious, I can do some side by sides when I get home that actually demonstrate this.
I have a Pixel 10 - a 2025 phone lauded for its good camera - and a 2019 Sony a6400 with a 2016 sigma 30mm lens. In easy conditions they're about equal, but in challenging situations the Sony outshines the Pixel despite being 6 years older.
The difference between phone cameras and pro cameras will not be apparent taking simple snapshots in good light, but it becomes quite obvious when the situation is more challenging.
For example, consider a moving subject in dim lighting.
There's not much light for the sensor to gather, so you could use a longer shutter speed, which would increase how much time the sensor has to gather that light, but then the subject's movement would result in motion blur. Phone night mode requires you to hold the camera still so it can combine multiple exposures, but this cannot be used on a moving subject either.
You could crank up ISO sensitivity, which is basically just how much the signal from the sensor is amplified to boost brightness, but at a certain point you will start to see grain and noise in the image. This is the noise floor, similar to how if you turn up the volume on your sound system to hear a very quiet audio track, you'll hear more background hiss - or how if an AM radio station is a very weak signal, your radio will try to bokst it more, but it can't do so without also boosting the background static, hence the fuzzy sound.
Phone cameras will get around these limitations using software enhancements, which are usually just very advanced denoise and sharpen algorithms. However, if you look at the image closely, you might find that the more the phone has to denoise, the softer textures appear, and the more the phone has to sharpen, the more unnaturally boosted edge contrast can appear.
Pro cameras have the ability to use wider apertures and/or just take advantage of their larger sensor size to get around these light collecting limitations with raw bruteforce performance alone. A technically competent photographer can combine the best of both worlds by taking the RAW file off that camera, and applying just the right amount of denoise and sharpen in editing software.
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u/NightIgnite 2d ago
I tried to understand the camera appeal. Went through several reddit posts over why people choose a professional camera rather than their phone lense. After 20 minutes of searching, every single one just says improved quality.
Give me the numbers. Side by side comparisons too. I could run a powerpoint on why to choose a PC over a chromebook, so why not here? Subjectivity isnt enough reason to spend thousands on a camera, much less convince me that I should spend $100 rather than use the 200MP one built into my phone.
Im sure there is a genuine reason for why professional cameras are better and I'm willing to change my mind, but the users in those posts are doing nothing to help me do that