The compact camera is dying very quickly
Friday, May 18, 2012 at 2:59AM The latest smartphones from HTC and Samsung, and to a lesser degree the iPhone 4S, show just how far smartphone cameras have come in a short space of time. The quality of output is now so good that you would be hard pressed to know if the photos have been taken with a smartphone or a compact camera, and this is just one problem facing compact cameras.
The fact that they find it difficult to connect easily to desktops and laptops is another. They cannot easily share with social networks and they are not very portable. And the list goes on and on.
Now that smartphone cameras offer results that are comparable to compacts, the final nail in the coffin may not be too far away. Auntie Joyce will always use a compact camera, but when she dies she will leave generations of people who have been brought up on smartphone cameras. Sorry to say, but phone cameras and DSLRs (and above) are the only picture-takers I can see with a long term future.
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Reader Comments (8)
IMO the iPhone 4S camera is still the best for overall quality. Yes the others have more features and are very close in quality but not quite there. However, the Sony Experia Arc (can't recall the exact model ), also has a camera on par with the 4S. Not surprising as the 4S has Sony optics inside.
I can believe that standalone compact cameras are nearing the end of their life, as, I think, are standalone GPS devices (except for those integrated with cars).
I don't own a compact digital camera and actually never have. The phone is sufficient, although I think the cameras in phones are merely adequate quality, still (excluding Nokia's outrageous PureView thingy, which is 5 years ahead of everyone else).
Also on the way out, eventually: Blu-Ray, CD players and handheld video game consoles.
I've been seeing a lot of people with those semi-pro type DSRL's... I'm not sure what they're called. Where you can change the lens and stuff but they're not the full quid. I think those suit the hobbiest whilst the camera on the phone is great for snaps.
I have a Samsung camera with built-in Wifi and that goes a long way to making the compact camera more viable. It can be setup to automatically upload to various online photo services (including Picasa and Flickr) or directly to your home PC whenever it detects your home network.
The ability to control it from your smartphone adds an extra level of functionality - my seven year old son uses it to make stop motion animations, controlling the tripod mounted camera from the phone and then adding special effects in post-processing on the PC for example. (At seven-years old I was still struggling with Play-doh... how times have changed!)
The smartphone camera is the camera you've always got with you, but I think for special occasions - birthdays, weddings, parties and the like; you'll always want the extra quality of something dedicated, be that compact or dslr...
Just bought a Canon Ixus about two weeks ago, 230HS model. Frankly, the quality of pictures it takes in all lighting conditions is much higher than any camera found on a smartphone. I had a Sony Xperia S a month or so ago, it's supposed 12 megapixel camera was a major let down. Until smartphones can match the quality of pics on a dedicated shooter I'll continue buying digital cameras.
Smartphone cameras on top smartphones are definitely killing off th bottom-end compact cameras, I.e. under 60 quid or so.
Basic physics shows that the lens and the body size is the limiting factor for most cameras given that sensors have in many ways plateaud and can be any size and resolution for reasonable prices.
Digital photography has made photography and video free to all intents and purposes, and for many people their natural upgrade is to a "bridge" camera or a micro-four-thirds sub-SLR which provides a massive step-in in quality, not to a basic compact camera which doesn't provide an opportunity to develop their skills.
I was at an interior design show on Friday evening and there were quite a few people taking photographs.
Some of the colours were quite intense and I found that I needed to override the default settings of my phone's camera (HTC DesireZ - Android/Gingerbread) to set manual white balance and reduce exposure to stop the colours being burned out or, worst case, stop the camera trying to flatten the scene into a neutral grey. I was able to enable/disable flash too to make the scene more neutral. Here's an example:
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-e75kszjyLyU/T7eOHAGTElI/AAAAAAAAAGQ/dr6kNZdOC_0/s586/IMAG0324.jpg
without override, the picture looked, well, crap.
Someone else there was struggling, she was using her iphone4. I asked why she didn't tweak the settings, and she asked me to help her. The only setting I could find, apart from zoom, was to enable/disable flash. I was quite puzzled. The pictures all looked a bit flat; exposure was OK.
So I would like to ask some i4s experts whether its camera can be used in anything other than fully automatic?
Paul. The 4S is a much better than the 4. It is possible simply by tapping screen in different places to shift the exposure. But for more options you do need an app.