[josephdviviano]

> Yes, the phone is adequate for Instagram but...

Maybe true, but I pretty much only post photos on instagram (using a 5 year old mirrorless camera I found for less than a new good smartphone), and non-experts consistently ask me how I am able to get such high picture quality. So non-photographers can detect the difference between modern smartphones and 5 year old mirrorless tech.

[abakker]

my wife focused on her instagram for her jewelry business for a while. it took about 1 day for her to realize that phone photos were totally inadequate for the quality she wanted to deliver. I'd be surprised if any pro instagrammers really used phone photos for the majority of their work.

[vr46]

Ex-photoj here, I just bought a 2012 Fuji mirrorless for £110 with WiFi to instagram with. Even this area is becoming cheaper to get into. This camera spanks my iPhone XS for photo quality. Now. But give it a couple more generations...

[josephdviviano]

I don't really believe this. One of the major advantages of real cameras is the sensor size. More sensor size gives you more SNR / dynamic range.

All of the tricks used in a smartphone could be used in a real camera. If they were, then real cameras will always have many stops of dynamic range advantage.

[vr46]

All technology has constraints, and pictures are made within them. Dynamic range may or may not be an advantage, because there are only so many levels that can be reproduced for the viewer. RGB, for example, only gives you 256 shades of grey. It might mean more options for the photographer, in that you end up with more information in the highlights and shadows, but ultimately the decision to compress one or the other needs to be made if making a black-and-white print (for example) and you end up with the same picture.

[josephdviviano]

if you have more stops of light available you can get a picture closer to what the eye actually sees. You can see the difference between a crop camera and medium format camera right now if you take a landscape with the sun in the frame, and that is only a few extra stops of light (recall that EVs are logarithmic so each stop is 2x the light). Most cellphone cameras have a native dynamic range that is just over 1/2 that of a crop sensor camera. If the crop sensor cameras used the same tricks as your cellphone, they would be able to do very impressive HDR in-camera.

[vr46]

It’s all true, but the point I was making is that photography isn’t just a technical pursuit nor are those tricks and abilities the things that everyone looks for. There’s more to photos than simply reproduction. None of these things has really shifted the overall quality of photography in the last 100 years as much as it has shifted the way photos are made. And that second shift is pretty much done.