[combatentropy]

This article was actually published more than 20 years ago, https://web.archive.org/web/20020603153119/http://vothphoto....

Some of its advice is timeless, but its context is back when your phone did not take great pictures. Instead, most people carried around no camera at all, and events went undocumented. Then, among people who decided they wanted to take pictures of wherever they were going, they bought point-and-shoots, which did not let you change the lens. Then, for those wanted to get serious, there were entry-level DSLRs, which often were sold with a bag and a kit lens, and for the vast majority of these owners, the thought of buying another lens seldom crossed their minds.

In short, this article is meant to expose the problem to people who did not even know they had a problem, and to offer a solution that was last thing they would have guessed.

(I don't think the author meant to mislead us about the original date of publication. It looks like he recently moved everything to Wordpress and may not be savvy enough to fix the date.)

[hellisothers]

Arguably your phone still doesn’t take great pictures in the situation the author is describing: indoors, medium to low light. In this situation the advice is still timeless, a camera with a 50mm ~f1.4 can create a truly great photo (skills outstanding), while the best phone will still produce a “good” photo.

[yakubin]

I have an iPhone 13 Mini and in those conditions it will never take even a good photo. To make anything even half-decent excellent light is needed. When I look online at those articles-ads about phones being great at photography now they use a combination of great light and a boatload of RAW editing.

Plus you need to mind that it’s the standard problem of people saying they don’t hear the fans of their computer, don’t see the tearing in X, and finally don’t see the loads of noise and loss of sharpness in phone photos. Discussing those things is basically futile.

As a side note, a touch screen is never going to be able to compete with the comfort of physical buttons on my DSLR.

[massysett]

I have the same phone and your standards for “good” must be much higher than mine. This phone takes excellent snapshots in low light. They would look horrible if printed 8x10. They don’t look great when zoomed on a phone. But on a phone screen showing the whole photo, they look fine.

My point of comparison is my old point-and-shoot. In low light those things always resorted to flash and the results were terrible. Without flash I needed a tripod.

It’s not as good as a good SLR, of course not. But it’s good enough, a fraction of the size, and does iCloud photos automatically. I haven’t used my SLR in over a decade and should have sold it when I could have gotten a decent price for it.

[sunsunsunsun]

The biggest difference is that most phone cameras are still far too wide, they are just terrible for portraits. A few cameras have 50mm equivalent zoom lenses but most seems to go wide+ultrawide.