[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.