[hef19898]

And being sold used for 700-ish. Heck, an ancient D700 beats any smartphone whatsoever at larger prints and screens. You do have to do some post-processing yourself, true. And you need proper optics, there is only so much you can crop out of 12 MP. Smartphones take great pictures, and I love the fact that it gets a lot more people into photography than back during the film days. making art more accessible can only be good. But let's not kid ourselves, the reason why smartphone photos do look so great is a ton of heavy automated post-processing in device. I'd prefer to have that same functionalities available as stand-alone post-processing software. Or not, I'm fine with darktable.

[radlad]

I think the problem is less about the number of megapixels and more about the size of the pixels (i.e. sensor) personally.

Smartphones simply cannot resolve the same level of detail that a proper camera can, regardless of how many MP of resolution they provide. Computational AI helps a bit, but...