If you honestly think your phone camera is a valid replacement for medium/large format film, then you were never serious about photography in the first place.
For all their improvements, smartphones are still extremely limited by sensor size and the size of optics. Those are terrible, compared to even the entry level DSLRs.
I'm glad it works for your use case (although I can't imagine what that is), but any decent photographer will be able to tell a smartphone picture from a picture taken with good optics and a DSLR. It's just that the market for those photos has also shrunk and the masses are happy with their instagram filter drivel.
not only that, but Google magic eraser made my holiday photos appear like i had my own private island and yacht and i was always happy and smiling and looking at the camera and the sunset and skies, oh my! it just lights up my instas. i don't get what real cameras even do, they have something to do with reality?
seriously though, not all the kids will be coopted into this, and will find cameras are still instruments for artistic expression. but for that we hardly need dpreview and its obsession with optical sharpness and perpetually reviewing every camera in existence as "almost good enough"
You might have it mixed up with DXOMark. DPReview is more "you can sort of tell the difference side by side, but who does that outside a review? They're both good"
and film photographers weren't as serious as daguerreotype photographers in the 1840s.
the market shrunk because gatekeeping photographers were insufferable and tone deaf and everyone ignored them because they had an accessible solution that was good enough.
if you want to pursue a convoluted process for self fulfillment, the choice is yours, but almost nobody else will care about the output of your photos or your fine tuned process.
That's an interesting transition. Why were you choosing those formats over digital ILCs at that time? Most people I hear from choosing film within the past decade, especially larger formats are as interested in the process as the result.
>Phone cameras can't come close to the quality of even a full frame DSLR, anything medium or large format is light years ahead of phone quality.
This is true for medium format if you're doing a drum scan of the medium format negative. Realistically, however, most medium format negatives are never going to be drum scanned.
If you're scanning with a flatbed or via a DLSR, then the difference in quality vs. a modern cell phone camera is not huge. With a typical flatbed you'll get less resolution than a modern cell phone camera; if you scan with a DSLR and macro lens you'll get a bit more (but it's laborious, especially for color negatives).
It's possibly a bit counterintuitive just how bad a job flatbed scanners do in the case of medium format negatives. Years ago I was very excited to make my first scans of some 6x6 negatives with a consumer Epson flatbed scanner. The resulting photos showed about the same amount of detail as roughly equivalent photos taken using my iPhone 4S. There was far more detail on the negatives, as I easily confirmed with a loupe. Extracting that detail via practical scanning methods is far from trivial.
The other point to consider is exposure, color and dynamic range. Modern phones do a fantastic job here.
That's a strange comparison, but if all you want is a photo to post to Instagram, I guess you really doesn't need medium format film, and any "phone camera" will do.
For all their improvements, smartphones are still extremely limited by sensor size and the size of optics. Those are terrible, compared to even the entry level DSLRs.
I'm glad it works for your use case (although I can't imagine what that is), but any decent photographer will be able to tell a smartphone picture from a picture taken with good optics and a DSLR. It's just that the market for those photos has also shrunk and the masses are happy with their instagram filter drivel.