[canbus]

maybe for the average consumer. but how many professional photographers do you see using an iPhone?

sensor size matters for low-light stuff too. sure, an iPhone can do a pretty good job at taking several pictures over say a 2s. exposure, but there _will_ be artifacts in the shot as there isn't physically enough light to form a legible image regardless of post-processing.

this is just one of many reasons why digital cameras are NOT at the brink of collapse yet.

[heartbreak]

The folks working for your local news org are getting paid to take photos on phones. Almost all of the people you would probably consider “professional photographers” in that industry got laid off years ago.

Watching them take photos on their iPhones at high school sporting events is always painful.

[rchaud]

I've never seen a wedding photographer using an iPhone, and the ratio of wedding photographers to news org photographers is probably 100:1 if not more.

[heartbreak]

If we’re including the journalists using iPhones then no, that’s not going to be the ratio.

For what it’s worth, I’m a professional sports photographer (side gig obviously), and I don’t get paid for iPhone photos. I’m not disagreeing with you that iPhones cannot replace dedicated cameras, but they are a lot closer to replacing them for weddings than they are for sports.

[kaba0]

I think the only reason why wedding photographers won’t stop using their dedicated devices is the appearance of professionalism they give.

But yeah, there is only so much advanced computational photography can improve - you can probably do a fairly good job for a slow scene like a wedding, but fast movements are hard to capture with small sensors.

[labcomputer]

Yea, but wedding photogs are businesspeople, who respond to customer expectations. If they show up with “non professional” equipment, they tend not to get referrals, in spite of whatever photo quality they deliver.

[BlueTemplar]

And yet digital camera sales only halved since 2003 ? (But I guess that we should be looking at all cameras for this, not just the digital ones ?)

[tiahura]

By unit sales, or by deflated dollars purchasing increasingly niche priced units?

[labcomputer]

Nitpick:

It’s not the sensor size they matters (larger sensors actually have more noise: that’s why phone photos can look as good as they do). Stop and think for a second: where does the extra light captured by a larger sensor come from?

What actually matters is the physical aperture of the lens. What a large sensor forces you to do is use a larger physical aperture to get the same focal ratio (“f-stop”) and field of view. That’s how you get more light. (the larger physical aperture and constant focal ratio implies a longer focal length, so the math works out)

If you do the math, the larger physical aperture more than compensates for the extra noise of the larger sensor (signal to noise of the system scales as sqrt(sensor_dimension)), so camera systems with larger sensors and the same focal ratio have better noise figures. But it’s not directly due to the sensor.

You can compensate for a lot of that effect by simply installing a lens with a larger focal ratio on a small sensor. That’s because it turns out to be easier to have a high focal ratio when the lens is small: the shorter focal length (for a given field of view) requires a smaller radius of curvature, so controlling chromatic aberration and circle of confusion is easier at higher focal ratios.

[pnpnp]

I honestly see a heck of a lot of wedding photographers using them in some capacity now.

I also see a lot of outdoor photographers using them to save on weight (and pairing with some type of spotting scope when needed).

Digital cameras are definitely not on the brink of collapse, but I do see phones being used to either augment or replace specific scenarios more and more.