Are modern SmartPhones the Death Knell for compact cameras?

Right then, I want a robust, compact camera for living in a pack or jersey pocket for decent mtb photos. I’m used to slrs and like an element of control over everything.

Does this camera exist, say up to £100? Or is it likely to be a lot more?

bikebouy – Member

I’m a huge fan of smartphone cameras, I too have a DSLR that is currently sitting unloved in its bag with a half full memory card I’ve yet to download to my Mac..

Erm…..I missed the bit where a DSLR is a compact camera. It’s not, never has been & has never claimed to be… 😀

Yak – Member

Right then, I want a robust, compact camera for living in a pack or jersey pocket for decent mtb photos. I’m used to slrs and like an element of control over everything.

Does this camera exist, say up to £100? Or is it likely to be a lot more?

When I was looking a few years ago, around the £100 point most cameras didn’t have much in the way of manual control options. You had to step-up to around £200 for that. Not sure if things have changed now, but most brands do fairly cheap compacts with the normal PASM modes on them.

£200? Ah, ok then. I don’t want to miss out on usability, so I will look at 2nd hand stuff then.

Yak – Member

£200? Ah, ok then. I don’t want to miss out on usability, so I will look at 2nd hand stuff then.

This was several years ago though – I think my Nikon p300 is getting on for 5 years old now and I think that was £200 (down from RRP of £300, which was a tad hopeful of Nikon IMO)!

It’s worth looking on Jessops or Argos and seeing what you can get for your money – I think you can filter by price.

stilltortoise – Member
What case/strap/setup are you using to keep it there and keep it safe?
I use a LowePro Dashpoint. It has a great mechanism for attaching securely to the rucksack straps and even unzipped the camera is secure enough to ride with. Perfect for whipping the camera out one-handed and taking a shot whilst riding. Recommended.

Looks good. Ordered. Thanks for the recommendation.

In terms of compact vs phone vs DSLR. As a sometime photography teacher I’m (I think) pretty atypical in that I don’t much care for all the tech side of taking photos. Obviously I know it fairly well, but for me the image is everything and as I trained as a painter I tend to heavily process my photos anyway to a degree that might upset a ‘pure’ photographer. I don’t even currently own a DSLR – I have a decent bridge camera with full manual and RAW shooting, a cheap (no manual mode) compact and my (also RAW shooting) phone. The phone gets used more than anything else, but I’ve smashed a few while riding due to having it in a pocket so bought the compact to ride with. The ‘decent’ camera really only gets used when I’m going somewhere with the express intention of taking photos or for stuff for print/other people.

Long winded way of saying decide why you take photos, what you want out of them, what you do to them in post processing, and choose a camera based on all that.

I am however, firmly in the ‘the best camera is the one you have with you’ camp, and that good photography is in the eye and mind and not in the kit. Give Rankin a crappy camera phone and he’ll still take a better photo than me if I had thousands of pounds with of gear.

One of my favourite ever cameras was an early Nokia camera phone with a tiny resolution (something like 120 x 180) and fixed focus, but its crude processing did something amazing to colour and contrast in my eyes.

Whats interesting is even though the traditional camera companies have had decades of experience at getting picture processing right the phone companies have come along and nailed it in a matter of years. For the general snap phones I think take far more reliable photos than compact cameras, even ones that are meant to be half decent. I think some of it is that camera companies have always come from the stance of trying to capture the photo exactly as the scene is. The purer the better. Whereas phone companies have come from the stance of a photo that looks the best even if it tweaks the reality.

You can stick your smart phone cameras….!

Just seen this, while having a look about….. 😆

Nikon DL18-50
1.8-2.8 lens with a 1″ sensor

Bit spendy though 🙁

“I know two people who have mahoosive SLR type cameras but they are both crap photographers.”

I’ve seen plenty of people on £5k+ bikes mincing gingerly down relatively easy trails. Etc. In our wonderful capitalist society, the limit to ownership is your bank balance, not your ability.

“I’m a huge fan of smartphone cameras, I too have a DSLR that is currently sitting unloved in its bag with a half full memory card I’ve yet to download to my Mac..”

Maybe a smartphone is sufficient, and the DSLR overkill for your needs/requirements. Most of us own/use computers that are way more powerful than we actually ‘need’. But see my point above; since when was it about need?

My compact camera is less than half the price of a decent smartphone, but does take better pictures. I have a RAW file from which I can get a pretty good image, and the lens is of vastly superior quality. I think people forget about lenses; it is much easier and cheaper to make a reasonably sharp lens for a tiny ‘phone sensor, than it is for anything larger like 1″, 4/3rds etc. I concede that at the lower end, it might not seem worthwhile buying a separate camera if you already have a high-end smartphone, but then a cheap camera can cost as little as £70, whereas a ‘phone with comparable image quality will be several times more plus the added monthly contract cost etc. I don’t think we’re far off from even cheaper ‘phones having the image quality of low end cameras, but the smartphone hasn’t replaced the cheap compact camera just yet.

Nikon DL18-50
1.8-2.8 lens with a 1″ sensor

Another thing for the “what I’ll buy when I win the lottery” list 😆

remind me of the benefits of a 1″ sensor? My camera has one and Ive forgotten! 🙄

Rip Nokia

don’t speak too soon :

Hello Again

remind me of the benefits of a 1″ sensor? My camera has one and Ive forgotten!

Generally speaking the larger the sensor the better it performs. These performance measures are nuanced and debatable but they typically relate to signal to noise (i.e. ISO performance), depth of field (or lack there of, the larger the sensor the shallower the depth of field for a given apperture), colour rendition and other factors relating to general image quality.

A bigger sensor doesn’t autmatically guarantee improvements in these variables but it mostly holds true and it tends to hold true, all other things being equal.

A one inch sensor is quite a bit bigger than you typically find in a compact camera, which would usually have something around 2/3″. But a one inch sensor is still about half the size of APS-C (found in your typical consumer DSLR or mirrorless) and half the size again of a full frame 35mm sensor.

Rockape63 – Member

remind me of the benefits of a 1″ sensor?

Generall speaking as I understand it, a larger sensor will have less noise.
A less noisy sensor has the potential to produce cleaner images, particularly in low light.

My compact camera has a 1/2.3″ sensor, which is much smaller than a 1″ sensor and consequently produces quite noisy images when the light levels drop even moderately.
This would be the main reason for me getting a new compact with a larger sensor – the RX100 that everyone raves about has a 1″ sensor.

You can also get shallower depth of field with a larger sensor, so it’s easier to throw the background out of focus if you want to.

There’s a fairly good article here, that explains a bit and has some images to show the variation in sensor size:

http://www.gizmag.com/camera-sensor-size-guide/26684/

Interestingly (or not), it reckons that phone cameras have almost the same size sensor as a lot of compact cameras, which explains why they aren’t able to produce massively better images in a lot of situations.
For example, my Nikon P300 sensor apparently measures 6.2×4.6mm, while my Xperia T phone has a 4.8×3.6mm sensor; bigger, but not exactly by a huge amount.
A 1″ sensor measures 13.2×8.8mm, so about 4x the surface area of the sensor in my P300.

Wikipedia has a load of stuff on this, but it’s a bit more heavy to digest than the gizmag link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_sensor_format

might have a proper read of that later…..

Just returned from a weekend away riding and have been perusing the photos I took, some on a Panasonic Lumix TZ40 and some on an iPhone 6. Once again I’m left amazed by the quality of the iPhone photos and disappointed by Panasonic. The iPhone is the epitome of a “point and shoot” and has much better dynamic range. It captured mountain scenes with much more detail in the sky and clouds, whereas the Lumix photos were quite blown out by comparison. I’m not saying the Lumix was bad, but the iPhone was better.

I bought my Canon S90 on the recommendation of a pro-tog friend. It replaced an average Fuji F60, which in turn had replaced a brilliant Fuji F20. It was a disappointment to start with and has done little to redeem itself, and now the iPhone takes such good shots it rarely gets used.

I had the S120 for biking duties, was reasonable in good light, not so good in the trees, replaced it with a RX100M2 which is much better, still use the iphone quite often, results vary depending on light (obviously)

Thought I’d post several photos taken at the same event, pretty much minutes apart, using both my iP6+ and my Lumix TZ72, they show quite clearly why a compact will always score over a phone camera, no matter how good the phone camera might be, when the subject is some distance away, and getting closer really is not an option!
iPhone 6+:

TZ72:

I think it’s fair to say that, while the TZ has limitations, they’re nothing like the limitations of a smartphone camera, and I don’t care who makes it; the daft 42Mp Nokia still couldn’t match the TZ, because there’s no zoom, other than digital, which is crap anyway.
When they can get a 20x optical zoom into a smartphone, I’ll fight my way to the front of the queue to get one; until then, I’ll carry both

here’s two pics, both from instagram which may drop quality a little, one with RX100M2, one with iPhone 6S+… both decent… which is which though…

When they can get a 20x optical zoom into a smartphone, I’ll fight my way to the front of the queue to get one

Well there are telephoto lenses available for iPhones (and no doubt Androids too):
https://www.olloclip.com/shop/devices/iphone-6-6s-6-6s-plus/

But sadly only 2x at the moment (some do 4x but not very good quality).

Also has anyone mentioned the DxO One yet?

Looks interesting in the context of this discussion.
32mm equiv, 20 megapixel, 1″ sensor, f1.8–11 “camera” that uses the phone for all the smarts and UI.

(TechRadar review – but slightly out of date due to firmware and app updates etc)

I think the DxO is one of those products that on paper (and in magazines and on websites) looks really cool but just doesn’t work. Sony has tried the same thing with their Cyber Shot, lens and sensor in a can product. They are all just to clumsy and fail to appreciate the fact that anyone who wants to use their phone as part of the creative process, really doesn’t care about quality.

both decent…which is which though

Picture one is a picture of a tree, so it doesn’t really matter what camera it was taken with, it’s just a picture of a tree. If it had been taken with the Sony, then you would have been able to zoom in on the rider in the background and make the picture of them instead, which might have been more interesting. If the iPhone, then that would have been very difficult if not impossible to do.

Picture two is poorly exposed. The camera has exposed for the strong contrasty light in the foreground, but the picture’s main subject is attempting to be the rider in the shadows. If it was taken with the Sony and shot in RAW you could have selected spot metering and metered for the shadows before shooting or added exposure compensation to the evaluative metering. You might also have been able to recover some of the lost shadow detail in post. If the iPhone then there’d be almost nothing you could do.

ouch 😉

Picture one is a picture of a tree, so it doesn’t really matter what camera it was taken with, it’s just a picture of a tree. If it had been taken with the Sony, then you would have been able to zoom in on the rider in the background and make the picture of them instead, which might have been more interesting. If the iPhone, then that would have been very difficult if not impossible to do.

Picture two is poorly exposed. The camera has exposed for the strong contrasty light in the foreground, but the picture’s main subject is attempting to be the rider in the shadows. If it was taken with the Sony and shot in RAW you could have selected spot metering and metered for the shadows before shooting or added exposure compensation to the evaluative metering. You might also have been able to recover some of the lost shadow detail in post. If the iPhone then there’d be almost nothing you could do.

The doctors have said that rs may never recover from this sick burn 🙁

If the iPhone then there’d be almost nothing you could do.

Not quite – you can spot meter and/or do exposure compensation on the iPhone too, so he could still do that at least – though granted it is a bit more clunky than on a real camera.

Likewise an AF lock on the subject would help.

A bigger sensor doesn’t autmatically guarantee improvements in these variables but it mostly holds true and it tends to hold true, all other things being equal

.

That’s certainly holds true in the digital film world. Sensor implementation counts too.

Not quite

I meant that you couldn’t recover the lost shadow detail because you can’t shoot in RAW on the iPhone. You can do the other things but that’s what i meant by ‘very difficult if not impossible to do’.

Yeah if you wanted any more shadow detail on the iPhone then I think the best you could probably do is shoot HDR and then tweak it from there.

Ouch indeed, but i’m slowly recovering, you’ve focused on the details of the image rather than the thing as a whole. I like both the photos because the rider doesn’t stand out, think singletrack cover v MBR cover, part of the enjoyment of biking is being in a big forest and these capture some of that for me at least, and both did what I wanted. Its more than just shadows this, blah that, zoom, crop, etc.

CZ

Unless you were an official photographer why we’re taking pics at a gig?

Last night the bouncers were chucking out snappers at the Roundhouse and it was ace!

Ouch indeed, but i’m slowly recovering, you’ve focused on the details of the image rather than the thing as a whole.

Dude honestly I’m really sorry. I’ve just been a complete **** there haven’t I.

I’ve just been a complete **** there haven’t I.

it was funny though…

Yup. I’m willing to have you feeling like a **** for the chuckle I had 😉

It was how quickly it escalated that tickled me.

Sony Xperia Z5 excellent camera for a phone and great for snapshots.
Canon S120 is for use on the mtb as its much better in low light. Slightly sharper in ideal conditions.
Canon 100d with Sigma 17-50 f/2.8 lens craps on both of them from a great height. But only use it on holiday, days out and for aviation stuff

Sony Xperia Z5 excellent camera for a phone and great for snapshots

I hope it’s a lot better than my Z3 compact – some photos from it are good on a big screen as they resemble impressionist art!

strange my z3 compact is quite good tbh

My z1 is excellent.

I still use my 5 year old compact over my smartphone in many situations.

It can zoom, take 500 photos on one charge, adjust shutter and aperture settings, mount on a mini tripod etc etc.

Not sure about the z5 compact having a good camera, I’ve been particularly unimpressed with mine. Annoyingly the camera was one of the main reasons I bought it: proper os, waterproof, small and great camera – what’s not to like? Oh yeah, the crap camera!

“I know two people who have mahoosive SLR type cameras but they are both crap photographers.”

only 2? do you live on a little island miles from anywhere?

Its more than just shadows this, blah that, zoom, crop, etc.

I’d say that the blah blah stuff is what you need to get right FIRST, then you can say whether you want to depict an action scene, or one-ness with nature, or whatever. (Unless it’s a picture purely for emotional value, and you don’t care if your granny is out of focus.)

YMMV, of course.

Seems better than the Galaxy S5 I had previously and S6 the missus has. For snapshots it’s fine for proper photographs I’ll use a proper camera.