A serious photographer will try to maximize quality with camera gear that starts out with strong baseline IQ potential - Pro camera, large sensor, quality lenses.
People who subscribes to the value prop of iphone 12 pro max, do not lean towards this model for the above reasons.
Any pixel-peeping digital photographer, so millions...
>A serious photographer will try to maximize quality with camera gear that starts out with strong baseline IQ potential - Pro camera, large sensor, quality lenses.*
You'd be surprised. There are other elements "serious photographers" sometimes optimize for, including weight, stealth, convenience, and so on.
I'm "serious" for some definitions of the word and I definitely don't bother to haul around a dedicated camera as much as I used to.
And even here, "almost certainly" is the key term. E.g. Alex Majoli shot wars for Magnum Photos with compact digital cameras (this one: https://www.dpreview.com/articles/9257233153/olympusc5060 ) and won awards.
And of course tons of pro photographers have shot with the iPhone and such phones. Even more so in photojournalism, street photography, documentary photography etc.
Now, ad work, wedding, magazine portraiture, etc will of course mostly use their medium formats or $10K mirrorless setups...
I bet if you showed 20 non-photographers 2 images a phone screen, one from the phone and one fullframe edited, most wouldn't appreciate the difference.
That said, I wouldn't give up my camera for many shots but I can understand why many people do. Post-processing camera raws is definitely more cumbersome than quickly editing photos on a phone.
For your use case, are you going to pixel peep and compare RAW file formats differences? As if that knowledge would somehow materially affect your Instagram photo result.
RAW files just give you more latitude after the fact, and editing can either really eek out the last 20% or allow the photographer to better express their "artistic vision" and achieve a look (eg split toning or color grading). All this worked before on jpegs even, but raw just closes the camera/smartphone gap a tad bit more - especially when it's easily available to everyone.
You might be right that it's currently a niche, but if the UX improves, widespread adoption might happen.
People don't just read things that "materially affect" their results.
If we did we would read 10% of what we actually read in HN...
I guess I'm getting old, but I can't help but observe that the image quality provided by a smartphone today is superior to anything available even to rich amateurs when I was a kid in the 90s. This is especially so when you look at color accuracy and dynamic range as well as resolution (which is much less important, but much more often obsessed over).