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Comment by aspyct | Hacker News Reader

Phones will never have interchangeable lenses, or enough buttons to be usable fast.

I dare you to do sports photography in dimly lit situations on a phone.

That's 1/10000 of what photography is.

Anyone who has little kids often needs to shoot erratically moving subjects in a dimly lit environment. Low light is where most progress in imaging is made, I’d say perhaps over the last 7 years, ever since outright resolution stopped mattering (the others are dynamic range and focus performance). Everything that happened since like OIS, new generations of image sensors, computational photography etc came to serve longer shutter exposures to get more light into the sensor.

Anyone with kids also takes vastly more photos with the camera that’s readily accessible and has good sharing capabilities. Would the nice camera with big lenses take even 1/100th as many images as the phone?

I'd say 90% of the photos I've taken of my kids has been with a dedicated camera and big lenses. It is definitely nice also having a camera that is readily accessible for certain situations, but I don't find its use generally compelling as unless photography is what I want to do with that time I'd rather spend that time enjoying life with the kids, not watching them live their lives behind a screen. When photography is what I want to do, I can have the dedicated camera at the ready.

If you own one and you like using it, definitely yes

I can find you probably enough "1/1000 or what photography is" to make up for at least 75%.

Sports is the example I had on hand because it's one of the things I do most. But kids, pets, portraits, architecture, wildlife...

Phones are good for snapshots, that's a big part of photography but that's not 99999/10000

Phones don't need to be good at every situation, just in most of the situations an average consumer finds themselves in. As another poster alluded to, photographing kids is a big reason people buy cameras and before, camcorders. Families also have more money so it makes sense to target them.

Right now, phones kick the butt of compact cameras when it comes to versatility, dynamic range and using AI to make photos appealing and sharp. If the quality can only be rivalled by a dSLR with a 2 kilogram $1500 lens, then that is a big plus point for the phone.

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