Does gear matter?
arun.is
arun.is
Sometime in the early 10s I took a half-decent hobbyist DSLR camera on vacation, and my wife and I took photos of the same motive - me with the DSLR, my wife with her then-current iPhone. You could barely use half of the photos my wife made. I guess if we repeated that experiment nowadays it would be the other way round.
As someone else noted, DSLRs really win on lenses. Also things like high burst rate, high shutter speeds, etc. (And the viewfinder can be handy for better framing and just seeing what you're shooting).
(Lenses can of course add another factor, but everything I mentioned is with stock lenses.)
As somebody with a long unused DSLR packed away… I’d say it depends on the lens. Maybe. One thing that iPhones still can’t do as good as a DSLR is very low light (eg starfield), however the current crop of phones are getting pretty good at even this.
Those DSLR’s are huge and quite frankly their workflows aren’t as smooth as on phones. If a DSLR could automagically upload all images to my repository (ie icloud) then I’d probably use them more.
But as they say, the best camera is the one you have on you and the camera I have on me is almost always found in my phone.
The Samsung NX had wifi and upload to fb.
How so? My iphone 14 pro looks like a cartoon if I shoot people or animals in low light. Never had any "actual camera" look that bad, and my newest is an 8 year-old micro 4/3 model.
It's important to consider similar generations - yes, the iPhone 14 or Pixel 8 does better in static low light than my 2004-era crop sensor DSLR, but not better than a 2017-era full frame DSLR and dramatically worse than a current-gen mirrorless setup.
I do have a Fujifilm mirrorless but with the standard long wide to short tele zoom, I still bring it on certain types of trips but honestly it's almost a backup at this point. There's not a lot it beats my iPhone 15 Pro at--certainly for web viewing which is all I really do. This is especially true if you're not going to shoot photos with a lot of care taken to depth of field, shutter speed, etc. To just shoot, the phone probably does a better job a lot of the time.
I doubt that. I'm not a pro photographer by any means, but my 2016 olympus pen-f (m4/3 format, so the sensor area is a quarter of "full frame") wipes the floor with my iphone 14 pro it's not even funny. Had a friend the other day comment on some random pics I took in a bar with the pen-f, as seen on the phone's display: "how come your pictures look so good?". The subtle gradients, the details in dark areas, the barmaid's skin texture, all this looks like plastic on the iphone.
Sure, neither is technically a "now-current" device, but I don't think there have been any earth-shattering improvements between the 14 and the 15. I hear some Android phones might have superior cameras, but again, I doubt it's a night and day difference with the iphone. The Olympus is 8 years old, and even when it was brand new it wasn't exactly state of the art. A recent model m4/3 would be a noticeable improvement, and a full-frame sensor would be in a whole different league.
But one point where the iPhone (and similar androids) have the "real" cameras beat: it fits in a men's jeans pocket.
I do enjoy being able to take phone snapshots anytime I don't have my large camera with me but when I lug the camera I think in different ways.
No, the best gear won't imbue you with artistic talent or vision, but neither will the worst gear. These absolutist questions are so silly. Everything is relative.
For sports, action, wildlife (i.e. not in zoos), deep-space astro-photography (not milky-way), micro-photography (not macro), etc - you need good gear to make high quality photos. By quality I'm referring to technical elements of quality - ample detail, minimum optical aberrations/distortions, good color accuracy, good accuracy of focus, etc. You can intentionally make a picture which is blurry, has intentionally bad color casts, etc - but then we're getting into art here, which is subjective.
Having said that, a boring subject will result in a boring photo, and this is true regardless of gear.
I used to play pool a long time ago and there was one player that was far and away the best in the billiard hall. He would always say, “It’s the Indian not the Arrow” when people would come in with their fancy personal pool cues. To make his point he would grab the most warped pool cue off the wall and generally beat anyone he went up against.
The saying isn’t PC these days but the lesson did stick with me.
The Indians also spent expertise fletching decent arrows, for that reason.
Part of my day job is optical metrology so I realize that traditional optical design will never fully be replaced by the smarts in our phones and the super advanced miniature lenses.
I don’t think they can, but they usually don’t need to. If you manage to extract a modern phone lens and stick it in front of the film of a 35mm camera or a ten-year-old digital camera, you will get utterly terrible pictures :)
Nice old lenses had nice flat focal planes. For a camera phone, who cares? The depth of field is so big that you probably can’t tell whether the focal plane is flat.
Nice old lenses tried hard to avoid distortion. Your camera probably corrects distortion in software.
Nice old lenses collected lots of light and integrated that light using the world’s most boring algorithm: just adding it all up. Your phone has a much more sensitive sensor and cleverly takes multiple frames for you so it can infer a decent picture even in poor lighting using fancy algorithms.
Really nice old lenses might have been close to diffraction limited resolution, and maybe users managed to get extremely sharp photographs with them, but they usually didn’t. Your phone camera has a much much worse diffraction limit, but it has fancy sharpening algorithms that work sort of okay, and people mostly view the photos in small formats anyway.
Nice old lenses, with the aperture wide open, had shallow depths of field. Your phone camera doesn’t, and it will try to fake it for you in “portrait mode”. It looks pretty bad, but a surprisingly large number of users don’t care :) (I personally find the way hair looks to be quite annoying, and I’m surprised that I haven’t seen a nice AI-enhanced version that can fake hair over a distant background better.)
EDIT: I should add that the answer isn't a smartphone. I understand that phone cameras are now great, but I don't enjoy using them either. There's something aesthetically and ergonomically pleasing about a traditional camera.
There is essentially no other camera that can fit in your pocket. So if you want interchangeable lens, it kinda doesn't matter what you get at all because they will all require a camera bag.
EDIT: btw, when buying camera gear I highly suggest buying used, places like keh, mpb and b&h used department are great and I've never had a problem.
I rarely bother now because of crime, I just pocket a pancake and mirrorless.
Compact, lightweight, the built-in 23mm lens is good for most travel and nature shots you'd be taking as an amateur (from a fellow amateur, no insult intended)
If you're looking for something "aesthetic" and "ergonomic" Fuji is #1
The way they put dedicated dial with marking for all the principal part of the exposure trifecta (shutter speed, aperture, ISO) just clicks right with how my brain works.
My holiday kit is a X-T3 paired with a 23mm, 14mm and 50-230. Everything fits in a sling bag (the Peak design one); I can carry it in fanny pack mode if I need to have a backpack.
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I should note that not all u43 cameras are small - Olympus / OM have a top-end "1" model that is large and clunky. But the "5" and "10" models are nice and compact. I think the Panasonics and the Olympus / OM PENs are pretty small too.
There is then a useful range of lenses that lets you trade off performance, zoom range, and size; there are great, tiny primes; decent, tiny zooms; and great, chunkier zooms.
In particular, the Pansonic Lumix G 12-32mm lens is 24 mm long. I can put that on my E-M5 and carry it in a jacket pocket. People have managed to take photos with it:
Gear, particularly the lenses you use, matters depending on your preferred genre of photography. Beyond that, the difference between and low and high end cameras tends to be build quality and the ease of use.
It's important to remember that these are just tools. I've learned that everyone shoots differently, so it's important to find the right tools that work best for you.
With the slew of mounting adapters these days, you can keep using even 60-year-old lenses on most camera bodies.
Like the Helios 44-2 (ca. 1958), still being used today on big features like "The Batman" in a few scenes. They mixed footage from that $500 vintage lens with $50,000 ARRI anamorphic primes.
I mentioned to my dad how nice it was and commented "she must have a really good camera" to which my dad replied, after laughing, "people have said that before and it doesn't seem to matter what camera she's using"
I bet nobody goes up to authors and says "Great book - what pen did you use?"
The process of designing an image isn't. So if you were an art director in a studio in charge of the look of the model, hair, makeup, etc, nobody will question your credentials, but if you were the photographer hired to simply take the photo, then you're merely an operator of an instrument, not someone with a creative vision.
https://www.tagari.com/is-stephen-king-still-typing-away-on-...
As tech improves every field has such jumps in baseline quality. The most complex software in the world can be written on a $500 laptop. You can record a chart topping song on a $100 microphone in your bedroom. In most sports the average enthusiast today is using better gear than the top professionals in the world had a generation ago. The cost of the gear you need to be "good enough for all practical purposes" is constantly getting lower.
I don't know what the state of DSLR market is today, but in 2007, I took an amateur photography class in community college and had to rent a cheap camera to take photos for the assignment. It was pretty clear that despite using best available settings to take pictures, my photos looked nowhere near as noise-free/crispy as other adult hobbyists with $10,000 camera setups.
If you ever used a point-and-shoot camera and a high-end DSLR, you'll know that at the same level of skill nothing can compensate for good optics. It's simple physics.
Gear matters more in low-light conditions, or with fast-moving objects. It matters less for landscape photography with good lighting conditions.
But it always matters.
For example, I would want a very powerful telephoto lens when photographing this lion: https://i.redd.it/706yzd4nhs211.jpg
I definitely would not want to be taking that picture with my iPhone, even though it is possible if I got close enough and held the phone still enough.
I can't imagine what else I'd need right now, might as well learn to play.