Samsung's abandoned NX cameras can be brought online with a $20 LTE stick
op-co.de
op-co.de
- Built in GPS for location tagging in photos(a few cameras have this but for many you need an external dongle attached to the camera)
- Automatic backup of photos to cloud/network storage locations
- built in flash storage for redundancy
- Wifi that isn't trash so you could transfer photos at a meaningful speed
- LTE for the same reason when on location
- Run apps for upload to a variety of services
- More computational photography features
It shows that smartphones use small, and crappy, sensors behind even smaller, and crappier, lenses. Phone got a long way, and there is a reason they replaced point-and-shoots. They are still a far cry from "real" cameras.
Seems like the niche between those markets never was large enough to warrant this functionality, given that both mobile standards and cloud service APIs change multiple times over the lifetime of a camera.
Even a 15 year old interchangeable lens camera with a lower MP sensor can produce better pictures than a phone, esp if you want to do things like background blur / bokeh which is not possible at all with a phone (though they emulate it in software).
Hell lately I've dug up an old Canon Powershot 12MP CCD digicam out of a box, and put a hacked firmware on it (that can shoot RAW and let you do proper manual control of the lens), and gotten really interesting results. That thing has a tiny sensor, but having actual aperture control makes a big diff.
The gains from 2013 to today in the ILC market are much less interesting than 2003-2013 was, where we saw a pretty wild rate of improvement from the Canon 300D/Nikon D70 beginnings of a consumer market through to the modern era of digital SLRs.
My "daily driver" camera (olympus EM-1 MK II) dates from 2013, as one example of this, and still produces great results. The latest iteration of this model is not a quantum leap for most types of photography.
If I'm out shooting an event or something it's not uncommon for me to get 500-1000 frames. Multiply that by say 50MB each and that's a huge chunk of data at least for some cell plans.
I'm an amateur photographer though so it's not a requirement for me. Maybe a professional wouldn't mind writing the expense of mobile data off as a cost of business.
But there's not enough of a market at all to make it justifiable. Software developers are expensive. The interchangeable lens camera market is tiny, and the professional people who spend serious money care less about things like that and more about stellar optics and sensors.
The consumer (and even "pro-sumer") level tier of the camera market has almost disappeared. Even in Japan, which is camera crazy, it's in free-fall still.
Take Panasonic's new GH7, for example, a new rather nice Micro Four Thirds camera with a bunch of advanced features, but kind of targeted towards the video segment (so great for YouTubers, etc)... They announced the production numbers and it's only 4000 a month. That's... basically nothing... in the consumer hardware segment.
That said, I think this segment will come back in a bit. The digicam craze is evidence at least that young people (like my teenage daughter's age) can see the value in the camera form factor over using a phone. The ergonomics are way better. And Fujifilm can't keep the X100V series in stock, it keeps flying off the shelves. Phones themselves are becoming less "cool."
They all suffered from running Android 4.x with no major upgrades from Samsung.
Says who? There's no intrinsic reason a camera couldn't run with an Android OS. In fact, there's a lot of good reasons why you would want that - simpler development platform, reusing existing drivers, etc...
Basically an add-on for your phone that adds a serious interchangeable lens sensor.
There is: battery life and startup time.
DLSRs have no problem being being on standby for weeks if not months with minimal battery drain and then springing to life within a second at the press of a button. Android phones do no even come remotely close to that level of efficiency.
My M1 air is in standby for weeks at a time on a single charge. There's no reason you can't do similar with a phone. Maybe not months, but definitely for extended periods of time.
What camera needs: fast "boot", stability, reliability, ability to run offline for decades.
And no, I don't want all software being developed the way a social.media app for a phone is.
Phones have taken the place of the old point and shoots.
That doesn't mean that manufacturers of pro-sumer interchangeable lens cameras couldn't do a better job with software, though...
No they weren't. There just weren't any other options that were as affordable or convenient.
A kilo of SLR does not compete in the same space as a Kodak Instamatic.
Phones are now sitting in that segment of casual photography. And are "affordable" and convenient.
Those of us who are nerdy about pictures, go and buy a mirrorless. But that's always going to be a small and different segment.
This may not last forever. Phones are becoming less "cool" to people. They might come around again to carrying multiple specialized devices.
Now only C will buy a dedicated camera. But in the late 0’s and the 2010’s, segment B did too—lots of people bought DSLRs to get better quality pictures — often sticking to the kit lens and not getting all geeky about photography… just putting everything on automatic would still offer much better quality than a compact camera or a phone camera.
As phone cameras got better, people in this market segment switched to phones — they might just care more about the type of camera on the phone than the most casual of users do.
Consequently camera sales have plummeted: https://www.statista.com/statistics/799526/shipments-of-digi...
The first company to really "get" the integration of point and shoot cameras into the mobile ecosystem properly will win big.
Fuji is already selling boatloads of X100Vs, and there's the Ricoh GR3, etc as well. There's a trend for ergonomic nice high end fixed lens cameras.
And for kicks go on eBay and look up the prices of used old Canon PowerShots. Have a nice condition pink one in a drawer you can make some coin. From worthless e-waste to $300 status symbol...
In terms of computational photography... I think they're fine... a lot of things can be done in post-processing, which is fine, and there's been amazing advances in autofocus and stabilization.
The camera which is several years old at this point already has some good video stabilization. The AF is backed with good hardware, its pretty good and can even do face detection. Its far faster and more accurate than my much newer Pixel.
I wouldn't really care to do much post processing on the camera itself other than the basic filters and affects it can already do, as the interface is pretty small so it is hard to get details. If I'm really going to do some post-processing I'll be pushing it to my desktop with a large monitor so I can really see what I'm doing. But honestly if I'm going to work at it on my desktop I'll more likely just pull out the SD card and stick it in the computer and get far faster transfer speeds.
About the only feature I'd personally like would just be some kind of direct camera integration with Google Photos/OneDrive/iCloud/OwnCloud/whatever, have it just start syncing photos the moment it detects its online. That and good built-in GPS support. Apart from that I don't really know what else I'd do with more "smart" connectivity. I bought a camera like this because I wanted to manually adjust things instead of having some AI model twist and warp the photo into whatever the training data suggests looks good.
I'll consider a switch to a Panasonic for my next camera, since OM Systems seems mostly moribund.
FWIW I don't know if they'll make another G9x. The most recent similar camera would probably be the G7x Mk III. I think that's probably the camera I'd get if I were to replace my G9x tomorrow. I'm a huge fan of the small size of this G9x though.
https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canon-powershot-g9-x-mark-i...
https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/powershot-g7-x-mark-iii
I've heard positive things about Panasonic's devices in this market and strongly considered going with one years ago.
As others have mentioned, lack of geotagging, wireless connectivity, and other convenience features made them poor competitors to smartphones. And it wasn't just wireless connectivity being behind the times, Canon's T7i (aka 800D) launched in 2017 still made you find a mini USB cable. They were good at optics, but dropped the ball on the rest of the product.
Even though the phone had worse quality pictures, it brought many other things to the table.
Even when discussing just the on-camera UI, there's nothing about "tools for professionals" that says they must never change the UI, or that every setting must be immediately accessible in a flat hierarchy, or that you must use a one-axis scroll wheel to change a 2D focus point, etc.
Yes, it's a great thing that there are features of a standalone camera (like instant on, or physical buttons) that smartphones don't have. However, that doesn't mean the cameras have to disregard all the UX and UI changes other electronics have gone through over the last 10-20 years (some good, some bad, but over the long term they've become more approachable to more people). Meanwhile cameras remained largely unchanged and as a result DSLRs are pretty much a dead segment now. (I too loved the viewfinder and ability to use them without an screen, especially when optical... but not the rest of the experience).
As a former amateur photographer, I eventually sold all my bodies and lenses because it was just such a pain to use them compared to the smartphones and prosumer prime compacts of the day, which were all iterating much faster than the "proper" DSLRs. Back in those days, even just getting the photos off the camera wirelessly was a pain, requiring the use of 3rd-party WiFi SD cards or really old USB cables. I think these days mirrorless is once again trying new things, but I'm out of the hobby now and can't afford to reinvest into it :(
Well, the person upthread did say "I don't think any of the camera manufacturers have good UX people" (emphasis mine) and the kitchen appliance companies don't either
The menu hierarchy isn't flat.
Physical knobs for everything, even customizable. Touch to focus (though I prefer using the ring tbh).
BT/WiFi transfer. A bit slow (2-3 sec for a 50mb raw photo) but fine for what I need. I use a USB-c SD reader for my phone and sync the entire card to an SD card in my smartphone.
Full size HDMI built in.
I don't think I would say that cameras are dead, it's just that it's a hobbyist thing now. Most of my friends would never buy a camera except a cheapy one like an Instax for fun, they're not dropping a grand on an f1.4 35mm.
Can I ask how your experience with the electronic viewfinder has been? Is it as fast and clear as a traditional dSLR's optical viewfinder?
You can tell that it is a screen because of the HUD etc but it doesn't "feel" like one in practice.
I hear that the newer ones are better still.
If you go to a camera shop they should let you try it, that's how I went for mine.
It was sort of an insane jump but I'm having an amazing experience.
I told the wife I'd take very nice photos of a kid to try to justify the cost.
The glass alone can be $750- 1-3k. I'm borrowing glass rn.
Check out the sonyalpha subreddit to see what people are doing with it
"They sell tools not toys" - no offense, I hate deceptive UX engineering and e14n as the next guy - and vibration motors in Dyson vacuums - but that kinds of denials existed, and IMO had hamstrung Japanese tech products for too long.
"Piddly old wifi" is part of the problem, it's certainly what I'd expect camera vendors to support. You can push multiple gigabits over a good wifi connection these days.
If any camera companies are reading this, you probably read "I wish my camera came with a purpose-built app specific to your brand of cameras manufactured in 2024 (to be EOLed and replaced by a different app next year) and reimplementing an entire photo library with sync to your own subscription services because your manager says you need subscription revenue," but no I'd just like it to join my house's wifi network and give me a button on the computer to copy the files to a folder or add them to my Photos library.
Most people with DSLR’s or mirrorless are working with around 3lbs even with a lens.
This seems like the kind of thing that a single, dedicated hacker could crack wide open.
The pieces are all commodity, no? People can buy lenses independently, so you don't have to design those. Everything else should be COTS--processor, networking/cellular, display, etc.
It might not be super cheap, but it shouldn't exceed $500 on the BOM. And then people can iterate on it over time.
No one tried.
Everyone wants proprietary lock-in. No one wants to open up.
It's very much like the pre-iPhone phone market. It's not that no one wanted an iPhone, but that before Apple, no one was willing to try making one.
As a result, the camera market is all but dead:
https://www.canonwatch.com/here-is-what-happened-to-the-came...
My phone works better for most purposes (holistically) than my full-frame camera. At this point, no one has money to make the kind of investment needed to revive it, and an open model is unlikely to see the light of day. 2024 models aren't much better than 2014 models. My main camera is from 2012, and not worth upgrading.
Curiously, lenses keep progressing at a slow but steady clip. Sigma just announced an f/1.8 full frame 28-45mm zoom lens.
There were many attempts, some listed in other comments[1][2].
> 2024 models aren't much better than 2014 models.
Depending on the type of photography that you do, there were significant improvements[3]. Not to mention mirrorless replacing DSLRs.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40970059
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40970490
[3]: https://fstoppers.com/gear/decade-evolution-cameras-now-vers...
Even the basic GPS tagging is not available on most cameras. You have to run some crapp on your phone and hope that Bluetooth works.
Interestingly, Android was originally meant to be a camera OS, until they pivoted because mobile phones were a larger market[1].
[1]: https://www.androidauthority.com/android-history-digital-cam...
For a cool $10k? Not going to be popular in any case, as are the RED cameras. These are all pro-level cameras.
> Nikon Coolpix S800c
A useless toy, that happened to have a just barely better image quality than built-in phone cameras at that time.
If you try to find mirrorless cameras with Android, with a reasonable price ($1k-$3k), then there's only NX. Nobody else even tried that seriously.
NX was great, I had it for a while (it was stolen). It suffered from Gen1 diseases, that could have been fixed. But _nothing_ comes close in usability ever since. I have Sony Alpha, and it's UI/UX is just shit. I don't use it at all anymore, I don't want to spend time categorizing and manually geotagging its photos.
There was ONLY the NX. There were _no_ other mid-level Android cameras. And Galaxy NX was produced by Samsung, which is not known for their cameras.
So there was a grand total of ONE model of mid-level Android cameras. And it was fairly successful, but never got any improvements.
> people just didn’t like it and chose smartphones.
Most people haven't heard about Android cameras and never had a chance to try them.
No, these were not such attempts. A touchscreen camera is NOT what I want. The point isn't to make it phone-friendly or phone-like, but to make it open. Knobs and buttons are good.
The Olympus AIR and Sony QX series cameras would be awesome if they came with open APIs so I could program them. They came with proprietary Sony / Olympus kludges which ran on smartphones. The Olympus AIR is officially dead; the app is no longer maintained, and doesn't work on modern phones. Olympus was actually starting to try (in contrast to Sony), and released things like 3d CAD models, but the product was discontinued before it was finished.
Tossing Android on a camera is not the same as an open camera. An open camera would allow me to:
1) Write apps for it, taking advantage of what it can do.
2) Make accessories for it. This includes an open mount standard (of which MFT is the only one; I have the spec for the asking), an open hotshoe standard, open batteries, etc.
I'd be able to do things like super-resolution, custom white balance, custom autofocus systems, custom grids (rule-of-thirds / etc), and so on. I'd be able to program a handful of them to all have the same white balance, settings, and trigger, so I could shoot from five angles at once. I'd be able to use them for machine vision applications or video conferencing, for the coding. For power zoom lenses, I'd be able to eliminate focus breathing by adjusting focus and zoom together. I could make a panorama app, a focus stacking app, or an app which did smart image stacking for low light. I could toss on a machine learning algorithm on it, and have a custom shutter control so it decided when to shoot. I could use IBIS to track the stars for night photography.
That's what an open camera would consist of.
NOT a touch screen, Android, and connections to Instagram and Youtube.
> Not to mention mirrorless replacing DSLRs.
I was shooting mirrorless long before that.
Indeed, 10 years ago, you could buy a Sony A7R. Go to DPReview, and compare high ISO images from the A7R versus a top-of-the-line $6000 A9III and tell me which one is better. Or compare them on DxOMark.
10 years buys us:
- Higher video resolution
- Better autofocus
- Instead of obscenely fast shooting speed, we now have incredulously fast shooting speed
Unfortunately, the images aren't noticeably better, though.
120fps is kind of useless (unless you want to spend your life sorting through images; that's over 7000 images for a minute of shooting). Some models do give more resolution (notably, not the A9III in this comparison; the A7R had more), but that's only usable under bizarre conditions (even shooting 24MP, with an f/1.4 lens, if one eye was in focus, the other eye would be limited by DoF and not the sensor). Plus, a 4k monitor tops out at 8MP.
I will mention: If cameras used the same kind of smarts as a Google Pixel Pro, the images would be much better.
Yea and the abysmal experience with the iPhone 1, 2 and 3 showed precisely why.
> No one wants to open up.
The first iPhone was only available on a single cellular carrier in the US.
> no one has money to make the kind of investment needed to revive it,
It's not the lack of money. It's the lack of expected ROI.
M43 also lives on fine in Panasonic's lineup. Logitech just released a M43-mount $1000 live streaming cam ("Mevo Cam"). And like you say, the standard is open. I don't think it will die. The compactness of the lenses and their relatively lower price makes a lot of sense esp for new entrants (see "Alice Camera" etc).
Just the leaps in ISO we’ve seen absolutely makes this statement untrue, something smart phones absolutely are way far behind on.
A7S went ISO 50 - 409,600. That's early 2015. MSRP was $2500.
That's the same as $6300 EOS R1, double the $5400 Nikon X6III, 8x the $1500 Lumix S9, 8x the $4300 R5 Mark II, and 8x the $6000 Sony S9.
Those are the most recently reviewed cameras on DPReview.
Per DxOMark, like-for-like, we're up maybe 30% in a decade for typical cameras. You won't see that in a photo.
Damn expensive though.
99% of the time I wasn't taking pictures with the intent of blowing them up to poster-size prints, or selling them to major publications. I was just taking pictures to document and share elements of day to day life.
(You probably see where this is going).
Smartphone cameras have kept up well enough with most consumer needs that it would be really hard to justify carrying a dedicated camera. Further, that camera would need to have all of the features of a smart phone camera (eg: filters, touchscreen, lightweight editing, etc. As you also pointed out) that it makes it unlikely to exist in a practical manner.
I will say I'm slightly surprised we haven't see an external "lens and sensor only" gadget that pairs with a phone. Use this gadget to capture a better raw image, and then use the phone to do everything else. Could be a USB/cable tether, or even some form of wireless (bluetooth is probably too slow though?).
tl;dr - I'm not carrying a dedicated camera around, no matter how much better the images might be.
We have. They've all failed.
Olympus tried (2016):
https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/olympus-air-a01
Alice Camera is a kickstarter thing that might be about to ship now finally?
And there's another recent one, SwitchLens:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/halohub/switchlens-powe...
There's others that have been tried too I think?
https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/yongnuo-yn450-androi...
Personally I like analog dials and like to have them configured to control ISO and shutter speed, so would have a hard time using a touch-screen only system like this. Same problem I have with the Sigma camera.
It fails the same 'one extra thing to carry around and keep protected while not in use, which is most of the time' test as small mirrorless point and shoots and micro four thirds interchangeable lens cameras ( speaking as a long time OM-D user and enthusiast)
And if it's possible to affix it to my phone it will also get left home sooner rather than later, because now all of my phone accessories, mag safe chargers, car mounts, cases, etc no longer fit, which makes it cumbersome to carry around and use as a phone.
But to me the Alice thing is the worst of both worlds. Still need to use the stupid touchscreen LCD (which sucks for my aging eyes), doesn't have analog controls. But is still a bulkyish object. Hang anything other than a pancake lens on that, and the ergonomics are going to blow, too.
This, camera tech on phones is great, but it's never better than a dedicated device. Plus, the models with best cameras aren't always the best phone experience. An external camera device that you could attach lenses and such to, but could dump the data on to your phone, and get GPS and such from your phone, would be a great middle ground.
You can bluetooth-pair (most) modern 'pocket' cameras with your phone to get this functionality.
(And for the uninitiated; such cameras will have infinitely better picture quality than can be provided by lenses than fit in a phone. I always take such a camera where carrying a full-blown SLR would be a pain the in the arse).
That limits the market for a second device that is a better camera with all those features but not a smartphone.
Of course, computational photography combined with a proper lens and better sensor would be amazing, but it'd be a niche product and expensive (since it would be made in small numbers, and require expensive compute and much more RAM than current phones tend to have).
Sony's Alpha series all run Linux, with standby.
Sony's lineup actually has support for precisely that in the pinout of the MI Shoe which all their cameras since over a decade use [1].
Unfortunately, the <insert swear word of choice> at Sony never released a GPS dongle, and while there has been root available for all Sony Alpha models up until the A7S2 via the integrated (fossil and cut-down...) Android subsystem and they all run Linux, to my knowledge no one has reverse engineered the MI shoe comms interface, how to get that ruddy thing into being a wifi client instead of that temporary hotspot crap, or how to make it behave like a goddamn normal UVC webcam over USB instead of needing their brutally unstable client app.
Sony makes truly best-in-class hardware (no one else has a competitor for the S series in a low-light scenario) at the best possible price point... but damn no matter what hardware they're dealing with, they're the typical Japanese company that cannot get software right.
Rant over.
It's the only thing I miss having upgraded to a D500 some years later.
Long ago I read it's no longer built-in to simplify sales in places like China, which forbid personal GPS.
There is, I own one, and it has every feature in your list! YONGNUO YN455, Android-10-powered 20MP Micro Four Thirds camera: https://www.hkyongnuo.com/productinfo/660161.html
LTE band compatibility would be an issue for many, but I have it working successfully on T-Mobile US. I don't prefer using it for stills over my Panasonic/Olympus bodies, but I love it for video.
Here's what it looks like: https://i.imgur.com/3mdBWXt.jpeg (my photo, with Laowa 6mm Cinema lens)
And here's what it sees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzlBA2wSU7w
- RED also had some smartphones with a connector interface to supposedly add cameras, but the product line flopped pretty quickly.
https://www.zeiss.co.uk/consumer-products/photography/zx1.ht...
The 6000$USD price tag unfortunately made it hard to justify at the time.
Would be a fun retrofuturist experiment to backport fun newer things to old tech with big SD cards.
Sounds like things haven't improved much in the past twenty years based on links like these:
https://nerdtechy.com/best-wifi-sd-card
https://old.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/12ocr4u/the_wi...
- GPS doesn't count, although 'corrections' can be interesting.
- IDK you can totally do a workflow with a Sony camera to send to a phone/etc, may not be full-auto but I've done it.
- As a 'shooter' I'd rather get proper SD card redundancy on less-high end models than see a flash buffer for that isn't already present in how things work
- My a6000 had decent wifi speeds at the start, but it's hard to keep up with standards, also it's hard to get around the 'noise' of other wifi devices without making the camera larger or complicating the design for the sake of a wifi antenna.
- LTE is a continually moving target, adds cost for a marginal set of users that will bother to set it up.
- Everyone who's tried even a small amount of this never got far.
- Moving target. You're better off using DxO PhotoLab or Lightroom and keeping that up to date.
Mind you, this viewpoint is coming from the 'minmaxer'. Aside from my a6700 (and before that my a6000) I keep one 'main' camera as well as one or more 'cheap bodies' (i.e. store floor models or previous camera).
This makes it easier to do shots with different focal ranges without a lens change...
Pros will often have multiple bodies (but will be more discerning than 'oh hey 150$ with a lens lets goooooooo') and thus will have similar concerns...
I bought our recent camera and steered clear of any cloud or internet integration at all. USB-C is fine, and snappy as hell, thanks. SD Card as well.
... why?
You have a smartphone for photoing your food. Why there should be an option to upload to some service? What would you do when the service (or OS itself) became discontinued, just like in TFA?
> Automatic backup of photos to cloud/network storage locations
An another LTE modem which would be obsolete again in a couple of years? And eating money while it is supported?
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What happened to the "non-flat" CCD / CMOS sensors which were going to enable awesome smartphone cameras, by allowing lens assemblies with far fewer elements and virtually no chromatic aberration? Thanks to the fewer elements whey could be way thinner (or much wider in the same thickness, collecting way more light) and still fit in a smartphone body. This was supposed to especially benefit smartphones due to their fixed lenses (while for a variable zoom lens you would need different sensor curvature depending on the zoom level which is trickier....).
A couple relevant links (just a few search results):
https://optics.org/news/12/5/4
https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/sonys-new-curved-ima...
https://www.dpreview.com/news/7542036825/french-startup-is-p...
Also, the quickly deformable (with an electric field) "liquid" lenses which would revolutionize the lens aspect, similarly appearing in a lot of news and then never seemingly materialize.
https://opg.optica.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-31-26-43416&id...
Chromatic aberration can be good enough with doublet lens design and Petzval is largely solved by the final field flattener usually with multiple concave and convex sections, and you can still easily fit a large number of lenses in a small formfactor.
Additionally being able to adjust the power of a lens is not a huge gamechanger, as a lot of the complexity with modern optic design is to counter various defects and distortion like aforementioned Petzval.
Rather, the fundamental limit is the sensor size. It's just not practical to achieve much better image quality with a physically small system
A curved sensor would, by allowing a relatively thinner (due to fewer elements) lens assembly, could have a larger area, and still remain within the allowed overall "thickness budget" of the smartphone. Hence my surprise that they seem to have gone nowhere.
Fujifilm is having great success with their fixed-lens X100V, though.
They also seem to be rising in popularity recently amongst people who don't also own a pile of DSLRs or MILCs - I think this is mostly due to the retro styling.
Technically it could be just as painless and usable like Apple AirDrop; it might not be readily implemented in products, but technically it's shown possible. The reason why it remains massive pain has to be in the Wi-Fi standard that can't be kicked from client or established in split seconds.
Very interesting route to go through to get the camera working again!
edit: Many of these aren't that old, the last NX was 2015, I still use a pentax APS-C DSLR around that age and it's fine.
Then there are the geeks taking pictures using the B&W 320x200 Gameboy cameras, my feeling is even the Gen-Z would view these people as nerds...
The NX series interchangeable lens cameras however don't fare too badly compared to today's models, and have a good price-point on the used market, if you are ready to do some bargain hunting.
In the last decade, the improvements were largely in sensor resolutions (from 20MP to 40MP, not relevant for most practical uses) and in "smart" auto-focus, with better tracking of eyes, animals or objects.
And of course there's the effect where for every sufficiently popular camera their technical deficiencies become a desirable vintage look, given enough time. Kind of like people preferring vinyl records for their sound
Phones don't have space for big sensors either, other than some gimmicky big-sensor phones (808 PureView, Lumia 1020). The iPhone 15 Pro main camera sensor is 9.8x7.3mm, compared to say, the Ricoh GR III with a 23.5x15.6mm sensor, about 5x larger. The GR III is actually less tall/wide than an iPhone, but about 4x the thickness.
Anyway, I really like that little thing. With a C-mount lens adapter I can use surveillance camera lenses which is pretty fun.
I have a bunch of them, one converted to infrared. Usually I have the mini with me when the NX500 is too bulky. It's a pity that the lenses are so rare on the used market. The image quality is just awesome for the form factor!
But like you said it's an enthusiast thing. Photos are a hobby of mine. If you don't really care about having the best look and quality and are fine with good quality a 48MP RAW iPhone pic can be edited quite nicely with Photoshop nowadays. Even for large screens to enjoy them on.
If you don't care at all, snap away with any semi-new phone and pictures will be good enough for phone screen/sharing.