Huawei's telephoto lens identified a plane as a bird

I think a few years ago (perhaps it's still ongoing) there was a big uptick in purchases of "old" compact digital cameras - I still see young adults and teenagers taking pictures of these around London and I think this is a very good thing! (I fell for the trend and bought a used Olympus Pen E-PL8)

I wish there was an option on all smartphone cameras to disable post-processing, or at least the generative stuff - this reminds me of the samsung space zoom moon photo furore all over again.

xcancel cancelled me.

Don't smartphone RAW images bypass internal processing? Mine doesn't create them. They do on digital cameras (though I am pleased with Nikon's jpegs, and save but rarely process the RAW images.)

I used a Coolpix P510 (and still do) with equivalent focal length of 24-1000 mm for many years. It did basically everything I needed (less the extreme wide-angle, which got me into a new mirrorless camera in recent years) and is fairly compact.

Really small (fit in your pocket, about the size of a phone but fatter) cameras have a zoom of 8X or so, which is OK. I have taken them on trips. The equivalent focal lengths are roughly 24-180 on full-frame. Small cameras do often have very small sensors, to achieve long effective focal lengths in small cases.

The Coolpix sensor is 1/6 of full frame. Interestingly, that model is so old that it doesn't kick out RAW images, but the rendered jpegs have almost always been very pleasing and "true" (you can adjust rendition in the menu tree).