“For better cameras” like… I don’t see it. Back in the mid 2010s and late 2010s before the bump trend iPhone, Google and Samsung had the best phone cameras, and both were flat and with decent digital zoom and stability (for a phone). If you look at the photo samples for back then and compare it with now the difference is almost imperceptible.
That ugly bump makes big phones even harder to use and weight more now, plus if you’re one of those who never liked using a cover now I bet you’re forced to use one because of the added vulnerability of the bump.
Edit mid 2010s to late 2010s (until the camera bump appears around 2018)
No way, your premise is wrong. Photos from a 2024 phone are MASSIVELY better than a mid-2010 phone photo.
I have no input on if the bump is helpful from engineering but you are off your rocker and blind if you can’t tell the difference in camera quality, especially 30 and 60 fps video from 6 or 7 years ago. Not even close.
I bought a Canon T2i in 2010. 19MP, APS-C sensor. Had it fitted with a $1200 17-55 F/2.8 IS lens. Used to bring it to family Christmas every year for the group photo until around 2016. My cousin handed me her phone to get the family on it as well.
Between improvements in sensor technology, whatever post processing was happening at the time, and the lenses on the iPhone, it blew my camera away.
It’s actually pretty hard to find a midrange camera now because phones are so good. I switched to a dumb phone last year. Best pocketable camera I could find to complement it that wasn’t a toy was the Ricoh GRIII which came out in 2019. Got a 4K camcorder. Best I could do was a Sony AX700 from 2018.
You might find the OM5 to be a good option if you still want a “real” camera that’s not point and shoot and still really small. With a pancake lense and big pockets it should be pocketable. I got a used EM5 which is the old version of a very similar body and with the pancake lense it feels like a point and shoot with good ergonomics and lots of manual control options.
I think Lumix has some options as well.
Any decent camera with an m4/3 or better sensor and a half decent lens will blow the best smartphones out of the water. Computational photography can’t beat physics.
Edit: in good light they can get close, but the differences show up quickly in low light, if you crop, or if you look at it on anything bigger than a phone.
I mean computational photography is exactly how you beat physics. And it’s shockingly good.
https://youtu.be/3EFW_dAX9lQ?si=LvaoeAG6h9HQoKc4
Highly recommend this guy’s videos on the matter. Can’t find a good comparison at very low light, but even dusk conditions are fine for a new iPhone.
I haven’t had a chance to watch the video yet, but I will when I can, thanks for the recommendation!
From personal experience, my 2 year old Phone 14 only competes with my 6 year old a6400 in perfect light when it comes to noise and sharpness. Indoors it’s not even close.
It could also be a perception thing. My eyesight is frankly pretty bad even with glasses, and I don’t really notice a difference (I currently use an iphone se without a camera bump). I don’t need a better camera, because my pictures are just for myself.
I wouldn’t argue with someone with better eyesight, but I honestly didn’t realize it made a big difference.
The are plenty of situations where anyone could tell the difference, such as low lighting conditions. In low light an old phone will make a photo that’s just a brown blur, while a new phone will be a sharp clear photo of the scene.
But if you’re happy with what you have then í wouldn’t want to talk you into buying something else. The old iPhone se is a imo a much better design than newer iPhones
It’s totally possible that I’m less likely to take dark pictures than I would be if I had a better camera, so I might not really be comparing low light pictures
I don’t know that it’s an eyesight issue. I mean, if you have good enough eyesight to read stuff on your phone screen you have good enough eyesight to see the difference.
It may be an awareness thing, where the more you care about photography the more the limitations of the bad cameras stand out. And hey, that’s fine, if the phone makes good enough pictures for you that’s great. Plus, yeah, you can get phones with the exact same lens and sensor where one of them has a big fat bump that is deliberately blown up to make the cameras “feel” premium. There’s been a fair amount of marketing around this.
But if you compare A to B it’s very obvious. Camera bumps became a marker of premium phones for a reason.
I am annoyed by most phone trends of the past decade, but… yeah, if you go back to a 2014 phone today there is some readjustment between what you remember phone photo and video looking like versus what they actually look like. That was the Galaxy S5 year. That thing had a single camera you would consider unacceptable as your selfie shooter today.
That looks like a really low light scenario but the cameras are undoubtedly better now regardless
Also I wasn’t talking about phones that old, a more fair pick would be a phone from 2017 (still bump less but with great camera)
That’s one of the two reasons for a camera bump- a larger aperture improves low-light photography as well as providing the option of shallow depth-of-field. The other reason is a larger sensor for higher resolution and improved digital zoom.
Yep. That sample above is from a review, but digging into my own archived photos at the time it’s crazy to see how much blur picutres taken from moving vehicles have, even in direct daylyght, and how grainy indoors images are, even when well lit. That thing was genuinely just opening itself up for a while and hoping for the best.
Sounds like my dating strategy…
I’m talking about more like mid 2010s late 2010s