Conventional wisdom suggests that putting cameras in phones was pretty much the death knell for digital cameras as mass market consumer must-haves. And yet, over the past two decades, there have been many thousands – possibly hundreds of thousands – of articles and opinion pieces posing one against the other, all with the aim of establishing which is better: dedicated device or camera phone?

Now Nova Scotia-based nature photographer, Canon ambassador and YouTuber Simon d’Entremont has pitched in, riffling though his years of photographic expertise to treat his nearly 800K followers on the platform to his own thoughts. While acknowledging phone cameras and iPhones are getting smarter, he still carries a dedicated camera with him every day.

Why? Well, first some background. Below is a summary of what Simon thinks the landscape currently looks like for today’s photographers, caught between a phone and a hard (camera) body. But do make sure you watch the embedded video for the full picture, literally.

  1. Phone cameras take good images in good light and they’re convenient. But while phones replaced snapshots, they didn’t replace photography.
  2. The market for dedicated cameras today encompasses serious hobbyists, creators, sports and wildlife photographers, landscape photographers and professionals; people whose photographic ambitions have exceeded what a phone can do. This market hasn’t gone away and is still growing.
  3. This audience appreciates features like amazing eye detection, auto focus, sports and action capability, plus lots of lens choices and better like 8K video.
  4. Content creation as a hobby or profession has exploded and features including tilting screens and microphone inputs have become valuable tools that an increasing number of cameras provide.
  5. The abundance of phone cameras has created a ‘feeder pool’ of new entrants into photography, who’ve moved beyond the question ‘how do I take a photo?’ and are now asking: ‘how do I take the photo I want?’

So, having digested the above, why is it worth plumping for a dedicated camera? 

Simon’s five reasons why a camera is better than a phone:

  1. Long distance photography exposes phones’ limitations. As AP readers are aware, often a phone’s 3x or 5x zoom mode is just digital cropping, reducing image quality while magnifying noise. By contrast, dedicated cameras can be used with dedicated telephoto lenses to allow you to capture way more detail.
  2. Phones are also limited for low light photography, as their smaller sensors collect less light. Phones will often use computational photography techniques to make up for this shortfall, resulting in lots of noise and poor colours. Plus there’s a point at which using AI to fill in missing detail starts to become more ‘digital art’ than photography.
  3. Background blur is prized by photographers to give their images a cinematic look. Cameras create this using a narrow depth of field, whereas the lens aperture of a phone camera is tiny. Yes, phones can digitally blur the background to create a defocused look, but often there’s imperfections and artefacts that remain.
  4. Another area in which you might outgrow your phone’s capability is when shooting fast action. Your phone is usually optimised for snapshots, whereas a modern dedicated camera can shoot 20, 30 or 40fps (or more).
  5. A further variable is creative control. Phones are devised to make decisions for you, so it might be difficult to control the variables that go into making a shot look unique. The difference between ‘taking a photo’ and ‘making a photo’ is often creative control. A dedicated camera simply has more options for hands-on user control.

In fact, the title of Simon’s video is something of a white lie, as he cites even more reasons in his video than this initial list of five, so make sure you watch the full video. AP readers may also have some to add. Give it a watch now to see how many of yours tally up with this pro photographer’s opinions.

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