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Smartphone cameras have amazing technology behind them, but there are things they just can’t do as well as a dedicated camera.
Phone Cameras Do a Lot, But They’re Not the Best
Our phones have largely replaced dedicated cameras over the past decade. Dedicated cameras are considered unnecessary beyond professional and artistic means, especially now that phones are good enough for most people. There’s even a whole niche forsmartphone photography.
As versatile and convenient as phone cameras are, however, they’re still not as good as dedicated cameras in many aspects. The digicam trend made me realize this as I bought a Canon SX610 HS that was announced in 2015, a decade old upon writing this. However, it’s still my preferred camera for taking casual photos without resorting to a bulky camera setup.
Engaging Photography Experience
Holding a dedicated camera no matter what type it is has a more intimate experience than a phone. Since you know that taking photos is the only thing it can do, it puts you in a more focused state of mind to capture better images.
A phone camera is also taken for granted; it’s often seen as a tool that gets things done. Quickly snapping documents, notes, basically everything. While many great moments can be captured with a phone, it doesn’t feel as intentional as a dedicated camera. I either use the Canon SX610 HS that I mentioned, or a Fujifilm X-T20 with a small lens to act as a compact high-quality camera.
A dedicated camera can’t be beat if you want to be immersed in the process. It can only do one thing, and it has much more photographic flexibility than a phone camera, which we’ll discuss below.
Better Optical Zoom
One major upside to the Canon SX610 HS is that it has an 18x optical zoom without being incredibly bulky. At its widest, it has a full-frame camera equivalent of 25mm and 450mm at the widest without including the 72x digital zoom.
25mm is a great street and landscape photography focal length, while the longer focal lengths could be good for portraits, landscapes, and even wildlife. I’ve managed to take some great photos of birds with this camera without shelling out a painful amount of money for huge and bulky lenses.
This isn’t a replacement for a professional’s tools, but it’s a camera not that much bigger than your phone and you won’t needextra phone camera accessorieseither. Whiledigital zoom in smartphone camerashave also advanced like the 100x zoom you get on Samsung phones, it’s still a digital zoom and isn’t as good as the much more powerful optical zoom like on the SX610 HS.
Dedicated Shooting Style Camera
Whether experienced or new to photography, you will have heard that limitations help creativity—and intentionally applying limitations is my favorite way to use a small dedicated camera.
My favorite ways are limiting it to black and white, using a certain zoom amount, or exclusively using a square aspect ratio. I love taking photos in a square aspect ratio as it’s not commonly used in photography except for Instagram. Monochrome is also a fun way to see things. It brings out the shapes, patterns, and the way light moves, instead of focusing on color.
Above are a few of my favorite square and monochrome images taken on the SX610 HS and Fujifilm X-T20. The X-T20 may be a bigger camera, but it’s still quite compact; especially when paired with the manual TTArtisans 25mm F2.0 lens.
They Won’t Replace Your Phone, but You’ll Enjoy it More
Smartphone cameras have advanced to the point that they canreplace dedicated camerasin many casual use scenarios. However, I don’t like the amount of digital processing happening that overly softens details and the clear computerized guessing in busy high-detail areas.
Give a dedicated camera enough light, whether through longer exposure time, the flash, or the environment and they can produce excellent images that smartphones with their smaller sensors and lenses cannot reproduce.
These small point-and-shoot cameras were often overlooked as do-it-all cameras for family gatherings and casual situations. Past 2020, however, they’re now the new film cameras as the images they produce have a nostalgic quality.
This makes it easy to take aesthetic images without needing to process film but still have an engaging photographic experience. As a bonus, you won’t need to worry about filling up your phone’s storage so quickly too!
