I know dslr cameras have a lot of customization options but other than that how are they better? Also I would be appreciated if someone explains “megapixels” to me in this sense.
Edit : Thank you all for the great answers, cheers!
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Noise, depth of field and optical character make things different. Better is a matter of taste.
Noise: as others have said…the first limit to noise is physics. All sensors have a background noise level. When a sensor pit is lit, it creates a signal. The combination of signal and background noise is what gets read. The smaller the pit, the weaker the signal, the smaller the difference between signal and noise. In practical terms, all other things being equal, low light shots on a small sensor will be more noisy. One way some phones try to fix this is by taking multiple images (more than one camera or a bunch of images in series) and using comparison between images to eliminate noise. This works because noise is random and signal is not. Such image stacking is how backyard astronomy is getting really amazing these days.
depth of field: large sensor cameras often have lenses that support shooting at reasonable distances with a shallow depth of field. That blurring is very useful when composition does not make your subject ‘pop’. There are a number of software solutions to this one…but often natural depth of field just looks better. This is the whole insanity about bokeh.
character: when shooting with large sensor cameras, particularly with vintage optics, it is possible to get different character. Some lenses resolve far more detail in the centre than they do the edges at wide apertures…this is bad, unless you are trying to bring your subject out. Some will vignette…the same. Some treat colours a bit differently…and there is a great deal of discussion about the relative merits of leica, zeiss, fuji, nikon, and olympus glass. These sorts of character are often part of filters in cell phones…but they don’t get it quite right. That said, cell phones have their own ‘look’. Apple phones, for instance, do a great deal of computational manipulation of images that produces a predictable and desired look (heavy saturation, high micro-contrast, exaggerated shadows) that is just as much a ‘look’ as is the now desired soft focus portra look that you can get out of filters in software like capture one.
megapixels have been explained. For screen use, when you are not cropping, even 5mp is overkill. The rest is useful for software zoom.
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