With how incredible high-end smartphone cameras have gotten, why do professional photographers and film makers still spend thousands of dollars on high end equipment instead of just using a high-end smartphone camera?
In: Technology
There’s a LOT of functionality that a smartphone can’t have without glass. The depth-of-field effects you see on ‘portrait’ shots are entirely emulated, for example, and won’t fool anyone who knows anything about photography. Probably as much as anything is the form factor itself; a camera is designed to give you complete control over things like exposure and focus, and the viewfinder is superior for composition compared to a screen. Add to that the immediate, physical responsiveness of a shutter vs. a potential laggy software-driven touchscreen and there’s no real reason a photographer would use a phone even if the quality was identical. Which it’s not.
a high end smartphone camera is still, in most cases, a fixed lens with a very small sensor, no zoom, and no ability to control the amount of light it lets in. All the hard work of photography is done via math once the image is captured.
While you can control some of the things your smartphone camera does, what you see is often what you get, and if you want to change the focus from what your camera says your options are, or if you’re going for an effect your phone’s software doesn’t understand, you’re out of luck.
A high end digital camera has replaceable lenses, a larger sensor (meaning less distortion), and the lenses can be adjusted on the fly to let more or less light in by changing the size of the aperture or the shutter speed. Moreover, many of these settings can be changed with physical adjustments to the lens or by the camera’s physical controls. You rarely need to go into the menus, if ever.
I’ve seen some amazing images captured on a smartphone, and some absolute garbage shot with a DSLR. The trick is to know your device, know what it can and can’t do, and work within those constraints.
I’m not really sure this requires an ELI5.
While cell phone cameras have gotten much better over the years, they still can’t compare to an actual camera.
Phone cameras still have a long way to go compared to professional cameras. They take pretty nice still pics in good lighting, but professional cameras allow a lot more light into the camera by using a bigger lense, which takes better high speed or low light shots.
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