Digital cameras forum: Buy a new camera or just go with a smartphone with camera?

Don't let the megapixel count sway you. Lens Quality, CCS sensor, f-stops and the flash are not up to point-and-shoot cameras just yet. Low light is the biggest problem. You wouldn't want to lose those important once in a lifetime family or vacation shots that a digital camera could have captured.

While you can get some amazing photos (in the right conditions) with today's camera phones, overall a digital camera IMHO would still be the best choice.

To be honest I think they should be separate. The plus to a camera is optical zoom which a phone doesn't have, better image quality and you don't loose the size of your sensor (capturing device) due to digital zooming which is actually digital cropping. Cameras are also small enough these days and have more features and most people react better, or in my case duck, when they see a camera rather than the raised eyebrow if someone points a phone at them.

camera phones are fine for photos of friends fairly close up and maybe the occasional landscape but the camera on my motorola android does not seem to have any zoom capability and so i am stuck with one, rather wide angle, setting. For me, that was enough limitation that i bought a $100 bargain priced Panasonic Lumix DMC-FH25 16.1 mp with 8x optical zoom. that translates to a 224 mm telephoto at the top end. it even has incredible macro close focus. it's small enough to carry around when i think i'm going to want to take photos but don't want to bring my really big rig, which is a canon 20D with some high end lenses, even an f 2.8 70-200 image stabilized zoom that cost more than the camera itself and weighs about 6 pounds. I suspect if you go to a store or borrow someone else's camera you will be able to tell if the lack of changing your field of view will be a problem, just by trying it, but you'll need to go outside to find things like you want to shoot on your vacations. Yes, the camera phones do take good pictures, and also videos (at least mine does) that are pretty good, too. I just needed something a bit more adjustable and $100 or even maybe $200 was not too much for what you can get, and it takes videos too which the canon 20d doesn't. It took a few weeks for that deal to come along. I don't think smartphones are going to make point and shoot - or, better put, small and compact cameras - extinct very soon. My canon 20D is point and shoot, by the way, so that's not really the entire issue, i don't think. So as far as your other question, if you want a camera for the reasons i did you can probably get a pretty good one for a lot less and still have mucho - really amazing - capabilities.

Hi Carol,

Cameras have certainly come a long way over the past 5 years haven't they? Old Guys like me still remember when the biggest new thing in cameras was 400 speed color film!!! Today, to change your ISO rating you just push a button or turn a dial and there it is. No film, just crisp, sharp photos. We've come a long way Carol, but we still have a long way to go before a Smartphone will give you the kind of quality you get in even the cheaper point and shoot cameras. Let's look at a few of the reasons why:

First, we have to think of OPTICS in the lens. High quality optics provide high quality images. I looked at a point and shoot made by Panasonic this week that had 8 elements in the lens, providing 16 x optical zoom and an added 4 x digital zoom. Until we can come up with a way to build affordable micro-optics for smartphones, they will never compare in terms of zoom flexibility or optical quality.

Our second issue with smartphone cameras is their limited application. They are fine for taking snapshots of close-up subjects in well lit areas. But even then the image quality will not stand up to any kind of enlargement for printing. But if you're just sharing pictures over a social network on the Web, the Smartphone may be just the ticket for you. What you can't expect is to be able to take pictures of fast moving objects, or to use the smartphone in low light scenarios. You can photoshop images to a degree, but poorly lit subjects will not come out well on your smartphone.

But don't be discouraged!!! The good news is that in the $100 - $200.00 range, point and shoot cameras these days are really a great bargain for the occasional photographer. They are ultra small, with very high resolution, built in flash (good for about 30 feet), and provide a multitude of zoom capabilities and image variables from indoor low light to high speed outdoor subjects. The battery life has vastly improved and the lens quality is remarkable for such small platforms. And they're small enough to fit in your pocketbook or ultra-small carrying case. Most double as Video Cameras and as you get closer to the $200.00 mark, the Video is in 1080P HD.

So if I were you Carol, I think my choice might be to either wait until they improve the quality and capabilities of the smartphone cameras, or just elect to buy one of the newer point and shoots.

Hope this helps.

bassinbill42 says "NOT all point and shoot cameras are the same. @KenHusVeg....."

I'm not sure why your using my name in your post. I understand your opinion perhaps you misread mine.

Smart phone can not,at this moment in time,better digital cameras.Having said that a good photographer can produce good images with almost any camera.
Its not the kit that succeeds,its the operator.
Why would a pro spend between £3,500 and £30,,000 on a digital camera body,let alone the lenses,if a smartphone could do the job just as well ?
Answer is they do so because the smart phone is , well, just a phone with cheap add ons to enhance their silly costs..

when has anyone ever kept the lens of a smart-phone covered to stop it getting dirty,when have they ever used the oh so important lens hood both features of proper cameras.
The images from smart-phones can be good given optimum conditions but do not at this time better real digital cameras.To start with they capture jpeg images in sRGB colour space,just as the cheaper digital cameras do which any pro will tell you is far from ideal.
Soot raw files ,post process and then you are starting to get the best from your camera.
Smart-phones are not there yet and as long as their sensors are small they will always have the physical barrier of coping with the relatively small wavelength of light being to large for the individual pixel sensors

I actually bought my smartphone for the opposite reason -

I thought I need a new phone, new camera and new sat nav.

New basic phone - £50
New basic sat nav - £100
New basic camera - £100

Total = £250

Instead I got a smartphone (HTC HD2) second hand from CEX - £180 and stuck a GiffGaff sim card in it so I'm paying £10 per month to them for unlimited internet, 300 texts and 300 mins, and use Google Maps for the sat nav, it took me more than 7 months to have paid more than I would have done for getting all three separate.

Of course I did keep my old camera for certain things.

As for buying a phone on contract your a mug if you do that - most contracts for smartphones are about £30 per month for 24 months for not much more than what GiffGaff give for £10 per month, and in the time of the contract you'd have paid £480 just for the phone and the phone then isn't even worth £100. Phones devalue faster than brand new cars!

One simple answer: a good point and shoot camera has a far better quality lens than any phone. You can't go by just a device's MP rating, but many people who don't know better make that mistake. There are a lot of other reasons a dedicated camera will produce better results than a phone, but the lens difference is the most significant. If you ever take a really special shot of something highly memorable, you will be glad you used a genuine camera instead of a phone or pad, especially if you want to enlarge and print it.

I used to always carry my phone and camera around with me, but now more often than not I end up taking just my smartphone with me rather than a camera and smartphone, which is a HTC HD2.

Sometimes I do still use my camera and there are good reasons for this

Most Smartphones do take damn good pictures, mine actually takes better pictures than my old Canon 3mp digital camera, and can even do Panorama mode which when you learn how this works it produces some amazing panoramic shots (to do this you set it in panorama mode, then take 3 pictures, one on the left, then there is a ghost image which you line up and take a second one for the middle, and then you line up the ghost image again for a 3rd shot and it glues these together quite well to produce a panoramic shot!)

However despite the good quality pictures there are still some things that smartphone cameras just haven't got right at this present time, and it's these that you need a normal camera for.

One major thing that is missing on all smartphones is optical zoom. Most of them have digital zoom, but this is useless. All digital zoom does is crop the image for you on your phone, something which you could do anyway at home on your PC and with greater accuracy. ensuring that you didn't miss out any of the important bits.

With optical zoom it uses various optics to actually zoom in on the picture you are taking, this allows you to take the picture and still keep it at the full resolution, with digital zoom however it lowers the resolution to zoom in (same way your paint program works when you select an area of a picture and click Crop). But of course instead of taking a full 10mp picture you can end up taking a 3mp picture instead.

You might not think optical zoom is very important but you'd be surprised at how close you need to get to some items just to get that perfect picture - for example if your at a concert, taking a picture with a smartphone is likely to get you a very poor image of a sea of thousands of people and a minute guy on stage and no amount of cropping will get it right, where as taking it with optical zoom can get an amazing close up picture.

Then you also have shooting modes, some smartphones do have a basic selection of shooting modes, such as changing shutter speed, increasing brightness, etc, but many digital cameras have a far more enhanced array of options. By far one of the best options on most digital cameras which doesn't appear on any phone I've seen is the "Scene selection" mode. This allows you to take pictures based on the scene you are taking, for example one of the scene selection modes is usually "Fireworks", and if you are at a firework party this is superb for capturing the picture of the fireworks just at the precise moment the gunpowder explodes. In firework mode what happens is you press the shutter and the camera monitors the light and the second the light increases greatly it takes the picture, thus you get the picture just as the firework has exploded, instead of with smartphones trying to manually time your shots and relying more on pot luck than anything.

Also on most cameras you have a mode called Macro or Super-Macro mode, this is missing on many smart phones. This allows you to take pictures close up and obtain superfine details. This works perfect if your into taking nature photos. With macro mode on you can take a picture of a flower and even see things like the pollen of the flower or the furr on the bee which you wouldn't see if you tried without macro mode.

On top of this on many digital cameras you do have manual focus. This again is missed on smart phones. Smartphones tend to use auto-focus rather than manual which can cause major problems if shooting pictures with certain areas of bright lights. For example last weekend I went to Ludlow Medieval Christmas Fayre and there was a person doing tricks with fire, (juggling with it and eating it), I took my camcorder with me and used that to take photos instead of my smartphone, because on the camcorder and also most digital cameras you can turn off auto-focus. In this instance if I'd have left autofocus on, or used my smartphone I would have got a very blurry image. Autofocus tends to work by focussing on the brightest thing in the picture (assuming it's a face), but on occasions where fire is involved, fire can become brighter than the human face and the camera can focus on the wrong thing. Having the option to turn of auto-focus and use manual focusing solves this problem (ok it means now you've got to play with the focussing yourself, but at least you can see the picture!)

Of course it's not all bad for smartphones, they do have some good advantages over digital cameras. For example they are handy if your taking them to places where expensive digital cameras may get lost or stolen, carrying a smartphone only means you are carrying less so have less to look after (you can even use them as sat navs which saves hiding the tomtom every time you leave the car - so you've eliminated two bulky items that are at risk of being stolen or lost for one small item which you just need to keep track of).

One major advantage smartphones have is the fact that the majority of them include some kind of GPS/A-GPS system, some cameras also include GPS/A-GPS systems as well but they're more at the higher end range.

The good thing with having a GPS linked to your smartphone when taking pictures is that you can add location information to the picture (to do this you normally have to chose a specific mode like "Location" on the camera settings). This comes in extremely useful when trying to sort out your pictures on the computer. Programs like Picasa can read this information and plot your pictures on a map which is really handy when looking back at pictures and trying to think about where you were at the time.

Recently I did have a use for this, I worked at a few events this year in the summer, during my work there I took some photographs, three of the events - The Royal Welsh Show, Goodwood and Wings and Wheels all feature pictures of aeroplanes taken on my lunch break in the middle of a car park... as you can imagine every car park looks the same and it without looking on the net for dates of the events it was hard for me to judge at which event these pictures were taken. Luckily though because I'd taken them with location services enabled I could see straight away exactly where they were taken by using Picasa and it's Google earth integration. Ok this might seem a very basic problem which I could have solved anyway just by searching for the dates on-line, but I know people who travel a lot and sometimes they look at their pictures and think they were taken in totally different locations to what they were really taken in. Also sometimes it can be good to see exactly where you were stood in the picture, for example this year I went to the National Eisteddfod in Wrexham, whilst there I took some pictures with location enabled and when uploading them to Picasa I could see the exact point in "Y Maes" (The Field) where things like the tents had been, and which now is just an empty field.

I think smartphones do have the possibility to make simple point and shoot cameras extinct, but there is one final important point to consider - battery life. It's ok if your out and about to be taking pictures with your camera until it flattens the battery, but if you do that on your smartphone not only will you not be able to take pictures any more it will also mean you can't take or make phone calls until you find somewhere to charge it up from (most smart phones do have either a mini or micro-usb port on them so you just need to find a USB charging port, but what if you were at something like a theme park or festival and you wanted to locate the rest of the family and you'd flattened the battery taking pictures and videos?)

With a phone you can set resolution up to the 2,000 x 1,500 range or better which is quite good, but if you want to take many pictures at that size you'll also need a memory card. For casual shooting this resolution is quite good, but you won't have the clarity or quality you can get from a camera with good optical zoom and high resolution settings. Plus with a camera you'll have better options for distance and lighting. If you want to take some graduation, school play or family reunion pictures, go with a decent quality optical zoom, not just pixel zoom camera with video capability. If you want to catch the kids playing in the yard or the dog acting like a clown, the phone is good and you can take medium/low quality videos with most phones.

I just purchased a new camera to replace an older 5Mpix. The Canon was chosen after several considerations.
Low light level was the reason Canon won. I feel this was the best buy for the dollars and am extremely happy with the pictures taken with no flash. This far exceeded smartphone capabilities to which it was compared.

This is the short answer. Smartphone cameras are a compromise. You are going to pay the price of not having to carry two devices to do two jobs in the poor picture quality. Despite the siren song of more mega pixels. To make a camera fit into a phone you will pay the price in reduced picture quality due to a lower quality sensor, and a marginal quality lens that only does digital zoom if it does zoom at all.
If all you want is a few snapshots to post on facebook the phone may serve your needs well. But if you want to preserve those never see it again moments like the Grand Canyon, or a new baby with a good level of quality consider investing an extra 50 bucks in a basic digital camera with a dozen mega pixels or more, and a 5x or better zoom lens by Zeiss as a starting point.

Hi Carol

You have just opened Pandora's box with your question. I'll not talk about focal lengths, CMOS sensors, fStops, Optics and the like. Especially, since you said that you have been using the same PS camera for 4 years and that you don't do any high-end photography. So, my guess would be that you probably use the auto-program mode on your PS and may only occasionally play with the flash (on/off).

I personally own a Canon D Series Autofocus SLR, a Sony Compact AutoFocus SLR, a Canon PS, an iPod Touch 4th Gen., with camera as well as my Sprint HTC EVO Phone with camera. When I want studio quality shots I pull out my Canon D series SLR (with it's multitude of adjustments). If I want to travel lite but still get near studio quality shots I use my Sony Compact SLR. If I'm attending a party or casual event and want good shots in varying light conditions I'll use the Canon PS. The cameras in my iPod Touch and my Sprint HTC EVO Phone are used for spur of the moment shots (in good light).

I gave you the above information to bring home the point that depending upon what you want as an end result should dictate what type of camera you choose. Before I talk about a PS Camera vs a SmartPhone Camera here's a chart on megapixels and what size photo you can print. As a disclaimer megapixels do not a camera make (because I know someone in this forum will take issue with using megapixels as a bench mark). So having said that here's the chart:

1 megapixel Best at Wallet Size good at 4" x 7"
2 megapixel Best at 4" x 6" good at 8" x 10"
3 megapixel Best at 5" x 7" good at 8" x 10"
4 megapixel Best at 5" x 7" good at 11" x 14"
5 megapixel Best at 5" x 7" good at 11" x 14"
6/7 megapixel Best at 8" x 10" good at 16" x 20"
8 megapixel Best at 8" x 10" good at 17" x 22"
10 megapixel Best at 11" x 14" good at 20" x 30"

Note:
The sizes indicated by "Best" are what you should expect from a given megapixel camera with minimal to no adjustment by the user. The upper ranges or "Good" are only possible under the best lighting conditions and proper camera adjustments.

So what type of camera should you invest in....?

First know that selecting a smartphone with a camera is not a cost-effective long-term investment for quality photo taking as with a good PS camera. Because, in theory you never stop paying for a smartphone (i.e. the monthly carrier fee).

Second, you can easily compare the photo quality of one PS camera vs that of another in the store before you buy it. To be honest if you choose a Best Buy Store you can probably compare a smartphone's photo quality (if there's a working model available) to that of a PS camera since they (BB) sell both. But even a head-to-head comparison of a smartphone camera to a PS camera will probably be at the lowest limits of the PS camera (i.e. a very cheap one at best).

However, smartphones with cameras have the advantage of being able to share photos instantanoeusly without the use of a computer via the phones data plan (i.e. email or IMS). You only have one device to carry and you can be ready to shoot at a moments notice.

At the moment (although I don't own one) the iPhone 4S is probably the best smartphone with a camera on the market. There are even add-on lenses available for the iPhone 4S to give the user a more SLR experience (click the link below):

http://planet10tech.com/2011/11/iphone-add-on-lens-roundup-review-owle-vs-olloclip-vs-3-in-1/

Another advantage of the iPhone 4S as a camera phone is that the optics will be the same regardless of which carrier you choose. But even with the aforementioned goodies the iPhone 4S is at best only a match for a low-end PS Camera. See CNET article: The iPhone 4S and Canon PowerShot 100 HS Shoot it Out by Lori Grunin - 10/18/2011.

So far the majority of the advice given has been NOT to choose a smartphone as your main camera for reasons I need not go into again...and I concur. Also, ask yourself....under what conditions were the pics taken that you saw on the smartphones of your friends and how complex were they? Here's another couple of items to consider:

1. Lose your phone...lose your camera
2. Some secure areas (depending upon what you do for a living) will not allow cameras including smartphones with a camera.

So my recommendation is to invest in another GOOD PS Camera. If you decide to go with a smartphone choose the iPhone 4S. It also affords some nice add-on's as indicated in the link above.

Good luck with your decision

I do not have a phone but I see my friends' phone photos. I agree that phone photo quality has improved enormously in the past few years, but I have so far seen none that can compare with the quality of photos taken with the Canon S95 which is very small (about the size of a phone). If all you want is a fast snapshot to upload to Facebook, go with just the phone, but if you want photos for print and you like the flexibility of shooting close ups, portraits, wide angle landscapes, and of shooting in less than ideal lighting conditions, and much more, then definitely go with a camera. I have the S95 which I love. It would take me pages to describe what this little camera can do. There are other good cameras out there including the waterproof Panasonic Lumix. No phone camera can come close to what these cameras can do.