Saturday, June 29, 2013

Smartphones: The Future Of Digital Photography?

By Mike Thompson


Ever since smartphones have entered the technology scene, it has caused a serious slump in compact camera sales. One of the most popular photo sharing sites, Flickr, has cites that the most popular cameras used by its members are the Apple iPhone 4S, the Apple iPhone 5 and the Apple iPhone 4.

It appears as if smartphones have eliminated the need to ever own a digital camera, however, there are a multitude of reasons why this is not the case. The simplest reason is higher quality of photos. A low illumination test against 2 popular smartphone brands, the Apple iPhone 5 and the Samsung Galaxy S4, and an average run of the mill point and shoot digital camera, the Canon Powershot G15, has shown that the digital camera is superior by a long shot.



In contrast to a smartphone, you will be able to shoot crisp and clear photos from a longer distance away with a digital camera because of the extra zoom. Other advantages of the digital camera are better subject tracking, metering and white balance. It is even possible to crop a photo at 300 per cent its original size and post that online on sites like Facebook and Instagram since the quality is simply that good. For a smartphone, this is completely out of the question.

Keep in mind that your smartphone is exactly what it says it is, a phone that has multiple functions and taking many pictures can be quite taxing on the battery. It is definitely not advisable to to do this as you might not be able to make phone calls or text messages afterwards because of this.

As a matter of fact, the big camera vendors have decided to compete against smartphones and not just let them achieve a monopoly. This has resulted in the creation of 'smart cameras' which are digital cameras that allow you to send photos online via Wi-Fi or your mobile phone's connection.

For instance, Canon has recently developed the Powershot N, which is a small square shaped digital camera, designed to have the similar size as a smartphone as well as having built-in Instagram-like filters and built-in Wi-Fi for instant photo sharing.

Generally speaking, compact cameras are becoming more and more complex to the point that they can produce quality shots as good as their DSLR counterparts. For example, the newest Nikon Coolpix A has the 16.1 megapixel sensor of the Nikon D7100 and the image processor of the Nikon D7000.

In the end, smartphones should not be dismissed as totally inferior to digital cameras. It just depends on what you want from these cameras. Would you take pictures to only just share photos with others? In this case, you would be better off with a smartphone. Would you take pictures because you would like them to be picture-perfect? In this case, you would be more satisfied with a digital camera.

To not belittle the usefulness of both of these types of cameras, you should think of smartphones as a complement to digital cameras, instead of them replacing digital cameras.




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