Five reasons you get much better pictures from a DSLR
I had the statement made to me recently along the lines that smartphone cameras are so good now they are just about as good as DSLRs, which lead into a question from the other person something like “Why would anyone bother carrying around a DSLR anymore?”
My somewhat over-defensive response was “There is probably about 50 reasons a DSLR kills any smartphone camera”, which resulted in the other person challenging me to give him five good reasons.
This caught me a little on the back foot and for a few brief seconds I panicked. I wondered if there were some good reasons in defence of the DSLR. But then I quickly managed to pull five valid and defendable reasons together.
Following are the five ‘quick fire’ reasons I came up with at the time.
1. No optical zoom
Smartphones don’t have optical zoom. Now I know someone is going to be shaking their head and muttering to themselves “Yes there is. You can get add-on zoom lenses for some smartphones”.
Yep. I know this. But for those phones where some third party does make one of these optical zoom slide-on gizmos they are pretty crappy.
So basically with smartphones you are left with ‘digital zoom’, which is not really zooming at all. Digital zoom is technically cropping with enlarging, and when you crop and enlarge a small part of a picture you always get degradation.
It always amuses me when you see people at an event like the football, or the baseball on TV, or at a concert and they are taking a picture from up in the stalls with their smartphone. Seriously! The players are going to be like ants in the their picture, and if they try to ‘digital zoom’ into them they will be so blurred and full of digital noise that they will not be recognisable.
2. Hopeless in low light situations
Over the last couple of years Samsung, Nokia, and Apple have tried all kinds of technology tricks to try and get noise-less colour-balanced properly-exposed low light images from their phones. Admittedly they are getting better and better results but the reality is that they are light years away from what can be achieved by the cheapest and most basic of DSLR cameras.
Even the half-frame sensor found in about 90 percent of commonly used lower-end DSLR cameras is massive compared to the sensor used in smartphones.
3. No macro-focus capability
Smartphones are totally not suited to any kind of macro photography—unless you get one of those slide-on macro adaptors. But I think that the couple of companies that made the three of four slide-on macro adaptors for smartphones sold so few of them they have all stopped making them.
I did a quick Google search for a macro-focus adapter for the world’s number one selling smartphone, the Samsung S4, and I could not find one.
4. Crappy focussing
Despite all the smarts that Samsung, Apple, Nokia, and other smartphone manufacturers have tried to build into their camera phones the reality is that achieving something approaching pin-sharp focussed pictures remain very hit-and-miss. VERY hit-and-miss.
The three main parts of the problem here are the tiny lens, the relative quality of the lens, and then that tiny sensor again. These three contributing components make it very challenging to get a sharp focus.
A basic rule of lens manufacture is that the smaller the sensor the better the lens has to be. Based on this rule can you imagine how amazingly good the lens on a smartphone camera has to be? Considering the sensor is basically miniscule.
In order to compensate for the difficulty in getting true focus when the picture is taken, what smartphone manufacturers do is try to increase the perceived sharpness of pictures in the post-processing of the picture. That is, they try and fake the sharpness after the picture is taken but before it is stored as a file.
In my recent posting about Adobe’s de-blur technology I paraphrased the quote “ . . . since the invention of the smartphone, never before in the history of man have so many out-of-focus, blurred, under/over exposed pictures been taken by so many people” (see snap below, which links to posting).
Case closed.
5. The flash is pathetic (and you can’t use supplemental flashes)
On ALL smartphones the flash is pathetic. It will either be one or two LED flashes, or a Xenon flash—like the new Nokia 928 which is recognised as having just about the best flash currently possible on a smartphone.
While Xenon flashes are an upgrade from LED flashes, the effective distance of this flash is still only about four to five metres (depending on the f-stop setting used). That’s it. Nothing past five metres at best. So don’t stand up in front of an eight metre hall table at a party and take a flash picture with a smartphone and expect the flash to cover the length of the table. Not going to happen!
Worse still, you can’t effectively use supplemental flash heads with a smartphone. The exposure computer in a smartphone is not set up to handle supplemental flash units. So don’t go out and by a Metz MZ-5 and expect that to work auto-magically with a Samsung S4 smartphone.
The built in flash on the most basic of DSLRs is good for about eight metres and up to 15 (depending on the ISO and the f-stop). And ALL modern DSLRs can handle supplemental or additive flash.
Since this episode I have thought of some more reasons, including:
- Ability to take true RAW images (i.e., digital negatives).
- Ability to manage the ISO (i.e., the light sensitivity of the sensor).
- The dynamic range captured by a DSLR (thereby providing the ability to do amazing things in post processing).
- Interchangeable lenses.
- Creative control over aperture.
- Creative control over shutter speed.
- Long exposure control (for capturing really amazing night pictures).
It is possible that in the not too distant future some amazing technological advances will make the smartphone camera a viable replacement for the DSLR. But that time has not arrived just yet.
