It's not perfectly true, but it doesn't matter.

I bought a Nikon DSLR (Most expensive purchase till then), thinking that I would take it around whenever I go out for fun trips.

I did take it out often. I had some great pictures with it. No problems, not even today.

But after I got the Pixel 2 XL, the pain points with DSLRs are obvious for regular shooting. They need to be charged, the SD card needs to be put in a computer to transfer files, and they're bulky so carrying them is a problem.

So now, when I want to take a nice quick photo, I wish I had my DSLR, but I take the photo with my phone anyway, and I don't think much about it.

I'm not saying DSLR are going to be completely irrelevant. But they're getting so close to the ideal picture quality for normal photos (i.e. no shutter speed or focus requirements) they're just fine. And the problem is they're getting better.

They won't replace the full-frame cameras with have large ecosystems around them, but they'll make people like me think twice before buying a DSLR.

I wonder, do you look at your photos on a computer afterwards or just your phone? I've found that photos I shoot with my Pixel look amazing on the device, but when I take them back to my computer (a retina laptop) the flaws become really noticeable. I'm talking about things like small amounts of motion blur or the focus not being quite perfect, or increased grain from the sensor size and ISO setting, etc., leading to an image that is just not as crisp as what I'd get on a real camera. But the flaws are easy to ignore on a small display and I suspect many people (not necessarily you) find them good enough as a result.

"but when I take them back to my computer (a retina laptop) the flaws become really noticeable."

This is true for all phones, no matter the cost. They simply can't compete with much cheaper but dedicated cameras for one vital reason: the sensor and lenses sizes plus noise. Phones need to be thin and they can devote only a small part of their area to a sensor plus lens. That lens also must follow a certain width/depth ratio to minimize image distortion, so if it's thin it also must be narrow, followed by a narrow sensor as well. Since a narrow sensor is exposed to less light than a larger one, to obtain the same level it has to be pushed to higher sensitivity to cope with lesser light, hence the higher noise.

No, the size of the sensor has nothing to do with the light exposure. The amount of light captured is determined by the lens aperture and the photosensitive element size. The problem with small sensors is that their pixel density is much higher and this increases the noise. Also to have the same resolution a bigger sensor can use bigger pixel and that increases the amount of light captured by the single element. For example a full frame sensor with 12MP has a better signal to noise ratio than a 48MP one. If you use a sensor that is 4 times smaller then if you want to maintain the same resolution the signal to noise ratio is much smaller, if you want to maintain the same low light performance then your resolution will be 4 times smaller. Just think about a full frame sensor, if you crop the image in the center the final result will be exactly the same as an image captured with a smaller sensor with the same pixel density.

I don't think thats true. You need to calculate equivalent f-stop for smaller sized sensors to compare the captured light. The f stop mentioned on the smartphone relates to the physical focal length while the 35mm-equivalent focal length is adjusted by the crop factor. As a result the sensor actually covers a small part of the area that could theoretically be lit with such a short focal length (light falling in from the side at large angles).

There is no equivalent f/stop. There is an equivalent focal length but as I explained it has nothing to do with the amount of light captured by the photovoltaic elements. The equivalent focal length is used only to infer the field of view.

Imagine a 14mm 2.8 on full frame - that's a very wide angle. Of course a 14mm 2.8 on a mobile phone size sensor will not be used a wide angle, as the senor will only cover a tiny amount of the arc behind the lens. While the two lenses theoretically "transport" the same amount of light, the sensor of the smart phone only sees a tiny amount of it in the center of the theoretical image circle. In practical terms of course the smaller-sensor lens will already be constructed to only have a very small image circle and therefore let through nowhere near as much light as the lens constructed for a larger sensor. That's why it makes sense to consider equivalent f-stops for calculations of light amount passing to the sensor, it also has its place in calculation of DOF.

Interesting, I took a totally different perspective - as easy as it is to take a picture with my pixel 2, I get almost no satisfaction from it. No fun of choosing a good fstop, framing the shot, etc. Editing it later in Lightroom...

The picture taking I do on my phone is very different I do on my dslr. As for battery life maybe I'm not shooting enough but I've literally never "had" to charge it. I don't even bother bringing the charger anymore, the damn battery refuses to die. I just charge it after a trip or once a month at home. Fat SD card means same for memory.

Are you shooting in raw and editing your photos?

>Are you shooting in raw and editing your photos?

Yep, I do the whole works. All of them in RAW, spending an hour or so editing in Lightroom (with favorite presets), have a flickr (like every other DSLR owner). But it stopped being fun after seeing that so many people do the same 'artistic' stuff, it doesn't feel like I'm doing something 'worthwhile' anymore. Now I just want to take photos and videos with friends. I find them more important.

I used to care about the right focus, shutter speed etc. But with a phone, if you use the portrait mode, you get something like f/1.5, and if you don't, you get something like f/18. So that almost takes care of the focus problem for a lot of cases.

When it comes to shutter speed, I use the high shutter speed when there are faster moving objects. That's a problem with a phone, but with enough photos taken quickly, one of them usually turns out good. People use low shutter speed only for long exposure shots like nightsky, waterflow, etc. which isn't a 'normal' photo.

Low light is one place I guess where a phone can't exactly do as well, but as I said, it just needs to be good enough, and not perfect.

About the battery of DSLR, often I don't take it out anymore, and between uses, the battery is so low that I have to charge it. So it leave it, and next time, its pretty much dead. Poor maintenance, but it again ties into if it is worth it.

I still shoot with interchangeable lens cameras (both Fujifilm and Canon) but I do use my iPhone more and more of the time. On a recent trip to Europe, I had both my Fujifilm with a couple of lenses and my iPhone X. Looking through my photos on Flickr, there are some that I obviously took with the XE-3 given the low light conditions. But for many of the rest of my edited/curated photos, I couldn't have told you which camera I used without looking at the metadata. Probably if I blew things up big enough and really examined the fine detail, but not with casual viewing at normal sizes.

I prefer the careful manual selection of the shooting parameters and lens of a DSLR over my iPhone much like I prefer driving a stick shift over an automatic.

Unfortunately for DSLRs for my purposes, the joy of shooting one is vastly outweighed by the inconvenience of transporting it.

Once ICEs are dramatically less convenient than electric vehicles, I suspect I’ll give up stick shift too. Hoping that day is a long way away.

... the best camera is the one you have with you. I love my DSLR but now the multi-lens systems (iPhone X and others) that allow bokeh make it even less compelling to bring my DSLR. If they had a stronger telephoto option, it’d be a done deal for me unless I was shooting professionally again. Sure, I love the control of an SLR but I love always having a good camera with me even more.

Going beyond that, innovative ideas light the extreme mult-lens systems from Light start to offer features a DSLR can’t reproduce in a form factor closer to a smartphone. Disruptive innovation comes from flipping orthodoxies and that is exactly what we’re seeing.

I had never heard of the Light camera, that thing is crazy! Makes sense that it's 2k, I'm loving to see if anybody else tries to take a crack at this unorthodox system.

True, but where's the DSLR that cannibalises the high end by offering the software power of a smartphone camera combined with a APS-C sensor?