Also, the selfie camera on your phone is probably MUCH lower quality than the main one on the back. Have someone else take your picture instead if you have the option.
But almost any dedicated camera that isn't down in the complete crap price range will blow a cell phone out of the water, for two major reasons. First, optical zoom, the number one thing I miss with my cell phone. Second, it is at least somewhat more likely that your "12MP camera" really is 12 MP with your real camera, whereas it's fairly likely you "12MP" cell phone is a lie [1].
This is even in the $150/200 range, long before we get to the ability to change lenses or all those other pro features. My ~$200 camera from 10+ years ago still takes better pictures than my cell phone, because even though my cell phone nominally beats it on megapixels, my camera actually uses all of its pixels to obtain real information from the scene, instead of being a bullet-point feature on a device that isn't even primarily a camera.
So, to anyone reading this, if this sounds interesting, you don't even have to go to the big, expensive stuff; my kid literally bought a camera at a garage sale for $5 that also takes better pictures than my cell because it had like 8x optical zoom. It cost me more to find a functional battery than the camera itself did. It's not hard or expensive.
[1]: Test: Take a picture in broad daylight, the best possible lighting conditions. Move the picture to your computer. Zoom in until you can see all the pixels clearly. Can you see sharp edges, or do you see a whole bunch of multi-pixel blobs of the sameish color, even around sharp edges? If the latter, your "pixel count" is a lie; it doesn't actually have that much resolving power.
Do iPhone photos look better when zoomed in? Of course not, but they do look better at "normal" scale, which is what counts IMO. And of course this only applies when you shoot "standard" scenes, the DSLR (with lenses) gives you ability to shoot things that the iPhone just can't.
Am I ditching my DSLR? Of course not, but that's only because I'm willing to invest effort in actually taking great photos, which isn't trivial (to me) and is much harder with the iPhone.
I suspect this is probably why you're seeing the sales numbers drop too. The big camera makers have been relying on the cheap units to bring in the money. They're transitioning now to relying on expensive, high end units instead. It's a much smaller addressable market though.
At some point I think it will be largely a professional thing. Eventually the computational photography will look good enough to make up for the space constraints of a phones' lens. But the downside will be that any photo taken with your phone will look kind of samey and be poor at getting fine detail. And having your own camera with manual control options will let people feel more in control of what they're doing.
Camera phones will try to re-sharpen the image, but some information is always lost. It's especially obvious looking at things with fine detail and sharp edges, like tree leaves against a bright sky.
I tend to buy last year's midgrade phone because I don't really need the latest and greatest. Maybe the top end really does take the full photos they claim, but that still leaves a lot of cell phones that are lying.
Most of the recent cell phones take perfectly adequate pictures, considering the amazing disadvantages they are laboring under. It's just that if you downsample the pictures to 2 or 4MP, you're basically losing no information.
(There are similar effects with video. The aforementioned 10+ year-old camera I had suffers from this as well. It has a "720P" and a "1080P" video mode, but based on my experimentation, both modes get real video out at about 400-500 "real" lines of vertical quality. I can squeeze either video's source down to that size and when I compare the full screen result to the original, I can find no difference whatsoever. I imagine more modern real cameras probably do a better job here; this thing is pretty old now, obviously.)
Maybe true, but I pretty much only post photos on instagram (using a 5 year old mirrorless camera I found for less than a new good smartphone), and non-experts consistently ask me how I am able to get such high picture quality. So non-photographers can detect the difference between modern smartphones and 5 year old mirrorless tech.
All of the tricks used in a smartphone could be used in a real camera. If they were, then real cameras will always have many stops of dynamic range advantage.
The Revenant would have been impossible to shoot even 10 years ago, the demands on the sensor or film would have been too great. This means the story couldn't be told at all! So the technology actually enables people to take photos that would have been otherwise impossible.
I'm also suspicious that the second shift is "done". I suspect the technology will always be pushed further at the high end of the camera technology market which will trickle down. Similarly, I suspect the software innovations used by Google / Apple will trickle down into the software of dedicated cameras, which will further widen the quality gap between the formats.
Quality isn't all about reproduction, it is also about creative possibilities. Right now, none of the smartphones can take a photo of a moving subject in low light. They depend on averaging frames which leads to subject blur. This isn't a minor detail, it's the difference between a photo and no photo.
I love my phone camera (Pixel 1) but if I want to take professional quality pictures I pull out my E-M10.
But my photographer friend was right - mirrorless are better for amateurs and have one huge benefit: they can record video much more easily since they can focus and record at the same time.
About once a year, I consider moving to Fuji. Or to some other larger format mirrorless. But, the size and weight penalty just isn't worth it.
All that said, my wife's old Canon S90 compact is near the end of life. I thought about buying her a replacement, but I may just splurge on an iPhone XS instead.
On my last trip I think the weight/size of my dlsr equipment was cut in 1/3 with the same focal range.
(the picture in this article is comparison of camera/lens size..)
https://www.wildernessshots.com/why-you-dont-need-full-frame...
Heck, even the "large" 12-40mm F2.8 Pro lens on my primary body is about the same size as a mediocre kit lens on a full-frame SLR.
Switching manufacturers is a different beast however and you'll likely be limited to manual focus and a gimbal/in-sensor for stabilization.
Of course, because they're full-frame cameras, the glass is still big, so you don't get the hyper-compact size of a micro-4/3 body+lens, but it's still waaay smaller than, say, a 5D + a lens.
I believe the equivalent APS-C Fuji 23mm f/2 is around 200g/0.45lbs.
Of course, with the Summicron you give up such new-fangled innovations as, say, autofocus.
The glass for my Sony A7ii is significantly larger than (most) lenses I had for my Olympus m4/3 body. The exception is the main prime on both systems -- I have the Sony 50mm/1.8, which is about the same size as the Panasonic/Leica 25mm/1.4 that filled the same role on my Olympus.
One is that many manufacturers haven't taken advantage of how mirrorless changes lens design yet (the shorter flange distance enables a lot of design space), so you're still carrying a lens designed for a DSLR, but with a lot of hollow space between the back element and the mount. This is especially obvious with third-party lenses; e.g. it's well understood that a lot of Sigma lenses for Sony FE are functionally just their DSLR lenses with a built-in adapter.
The other reason why you don't see a big weight advantage with mirrorless lenses is that, where they are designed for mirrorless specifically, they tend to aim for "better" rather than "lighter. Lenses like the Canon 85mm f/1.2, the 50mm f/1.2, and the 28-70 f/2.0 are perfect examples of this.
However, lenses designed to take advantage of mirrorless can be smaller and lighter, when they have the same design goals — e.g. the latest (DSRL) Canon EF 24-105L f/4 weighs 795g vs the (Mirrorless) RF 24-105L f/4's 694g.
However, assuming I'm taking photos with anything besides my smartphone (which I probably use a greater and greater percentage of the time), it's going to be my Fujifilm mirrorless camera. I think if I were starting over, I'd just go with mirrorless and just forgo the specialized cases that the DSLR and its lenses are better for.
The advantage of a mirror is that capturing the right instant is much easier when you're photographing subjects that aren't posing, such as children. You want to get that facial expression just right! Not a few hundreths of a second later.
I got a $500 Nikon DSLR about 4 years ago and came to the same conclusion. I usually set it to auto, and I'm astounded by the photo quality that comes out. Occasionally, I'll adjust exposure or focus manually, but for outdoors, auto "just works".
Sometimes I think I should have bought a mirrorless instead, but so long as my Nikon works and I'm satisfied with its quality, I'll keep using it.
For almost a year without my DSLR, most of my photos were shot using my LG G6 phone. It was okay and I insisted feeling it was good enough.
It was last Christmas when I was able to borrow a Canon 6Dmk1 paired with a good lens. Boy, I was in for a treat again; the sensor, fast focus, bokeh and low light performance all reminded me how far I've forgotten the joy of getting better pictures using a better camera. Got myself a 77d+24mm soon after to satisfy the cravings.
The lens is wide like a smartphone so the subject always fits in the frame. And it has enough resolution to crop later. But it's not so wide that it warps the image. Straight lines look straight. I take 15-20 pics/day and charge it once a month. It's light and small so I can shoot one-handed (very useful with pets and children).
One day I'll buy a telephoto lens with better reach. But the 24m is such a great "around-the-home" package. It will be my default for the foreseeable future.
*EF lenses, can't comment on Canon EF-S personally.
We paid $3500 for the privilege with no regrets (so far). I forgot pictures can look so good: high resolution, pleasing background blur, and most important it's just a camera. It doesn't have reddit, or HN, or email, or pinterest. It sits about the house where we can grab it quickly. It goes in the day pack on hikes. It blows every other webcam out of the water.
And it has smarts to compete with our current-gen iPhones, which we increasingly tuck away to combat distraction. Fast autofocus and face-recognition are lifesavers and often outperform the phones. It's like photography on easy mode. Which it should be considering the sticker price.
I get that the best camera is the one you have with you. But we carry our phones less and our camera more. It's silly and sad that we can't exercise more self-control. But from our privileged perspective, a dedicated camera was a great investment in our quality of life.