With DSLRs my main complaint to this day is still the lack of a good modular lens system for phones (I understand some of the challenges and tradeoffs). For most people's camera habits (selfies, food shots, group pictures...) the lenses your modern flagship phone provides are mostly great.

What's seriously lacking though is in the say 50-70+mm focal length range. I have an old Canon DSLR in my office storage collecting dust I had to quickly dust off and throw some batteries in to get some shots at the edge of my yard a few weeks back to capture some unique wildlife that was hanging out. With my flagship premiere phone I simply couldn't capture the moment, no matter the hope of digital zoom techniques and a built in "zoom" lens. Stepping closer would have killed the opportunity.

My 10+ year old DSLR was there to save the day. Quickly rummaged out my 400 mm lens and simply stabilized on a table and got mostly the shots I wanted. My smartphone cameras have been good enough and convient enough to capture most things I want but I really wish there was a mount system for small portable optics

Another huge problem I've experienced with phone cameras is that they seem to all need to autofocus before taking a shot. This is horrible for, say, trying to take a picture out of a car's window as the car is moving, as the phone camera keeps refocusing on different parts of the scene, so I often miss the shot I need to take.

Any DSLR (and even many non-phone point-and-shoot cameras) have manual focus, so this is just not an issue with them.

Other problems with phone cameras are relatively slow shutter speeds and poor low light performance compared to DSLRs.

Phones can also only do digital zoom, which is horrible compared to a DSLR with a zoom lens. There's no way to put lens filters on phones either. They can't do infrared photography, etc, etc.

Lots and lots of ways that phones simply haven't caught up to DSLRs yet.

> With DSLRs my main complaint to this day is still the lack of a good modular lens system for phones (I understand some of the challenges and tradeoffs). For most people's camera habits (selfies, food shots, group pictures...) the lenses your modern flagship phone provides are mostly great.

Point-and-shoot cameras have been replaced by phones; DSLRs, on the other hand, are rapidly being replaced by mirrorless cameras. Mirrorless cameras, at least on the surface, seem to be an improvement on DSLRs -- they don't require a mirror, so they're both easier and cheaper to manufacture, they allow for modular lens systems, and even allow for more features (like shooting video as well as stills) than a traditional DSLR.

DSLR just got replaced by mirrorless basically same thing but without a mirror, cameras still have a more tech advancements to come, better EVF,global shutter, lower noise, higher fps, better AF, better metering, better IS, better battery life etc etc, a bit difference to a speaker that can only improve audio quality and at this point i probably can't tell the difference between a good 20 year old speaker and one bought today.

I think the point is that sure, recently DSLR got more or less replaced by mirrorless, tech wise, but the camera market as a whole has been massively diminished because smart phones ate it from the bottom up.

Now they're good enough that basically the DSLR/Mirrorless market is really just for enthusiasts or those with very specific needs.

enthusiasts? its for professionals and some enthusiasts, i doubt high end camera gear has reduced market share but the lower end consumer grade stuff has for sure gone since most people don't care about image quality etc when their phone can do basic photography. Just checked the sony A series lines cameras since 2015 have increased units sold every year.

The camera market has cratered, from 2010-2020 it dropped from 120 million units sold to under 10 million:

https://www.popphoto.com/news/the-camera-industry-is-changin...

The total market for all interchangeable lens cameras appears to be on the decline as well:

https://1kcreatives.com/smartphone-vs-mirrorless-vs-dslr-cam...

The point of the argument was that sonos and other smart speaker tech like sound bars etc, have eaten the market for hi-fi in the same sort of way. There is an enthusiast market, sure, and likely always will be. But it's way, way smaller than the old 'full' market and it's slowly declining as the convenient, easy to use products continue to get better (or continue to be terrible but convenient, if you want to be dismissive, but objective tests seem to show smartphones taking pretty damn good images these days).

i am not being dismissive, phone cameras are just no where near as good as a larger sensor camera, yes probably most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference on a smart phone small screen, but when your editing and doing large prints its very obvious especially when the phone camera uses anything higher then base ISO it becomes mush or that fake bokeh to mimic real cameras and editing latitude is really bad

yes smart phones did cut in the consumer grade camera market but the professional level cameras continue to do well and have increased in sales.

thing is about cameras you can't make a small sensor better then a larger one its not physically possible, this is a big difference between cameras and speakers... speakers have not changed much in the last 20 years most people won't be able to tell a difference between a 20 year old speakers sound quality then a modern one, so less and less people invest in those, who needs to upgrade a speaker every few years? so you can't compare cameras to speakers.

> yes probably most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference on a smart phone small screen

This is the dismissive part. See, for instance -

https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones-vs-cameras-closing-the-g...

And this was written a couple of years ago, with 2019 phones used to compare. The conclusion is that the non-smartphone market is likely to keep shrinking because the pictures keep getting better, but that people who want to 'tell a story' and tweak everything will probably stay with cameras.

> yes smart phones did cut in the consumer grade camera market but the professional level cameras continue to do well and have increased in sales.

No, they haven't, see the link I gave you before. Sales of all changeable lens cameras as a market sector are declining, regardless of how Sony's range is doing. In the mean time, sales of just body units are up as a percentage, meaning fewer folks buying starter kits - i.e. even in the pro-sumer sector the casuals are dropping off and the remaining market is people who are really into it.

> thing is about cameras you can't make a small sensor better then a larger one its not physically possible

But you can use multiple sensors with different characteristics and very smart software to do incredible things. You're getting into audiophile territory here. Phone cameras continue to improve faster than the camera-camera market can keep up, adding all sorts of stuff like depth sensors, IR, physical zoom capabilities etc, and they are a massive win on convenience. So this is cutting the market down to those very few individuals who do care about tweaking ISO levels and setting up the perfect shot.

I'm not saying "nobody will use DSLR/Mirrorless", but as phone cameras continue to get better and better, that market shrinks. This is borne out by the market figures.

And this is just like the hifi market, where good-enough + smarts + convenience is winning out in the same way.

Frankly, even if the market sector were holding steady, your objection to the comparison is bizarre. It doesn't have to be 100% exactly the same for the comparison to stand - the convenient/polished/not-necessarily-technically-superior product has eaten the vast majority of the market in both cases.

Lower noise is not going to do much.

Most of the noise in a modern camera at 'high' iso is present in the light signal you are capturing, rather than the result of a noisy amplifier.

Light (the arrival of photons at a pixel) is approximately a poison process with the brightness being the arrival rate of photons.

At low brightness, short exposure time, the variance in the total photons received at a pixel starts becoming relevant and visible.

and yet noise has improved over the years same with the dynamic range, to the point where they can decrease photodiode size and still keep fairly good noise and then also release cameras with lower resolution with this technology to have very good low light capabilities like the A7S series. Look at the Canon EOS R3 just a massive jump in ISO quality and double the resolution of the A7SIII

Resolution has little effect on 'shot noise' (The noise I was talking about). That's because when viewed at the same size, the noise averages out to be the same visual noise.

I believe that 'low light capabilities' are going to stagnate soon-ish simply because shot noise starts dominating sensor noise. The only real solution to shot noise is just more exposure. But aperture is generally maxed, and it seems unlikely to me that image stabilization can go much further.