A large percentage of those people have realised they can take really good photos with their phone now, good enough that they don't feel inadequate, and maybe they don't feel like carrying around heavy equipment either.

That market is gone and will never return.

Now one could argue about whether the tiny censors on smartphones in of itself is just another dimension of artistic expression.

But my personal aesthetic preference as a hobbyist photographer and art consumer is that unintentional censor noise is not good.

So I dug out the old DSLR and brought (lugged?) it with me on a recent vacation to Peru. I threw in the largest SD card it would accommodate (32GB), which gave me literally thousands of photos at the highest quality JPEG setting (don't really want to deal with post-processing RAW images). The only lens I brought was a 35mm 1.8 DX lens.

I have to say that the quality of my photos was much better than I had seen in quite some time. It is hands down better than my smartphone. Even though they are both ostensibly 12MP, the larger sensor and lens make a big difference. The two things I missed from my iPhone were super wide angle shots and low light. Since I had my iPhone with me, I could just pull that out if needed.

I briefly thought about buying a new DSLR or a mirrorless, but really my old one is good enough. I will probably just buy an 18-55 zoom or something for my next vacation.

And tons of people who want to have a youtube channel. Hell there are lots of people that use a SLR just for their zoom calls.

As a hobbyist photographer myself I can confirm that I spend serious amount of money on equipment that is pro-level. The last camera I got was the Nikon Z6 Mark II, which is an entry-level pro camera. Why? Because "The picture quality matters" and it feels good to have a really nice camera when you're standing around a bunch of other hobbyists who all have pro cameras.

For the most part the people who take photos with their phones were never really buying DSLRs. They were buying all the other digital cameras. When you go for a DSLR you're wanting to control everything, shutter speed, the aperture, etc. You want to be able to go wide-lens, tele-lens, you want to be able to choose between 2000/second and 100/second. You want to do time delay.

If you're even half interested in taking good photos you're looking to get a DSLR even if you don't understand everything. You can look at the photography sites for hobbyists such as youpic.com and 500px.com. These sites are full of people sharing their hobby photos and you'll find 1-2 out of hundreds using their mobile.

That's the crap webcam problem. You'll never use the mirror mechanism in a DSLR in that situation.

Nikon promotes using their DSLRs as webcams.[1] What you really want, of course, is the good optics, sensor, and electronics without the viewfinder, mirror, battery, and manual controls, and with good connectors and no overheating during continuous operation.

Neither the webcam makers nor the traditional camera makers have addressed this market. So who's doing it? Hikvision, the surveillance camera makers.[2] Their thing is making high-rez cameras that handle widely varied lighting conditions. So they offer some of those packaged as webcams.

[1] https://www.nikonusa.com/en/learn-and-explore/webcam-utility...

[2] https://www.hikvision.com/en/products/Turbo-HD-Products/Turb...

Although We’re probably saying the same thing, just differing on our definition of hobbyist.

Perhaps 20% of pictures I've shot have been on a DSLR, and 80% on phones. By sheer numbers, a really big share of the best shots are from a phone camera. And there's a lot of things that I took pictures of, that there's some rather obvious phone camera penalties from... but at least I have a picture while with a DSLR I would likely not.

It's freeing, too, to not have to choose between "do I lug the big camera today in difficult conditions or get no photos today?"

... I am looking forward to picking up a mirrorless to reduce the barrier a little bit of carrying "the big camera".

The phone pics have the benefit of some pretty good automatic processing, ease of use (the thing is already in my pocket), and for typical landscape or portrait stuff, they are just fine.

But there really is no comparison when it comes to "real" bokeh/shallow DOF stuff, not to mention the sheer flexibility offered by a full-fat lens, bigger sensor, and controls that don't have me poking around in touch screen menus. I could even swap to my 35mm f/1.8 if I wanted to shoot in lower light than my phone can do without digital tricks or longer exposure times.

If I were in the market today, perhaps I would go for a mirrorless camera, but as someone decidedly not professional at all WRT photography, I still enjoy having something flexible in addition to using my phone as a decent backup point-and-shoot camera.

That does not make any sense, it was already the case that you could make excellent pictures with compact cameras 15 years ago, without having a DLSR. If your hypothesis was right the DSLR market would have disappeared much earlier.

Your argument only holds up if you're taking high aperture landscape photos in broad daylight...

Now, a pretty excellent compact camera is in pretty much everyone's hands. So the question becomes-- is it worth another camera to be serious? Would I even carry it anywhere?

On the other hand they were revolutionary compared to film cameras, so it didn't really matter.

That customer base has pretty much disappeared and it has everything to do with smartphones. If I recall the statistic correctly, the DSLR market shrunk by 40% across the board in just a few years because of this.

Due to this, Nikon and others have re-positioned their market to high price/margin prosumer/pro gear mostly.