Biggest thing is they never really improved the mobile apps... and in some cases IMO they got worse.
Usability of the camera hardware and software ecosystem is another matter. I think the common wisdom is that most paying users don't want beginner-friendly, they want powerful and familiar. So everything emulates the paradigms of what came before. DSLRs try to provide an interface that would be familiar to someone used to a 50 year old SLR camera, and Lightroom tries to emulate a physical darkroom. Being somewhat hostile to the uninitiated might even be seen as a feature.
You can achieve maybe a quarter of the kinds of shots on a phone that an interchangeable-lens camera will let you make.
That's an extremely important quarter! For most people it covers everything they ever want a camera to do. But if you want to get into the other 75%, you're never going to be able to do it with the enormous constraints imposed by a phone camera's strict optical limits, arising from the tight physical constraints into which that camera has to fit.
Whereas a $1500 Nikon 15MP from 20 years ago is real crisp, and I can put a 300mm lens on it if I want to "zoom in".
Even my old nikon 1 v1 with its cropped sensor 12MP takes "better pictures" than the two 108MP phone cameras.
But there are uses for the pixel density and I enjoyed having 108MP for certain shots, otherwise not using that mode in general.
People make much of whatever Samsung it was a couple years back, that got caught copy-pasting a sharper image of Luna into that one shot everyone takes and then gets disappointed with the result because, unlike the real thing, our brain doesn't make the moon seem bigger in pictures. But they all do this and they have for years. I tried taking pictures of some Polistes exclamans wasps with my phone a couple years back, in good bright lighting with a decent CRI (my kitchen, they were houseguests). Now if you image search that species name, you'll see these wasps are quite colorful, with complex markings in shades ranging from bright yellow through orange, "ferruginous" rust-red, and black.
In the light I had in the kitchen, I could see all these colors clearly with my eyes, through the glass of the heated terrarium that was serving as the wasps' temporary enclosure. (They'd shown a distinct propensity for the HVAC registers, and while I find their company congenial, having a dozen fertile females exploring the ductwork might have been a bit much even for me...) But as far as I could get the cameras on this iPhone 13 mini to report, from as close as their shitty minimum working distance allows, these wasps were all solid yellow from the flat of their heart-shaped faces to the tip of their pointy butts. No matter what I did, even pulling a shot into Photoshop to sample pixels and experimentally oversaturate, I couldn't squeeze more than a hint of red out of anything without resorting to hue adjustments, i.e. there is no red there to find.
So all I can conclude is the frigging thing made up a wasp - oh, not in the computer vision, generative AI sense we would mean that now, or even in the Samsung sense that only works for the one subject anyway, but in the sense that even in the most favorable of real-world conditions, it's working from such a total approximation of the actual scene that, unless that scene corresponds closely enough to what the ISP's pipeline was "trained on" by the engineers who design phones' imaging subsystems, the poor hapless thing really can't help but screw it up.
This is why people who complain about discrete cameras' lack of brains are wrongheaded to do so. I see how they get there, but there are some aspects of physics that really can't be replaced by computation, including basically all the ones that matter, and the physical, optical singlemindedness of the discrete camera's sole design focus is what liberates it to excel in that realm. Just as with humans, all cramming a phone in there will do is give the poor thing anxiety.
I still have to manually focus (by pushing the screen where i want it to focus), but on newer phones the focus tries to "track" what you touched, which is... why would they change that? I tilt the phone down to interact with it, i know where in the frame i want it to focus, because before i tilted the phone down, i was looking at the frame! Rule of thirds, i can reframe the image to put focus exactly in one of the areas it ought be, zoom in or out, whatever. But no, apparently it has been decided i want the focus to wander around as it sees fit.
I just unplugged the honor 8 to take a picture and apparently the battery is kaput since the last time i used it. Sad day, indeed.
http://projectftm.com/#H-6GJlHgGFA8Yek86MrkVw "Neutral Density" unedited but cropped
Lightroom most likely has “obsolete paradigms” for the same reason Photoshop does: because professionals want to use what they know rather than what is fashionable. Reprogramming their muscle memory is not something people want to be doing. Anyway, I find Lightroom’s UI very nice to work with.
I still have the Loupedeck, on one of the shelves behind my desk. I think I might have used it twice last year.
What always stood out most for me compared to Canon was Nikon's larger viewfinders, letting you commit to actual photography rather than being stuck with a feeling of peeping through a keyhole, and placement of buttons on the camera body allowing for maintained control of the most necessary functions (shutter speed, aperture and even ISO) without having to change your grip or move the camera away from your face.
Canon bodies are designed by engineers, who all had to prove they could palm a cinder block in order to get hired.
Sony bodies are designed by the cinder block.
On the digital front I found Fuji X-Txx series to be like tiny Nikons in their usability with all common controls on dials.
(One reason I shoot Nikon is because I can still shoot his glass on modern bodies. Indeed, that's what my D5300 spends a lot of its time wearing these days.)
True revolutions in consumer imaging excepted, I doubt I'll feel more than an occasional gadget fan's urge to replace my D850 and D500 as my primary bodies. Oh, the Z series has features, I won't disagree, even if I'm deeply suspicious of EVFs and battery life. But the D850 is a slightly stately, super-versatile full-frame body, and the D500 is a light, 20fps APS-C, that share identical UIs, lens and peripheral lineups, and (given a fast card to write to) deep enough buffers to mostly not need thinking about.
For someone like me who cares very little about technical specs, and a great deal for the ability to hang a camera over their shoulder and walk out the door and never once lose a shot due to equipment failure, there really isn't much that could matter more. I may have 350 milliseconds to get a flight shot of a spooked heron, or be holding my breath and focusing near 1:1 macro with three flash heads twelve inches away from a busily foraging and politely opinionated hornet. In those moments, eye and hand and machine and mind and body all must work as one to get the shot, and having to think at all about how to use the camera essentially guarantees a miss.
Hence the five years of work I've put into not having to think about that. I suppose I could've done more than well enough with any system, sure. But my experiences with others have left me usually quite glad Nikon's is the system I invested in.
The 105mm f/2.8 VR II Micro-Nikkor is still better for the field, of course; that kind of work requires a lens which can talk to my body and flashes, and the stabilizer is actually useful. But for folks not chasing wasps around or the like - and willing to be a little old-fashioned about their working, in a way that will teach you about photography some of what a Piper or Cessna does about flying - there really is no better way to get anywhere near that kind of performance at a similar price point, and a well-maintained lens of such stately age is a joy to work with besides.
After all, most of the time she's watching me every bit as closely as I her, and I like to be able to show that. From the ways people look at and talk about that work, the effort has not been wholly wasted, but it is a more demanding task than I expect a median EVF, or if I'm honest really any even remotely affordable model, to handle. My eyes barely handle it, such that even in the D850's bright and generous viewfinder, the way I perceive this kind of focus is not as a clear sense of seeing those fine divisions between optical elements, but rather as minimizing a sort of unpleasant perceptual "static" or "interference," and it doesn't work at all even in my dominant eye through the lens of my glasses. (My cameras' eyepieces have diopter inserts adjusted to match my prescription.)
On reflection, maybe that's why the EVFs I've tried (Nikon Z5 and Z7 iirc, so previous generation) felt like they had a kind of weird shimmer I didn't like. I assume the Z8 does better, and sure, all the focus peaking and trick shot stuff in the viewfinder is nice. I'll even grant it feels like looking at the future. It's just that, so far at least, I find I seem to prefer looking through a camera.
But even then once youve metered a scene how often do you adjust iso on the fly? Hardly ever. Fixed iso, aperture priority, center dot focus and metering, off to the races.
Amusingly, their Instax control app is actually pretty good!
Anyone know of any fujifilm firmware jailbreaks fwiw?
As an anecdote, I have a Sony a7r and operating it via its mobile app is one of the worst user experiences I have had in a while.
Same goes to the surrounding ecosystem of software. E.g. Adobe's Lightroom is full of obsolete paradigms and weird usability choises.