Tag Archives: iPhone 6 Plus

Do You Need a Digital Camera Any More?

Apple and other mobile phone companies have been pushing how good the cameras in their phones have become for a while now, and certainly because most people have their phone with them a lot more often than they have a camera, people are taking many more pictures on mobile phones. However have the cameras on phones now got so good that you really don’t need a separate camera?

Certainly they’re not as good as a digital SLR, but could they replace a digital compact camera?

Until now, despite having had a mobile phone capable of taking pictures if I’ve been going on holiday I’ve always taken a separate camera. Over the years the pictures from the phones have been getting steadily better, but they were still noticeably better from the camera than the phone. However that has changed with my most recent upgrade to an iPhone 6 Plus where I have been regularly impressed by the quality of the pictures even in situations where previous phone cameras have struggled. So this year, as an experiment when we went on holiday I left my digital camera, currently a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ10, at home. You can take a look at the album of pictures we took on Flickr by clicking on the image below. The album contains pictures from two phones, my iPhone 6 Plus, and also pictures from the iPhone 6 used by my wife.

Devon Holiday 2015

Certainly they are a pretty good set of pictures, including some that my regular camera just wouldn’t be able to produce such as the panoramic shots. However there are some shots that the Panasonic would have made a better job of – anything that is zoomed for example as the Panasonic has an optical zoom whereas the phones are zooming digitally. A good example is this picture of a train arriving that used the digital zoom on the iPhone 6.

There are also some practical issues, a big one being battery life. A digital camera can quite happily run on a single set of batteries for significantly longer than a multi-purpose device like a phone, indeed on the holiday there was one occasion where the iPhone 6 couldn’t be used because the battery was getting too low. Getting an emergency charge battery like this Anker unit can help if you get caught short on battery, but it would still be better not to have to worry. One big practical issue is that it is one less device to have to carry – more and more the smartphone is becoming a single multi-purpose device replacing still camera, video camera, sat-nav, handheld games console, and even the holiday paperback.

Ultimately though as phone cameras continue to improve, the market for the digital compact camera is going to continue to diminish, especially as the other advantages of photography on a phone such as being able to easily edit and share those pictures straight from the device are taken into account. With services such as Google Photos, Flickr or Apple iCloud Photo Library allowing you to synchronise and share edits, the days of taking pictures on a separate camera and importing them to a computer via USB cable or a card reader will increasingly be in the past