It shouldn’t be surprising. Real depth of field is physically impossible with a small lens. And cameras have teeny tiny lenses and sensors. It’s impressive how good the photos are given the hardware, but the hardware is very very bad in comparison to a dedicated camera with replaceable lenses.
(There's an old camera influencer named Ken Rockwell who constantly pushes this; he has every possible opinion at once and is trolling most of the time, but he's right about this.)
The smallness of a phone means it can take pictures larger cameras can't because you have it with you when the picture is happening. And that's what really matters.
> They just look wrong in comparison to a real camera with real lenses and real lights.
You can use real lights with a phone camera all you want!
Hi! I'm right here! I care about image quality!
Image quality helps me feel proud of my photos. If I don't feel proud of my photos, its way less fun to wander around taking them - and I just don't bother. Image quality actively makes or breaks some of the joy of the medium for me.
I went to a nature photography exhibit / competition today. The exhibition was full of incredible photos of nature taken from all over the world. But some of the images were lower quality. There weren't enough pixels for the printer to do a good job, or you could see digital noise in them. I wanted to like them just as much, but I didn't. The photos weren't as good.
> The smallness of a phone means [...] you have it with you when the picture is happening. And that's what really matters.
What a weird statement. "What really matters" is completely contextual. What matters when you're entering a photography competition is completely different from what matters at your friends' birthday party. Or at a wedding, or on a photo walk, or a live show.
Use the right camera for the job. I personally hate the look of the photos my phone takes. My phone is almost never the right camera for me.
Much of that can be fixed with shooting raw and editing in Lightroom, which is the same process you'd use for a bigger camera.
As for printing, it matters how it's being viewed. You're looking at it up close, which is the physical equivalent of pixel peeping and relatively rare. For something like a highway billboard, a low resolution photo is actually fine because you're so far away from it.
I'd suggest trying crappier traditional cameras to learn flexibility. Last time I took a photography class we used disposable B&W cameras and pinhole cameras and developed the film ourselves.
Btw, one thing I've always found interesting is that people seem to think "DSLRs" are the higher quality competitors to phone cameras, but they aren't particularly high quality as far as these things go. For film cameras, rangefinders, medium- and large-format cameras have better "image quality" than SLRs. Those Apple product images that look like 3D renders are real photos shot with large-format digital backs from Phase One.
(This is good to know if you have a mirrorless camera, because you can adapt rangefinder lenses to them and they're very cheap for the quality you get.)
The photos were printed and displayed in a gallery. I didn't need to pull out a magnifying glass to notice which images were a bit blurry. It was obvious at a glance. The images in question were worse. There was one beautiful B&W image of a Meerkat, and you could see each strand of hair on his belly. Another image was a lion's face - and the hairs were all a little blurry. I think the photographer cropped in on the image past the usable resolution of their camera. I'm sure it looked fine on a phone, but it didn't make a great print. Shooting raw and editing in lightroom can't replace missing pixels.
Quality doesn't matter until it does. And then it really matters!
The thing I really hate about the photos I get from my phone is the over processing that the software applies to the images. Some part of my brain intuitively understands focal planes and how lights interact with the colour of objects. My phone produces images which just don't look right. They're in an uncanny valley where they don't quite make sense to my brain. Looking at them stresses me out a little.
Maybe its worth trying my phone with RAW images, so I can turn all that crap off.
> people seem to think "DSLRs" are the higher quality competitors to phone cameras, but they aren't particularly high quality as far as these things go.
It really depends on the camera and the photographer, and what kind of quality you're going for. DSLRs can make use of larger lenses. As a result, you get natural depth-of-field as a consequence of the optics. If you're using an old digital camera, there's a good chance the sensor isn't as modern as the sensor in your phone. So you might get worse low-light performance and worse autofocus. But the depth of field is impossible to recreate optically using the tiny lenses on a phone. Phones can simulate DoF using computational tricks, but it never looks quite right. A person's face will be in focus and some of their hair out of focus. Its weird.
My dad took some photos of me when I was a kid some ~30 years ago on his old SLR film camera. They're stunning photos. Those photos are much more beautiful than the photos he takes now on his iphone.
And yeah - I'd love to put some vintage glass on my mirrorless camera. Aah its an expensive hobby!
There's just no way to replace the massive 35mm sensor of a larger DSLR / mirrorless camera. The amount of light gathered can only be simulated by capturing many frames. True depth of field can only be emulated by imperfectly blurring estimated background area via software, leading to goofy blurred hairs. Even the reported megapixels of a smartphone contain a quarter or less the equivalent DSLR resolution detail (a 24MP smartphone photo is roughly equivalent to the detail of a 6MP DSLR photo).