the quality on a phone is good enough that there's really no point to most compact cameras these days
Not sure why the downvotes because that's the real story. As is (far too) often quoted - the best camera for the job is the one you have with you. Before phone cameras I used to carry a disposable film camera around with me and the images were fine. Apart from the lack of decent flash, a typical phone camera produces images at least as good as and usually better than the images from those cameras.
A half-decent compact camera can still outperform many phone cameras in my opinion, but it's also true to say that few people would carry one with them everywhere while these days people do carry their phone everywhere.
Some very clever software goes into phone cameras these days to make up for their hardware deficiencies and given other constraints (a modern phone has to be "thin") it's always going to be easier to add pixels than to improve lenses, fit a larger sensor or a proper optical zoom. Those pixels can then be combined in creative ways to emulate better lenses or other things.
It's an interesting argument about larger pixels because while a typical SLR has physically larger pixel wells which can collect "more light", don't forget that these wells are overlayed with a colour filter which means that colour resolution is lower than luminance. If you bin four tiny phone pixels you effectively create one larger - genuinely RGBG - pixel. Ignoring the part played by the lens, you could argue that a 20Mpixel SLR has a (real) luminance resolution of 20Mpixels, but a colour resolution of only 5Mpixels while a 64Mpixel phone sensor which does 4:1 binning has a real luminance resolution of 16Mpixels, but a colour resolution of 16Mpixels too.
I'm definitely not of the persuasion that I should ditch my SLR, nor even my compact cameras, but over the last few years I have begun to be impressed with the images produced by phone cameras, though admittedly not from those which are in the price range I would consider for my next phone.
M.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
