this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2026
95 points (94.4% liked)
Technology
87938 readers
2829 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I feel like things have been trending this way for a while now. DSLR is a lot clunkier than modern options like mirrorless. I own a decent one, but at this point, I'll usually just shoot with my phone for convenience. Trying to hike or whatever with a big camera and lenses swinging around is a hassle.
An OM-3 or a Lumix GM5 are both absolutely portable, even more so than typical mirrorless bodies. Unfortunately, the OM-3 is a flagship camera, and the GM5 has turned into a collectors item, so both are expensive.
What kind of phone? Every phone I've tried, pixel, iPhone, moto... Sucks the moment you look close and zoom is a lie.
I have a moto and the photos indeed do suck compared to my DSLR. But I'm a hobbyist, not a professional photographer. If I were taking pictures at an important event or something, yeah, I'd probably pack my DSLR for that. When it comes to day to day pictures, just capturing memories, it's not worth it for me anymore.
I would love to get a mirrorless eventually though, seems like the best of both worlds.
I doubt know what Pixel does for compression but they certainly ruin their photos the second they’re saved. It looks great in the viewer, then even raws look smeary.
Zoom is better than what it used to be and not outright a lie. I still have a dual camera phone (pixel 7, standard camera and superwide), and the picture is reasonable at 2.5x. It's a 50mp sensor that, by default, only takes ~16mp pictures by only using certain sensor cells. Zooming uses a tighter group of those cells while still making a 16mp picture. But yes, zoomed pictures absolutely lose quality as the cropping starts hitting the limits of a tiny piece of do-all glass. My phone goes to 8x. Meanwhile, the flagship phones with an additional mild-zoom cameras bump up the baseline further. Still, only equivalent to like 40-50mm on a DSLR full frame sensor. Not enough for me, not for the price, so I still lug my DSLR around occasionally, as my eye tends to prefer framing with my phone above 3x - or about 50-85mm on a crop sensor.
Using less of the sensor to take a picture and calling it zoom is a lie. That’s just cropping the picture to be smaller not zooming.
It is a clear step above cropping a 16mp sensor to 2mp for zoom
Point and shoot and mirrorless camera are trending again. People realized that it is not about the technical quality of the image, but the experience of actually taking a picture. Cameras don't have algorithmically tailored infinite content scrolling, and that alone is a plus for a lot of people.
At the same time, dedicated cameras still blow phones out of the water the moment you try to see the pictures in anything larger than a 6" screen. People are also starting to explore the fact that taking 5 thousand pictures that you are never going to see, share or enjoy again is dumb. Instead creating dedicated spaces and ocassions where fewer, higher quality, more sentimental value pictures can be appreciated. Phone's are woefully inadequate for that purpose, the shadows are always a mess, values are compressed -even when they are shooting fake RAW- and now a lot of fine detail is AI generated. Which looks awful when shown even on the most modest TV screen.
I'll still shoot birds with my DSLR, but the phone has replaced 90% of my vacation photography