People who (like me) would say they’re “real photographers” are often highly annoyed by people who take photos with their phones. For me, the problem isn’t disdain for the smartphone as a camera but the lack of consideration phone users show those nearby. It’s hard to even see around a bunch of smartphones held up and pointing in the direction of something, and harder yet to wade through a forest of selfie sticks in the same location.
Let’s get past that for this piece, and focus on the smartphone as a camera. First, it’s not anything like a substitute for even a fairly modest point and shoot, and certainly nothing like a DSLR. However, the differences may be small under some conditions, and that’s worth knowing. In addition, there are ways a smartphone can actually do a better job than a camera.
The big problem with phone cameras is inherent in the camera. You are dealing with a phone maybe a quarter-inch thick, and to fit a camera in that space is obviously going to require compromises. The CCD that records the image is small, and the lens is almost always fixed-focal-length, meaning there’s no optical zoom. The focal length is short, meaning that phone lenses are naturally wide-angle. I did some tests on several smartphones and they seemed to have something around a 25mm equivalent focal length, with the “equivalent” meaning equivalent to a lens on a 35mm full-frame camera. That’s certainly wide angle.
The small CCD also means that the image quality is typically lower than that of a DSLR, whose CCD is larger. Even discounting resolution (many smarphones offer 12 megapixels, which is more than many of my early DSLRs did), the problem is digital noise, which is greater for small CCDs and in particular greater in low light.
People who use smartphone cameras often zoom in to get around the wide-angle problem, but remember that your phone almost surely does not have optical zoom. That means you’ll be zooming by cropping, making your image resolution lower. If you do a 2x zoom, your image resolution about half that, and so forth. If you process pictures before using, never zoom in photo mode; it will take a worse picture than you could crop post-processing to achieve.
All this means that if you want wide-angle pictures, landscapes, whatever, you’re OK with a phone camera in decent light. You’ll get noisy results at a lower ISO than you would with a real camera, particularly a DSLR, but many new phones will do about as well as a point-and-shoot if you avoid zooming. Don’t try to take wildlife pictures with a phone unless the wildlife is big and acting pretty tame!
Movies are a whole different story. A phone camera in video mode shooting 1080 HD is using about a quarter of the CCD’s resolution, so you can zoom up to 4x and you won’t have a major problem, other perhaps than holding the image steady. The larger display on a smartphone also makes it a lot easier to see what you’re doing, and to access controls that would otherwise be unavailable.
That’s the big advantage of phones. A nice point-and-shoot or even a top-end DSLR has a back screen that’s perhaps three inches wide, and a smartphone can have four times the viewing area. You can pack all the main controls onto the screen, accessible by touching, and avoid having to diddle with camera dials and buttons during shooting. People who would never use something like manual focusing or white balance or exposure compensation on a camera can use the all on their phones (but most don’t).
How much of the photo/video experience you can control, and how easily you can control it, will depend on the camera app you use. Most new phones, and phones that still receive regular version updates, will update their camera app, but many apps aren’t designed for real photography as much as for selfies and playing around with images. You can get real camera software from the phone’s app store. My experience is with Android phones, and there’s a very nice open-source camera app for them–Open Camera.
Take some time with your camera app to see how to use whatever advanced features you really like, and also tune the user interface to suit your needs. Open Camera lets you put a zoom control on the screen so you can avoid the pinch-zoom process, which I find critical if you’re shooting video. The pinch method tends to shake the camera. Also set your image type and video frame rate; you’ll find that most cameras will shoot better video at 1080 HD 30 fps than at 60 fps, and many won’t shoot quality 4k even if they say they will.
If you plan to shoot a lot of pictures, or especially a lot of videos, you may have to do something to manage the space they take up. A phone that has a micro-SD slot can be used with very large cards to eliminate the storage problem. You can also use something like Google Photos to back up your images, and even to store images instead of keeping them on the phone (Google will recover the space when the photos or videos are in the cloud).
If you want to take adventure pictures/videos with a phone, I’d recommend you get a mounting adapter that lets you put the phone on a monopod or add a vertical grip to it, with a lanyard attached. That will reduce the risk you’ll drop the phone into the water, in front of an elephant, etc.
I use my phone for ad hoc wide-angle pictures, social shots of friends, and so forth, mostly when I can’t take multiple cameras because of weight limits (not uncommon in adventure travel). I like the convenience of having it, but I’d still prefer a DSLR if I have the latitude to bring it, even though (because I shoot wildlife and bird pictures) I’d have to bring TWO DSLRs to cover wide-angle to extreme telephoto. The phone saves me from the second one.