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Didn’t phones get basic versions of the latest AF tech first? Eye recognition etc?
The churn of users replacing phones yearly and the shear market size would explain why.There’s some pretty trick stuff with multiple lenses and sensors for virtual DoF, augmented light-sources etc that doesn’t care how big your aperture or sensor is. I don’t know if ‘phones’ or ‘cameras’ will handle that best.
miro_o
That would be the story that mobile device manufacturers would love for you to believe.
But the fundamental physics of "get as much light to the film/sensor as possible in as clean a state as possible" is still there.
Mobile phones are never going to be equivalent. I'm obviously very pro-tech and software, but even I freely admit that all the software filling the in the gaps because you don't have enough light hitting a large enough sensor surface is always going to fall short of the times you do have enough light hitting a large enough sensor.
The illusion works really well, but yet it takes time. If you add time into what a camera can do then you degrade other aspects, i.e. if you want your camera to do video then you really can only do that on a mobile with a lot of light around you because if software is involved in infilling the image and the software isn't real-time you're going to lag or use tricks like recording at a lower res and upscaling.
Photography always comes down to light, and small lens and small sensors are always going to be second to larger lens and sensors.
The only true advantage phones have over cameras is "the best camera is the one you have on you". That's it. When I don't have my camera (a lot of the time) then I'm pretty damn glad that my mobile phone has all these tricks to squeeze more out of less light. But if I have my camera and take a photo on both that and the phone there is no comparison at all, more light hitting the sensor always wins. Physics is a bitch like that. A phone can't even do most of what a camera does, the tricks it does are to compensate for so little light coming in - e.g. I know of no mobile phone camera that has hundreds of autofocus points and can flawlessly track subjects.
Phones are great, the cameras are miraculous given the size and power constraints they have, their innovation is stupendous in the software to make it all work - but cameras will always win because of the physics.
This stuff is obvious, no?