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Have you tried the current generation of iPhones? Same issues? Just wondering.

We're three generations past the iPhone 6 and its camera:

iPhone 6
iPhone 6S
iPhone 7
iPhone 8/X


I would hope iPhone cameras would be at least a little better now...

Yeah, I'm on a 7 Plus now. Everything looks like a paint by numbers watercolor. It's not bad when the images are small, but they're totally unsuitable for printing or even having as a desktop background on my Mac.
 
I'm, as photographer, easly see how bad that rating is - Pixel 2 is absolutely a lot better compared to the X. Specially front-facing camera. Huge gap between these two devices.

right... maybe if you're a blind photographer.

And yeah, I own some equipment too, lots of it, doesn't make my opinion better or worse than yours.

There is no such big gap.
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Horrible image quality, looks like watercolor painting. Have you ever tried a real camera?

We are talking about smart phones here aren't we?
And unless you have a 1 pound camera in your pocket at all time, this is a pointless comment.

Also, quality of shot goes well beyond how sharp the image is.
Most actual pro photographer will agree on that one.
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Yeah, I'm on a 7 Plus now. Everything looks like a paint by numbers watercolor. It's not bad when the images are small, but they're totally unsuitable for printing or even having as a desktop background on my Mac.

You can shoot raw with third party app (if you're just annoyed by the sharpening and how they do jpg).
In there is good lighting, you can print a smart phone image (but not beyond 8/10 ).
 
I have a 40D sitting on a shelf somewhere, a year newer than your 400D, and with the newer DIGIC III processor in it but the same 10 megapixels. The only place it it excels over modern phones (all makes) is low light noise. Clarity and color on phones have caught up, and with the built in wide aperture many of them produce some really great shots with decent DOF right out of the pocket, without the portrait mode tricks. Regarding color, the 400D and 40D don’t shoot DCI P3 color space either, so I am not sure where you are getting higher color detail on old cameras that don’t have the same overall color space.

While low light isn’t amazing on modern smartphones, it isn’t far off the pace of 10yo SLR cameras.

The most up-to-date Apple camera I have (until X arrives) is in the current iPad Pro and you can absolutely forget taking a shot of lights or the moon at night with it while on the EOS pictures are much more “functional”, not just with long shutter durations. On photos from any of our dslr’s, the colours look much more natural, might not be actual colour range but iPhone/iPad photos look kinda messy to me both in colours and clarity, where there are many pixels but noise makes shapes and colours much less clear.

To be fair though, the both are totally different use cases and I like the decent quality of the iPhone which is sufficient for most situations, I also don’t want to always carry my DSLR with me so these mobile cams are very helpful. But the pace with which mobile phone cameras developed has slowed down a lot in the past years and probably always will lag a decade behind pro cameras just due to the compromised nature of their small sensors and because photos aren’t their primary function.

In the photos from the article, I would have expected much more of the background to be discernible and the sky and mountains being much clearer from today’s top smartphone cameras while the tree photo shows the issues of these cameras with nature shots, where many small details and similar colours just look kinda “messy”.
 
Thats saying 99.99% people don't need a DSLR. Nothing to do with X v DSLR

I'll go further and say that 99.9% of DSLR owners don't really need a DSLR either. I respect good photography and recognize that the best tools in capable hands will give you superior results. Understandably though, the democratization of photography thanks to the iPhone has left DSLR owners (most of them being amateurs, though plenty of legitimate professionals as well) feeling threatened. Their expensive equipment is no longer a massive differentiator. I don't think the criticism of this piece comes from a place of reasoned comparison, but from an existential fear of irrelevancy, thus the lashing out at mentioning iPhones and DSLRs in the same sentence. As another commenter mentioned, why would a pro photographer complain about having a 4k capable pocket camera available to them?
 
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