If you are curious about whether can smartphone camera beat a digital camera. The simple answer is No, Big No. But to understand all the things you have to first understand some basic concepts about cameras.
The main reason smartphone cameras can not defeat digital cameras is Sensor Size. The sensor is like the heart of the camera. Simple rule the bigger the sensor size the sharper the image will be. And after the sensor then comes the secondary parts which are lenses. World’s most expensive camera is Hasselblad camera. The camera cost 35K $ and only the sensor cost 26k $. Sensors cost like diamonds.
Let’s compare phone camera’s sensor and digital camera’s sensor. Recent iPhone 13 Camera sensor size is 6.17×4.55 MM and a mid range DSLR Camera sensor size is 24×15.60. It is like 10 times of iPhone camera sensor size. This DSLR camera sensor size is called a crop sensor camera. There is also a full frame version of the DSLR camera that is for professionals. The full Frame Sensor size is 35x24MM. Which is a bigger crop sensor camera. It can take sharper images than crop sensor cameras. With the half amount of money of iPhone 13 you can get a mid range crop sensor DSLR camera. With the full cost of the iPhone 13 amount, you can get a full-frame camera. Which can give you 20x sharper photos than your iPhone. Another thing you need also is a good lens for cameras. Canon 50mm Prime lens is the best on budget. You can get this lens in around $100.
It is totally ok if you buy smartphones like iPhones for your regular use. But don’t buy phones if you want to use it for camera only. Nowadays smartphone advertisers will try to trick you into saying about Megapixel. 60Megapixel,100Megapixel believe me this is just a number. In a Small sensor, if you put thousands of megapixels, it won’t give you sharper images. Sharper images need a bigger sensor. So don’t let the advertiser trick you by saying their magical word. So make sure you do some research before you go and buy smartphones or cameras. There is a huge difference in lens level if you compare a smartphone camera with a digital camera. The smartphone camera will give around 5-6x crop factor. That’s why smartphones use only 5MM lenses for their camera. So it becomes 5×6 = 30MM lens. It is actually good for portrait. Where you will get various lens options in digital cameras. 50MM Prime, 85MM Prime, and so many zoom lenses. Or you can get its kit lens where you will get the various focal lengths to shoot your photo. 18-55MM, 18-135MM are the best kit lenses to use.
Now a days mirrorless cameras are more popular than DSLR cameras. Because mirrorless cameras are lightweight and it is compact in design. You can get the same quality photo in a mirrorless camera that you could get with a DSLR camera. This is the reason everyone uses mirrorless cameras for all types of professional work. They are very easy to carry from one place to another. There is also a higher resolution full frame cameras available in mirrorless. Some popular mirrorless camera companies are Sony, Fujifilm, Canon, etc. Mirroreless cameras has the same sensor size as dslr camera. That means it can click the same sharp photo.
There are a few recent phone camera that uses some different mechanism to get a sharp photo. Like iPhone 13 uses its lense to sharp the image a little. But for smart phone cameras lense size are almost same in all the cameras. But iPhone and other popular camera phones use different kinds of the lens to click a perfect photo. They also have powerful processors to make that photo sharper. There is some software-level work to make photos more and more iconic. They also have 3-4 cameras for different purpose. One can do a macro shot another is for zoom and the other is for a portrait. Smartphone camera is good for faster clicking. Some smartphone also comes with a super zoom camera. You can literally take the moon’s picture from your smartphone. It is also good for birding(bird photography). Nowadays smartphone has a 4K UHD video recording option. You can get higher resolution video just from your phone. Many YouTubers and influencer use their phone to shoot vlogs. You can get a perfect video and photo from you smart phone. Later just need to tweak some things to make that video more gorgeous. Many many popular youtuber does this. If you properly shot a video from your smartphone and do some work on post-production. No one can get whether it is from DSLR or smartphone camera. Smartphone also has an inbuilt image stabilizer so you can get a clear shot without a tripod. That stabilizer is not perfect but good enough to take a stable photo or video. You can also use so many inbuilt filters on your photos and videos. This will help you to spend less time on post production. You can directly upload it to a social platform using your smartphone. This will really save a lot of time. This is why smartphone cameras are also good for simple video and photo shooting.
Professional Level Camera:
Then there comes the professional level cameras. A famous professional camera is “Red”. Many popular YouTubers and content creator use this camera. This has a really big sensor and it can capture upto 8K resolution. This camera is also used for shoting certain movies. There is also an IMAX camera. Usually, every director chose an Imax camera for their film. There are few Imax camera available in the whole world. Imax camera comes with daily rent. Imax camera has a different resolution. You can see extra height length in the imax version video.
This is why these certain cameras are actually important. A smartphone can not replace a digital camera. The smartphone is only for simple photo and video shooting. You can use some simple post production software to make your video more iconic within few minutes. This can save a lot of your time. Smartphones are very easy to carry and we use them in our daily life. You can take photos and videos within seconds.
In conclusion, the digital camera is only for professional work. But smartphone cameras are getting better day by day. So are digital cameras. With the upgrades, big companies are introducing new technologies on both mobile and digital cameras to make photo and video graphy more user-friendly. It is making things easier like never before. Sometimes a digital camera’s photo and a high-end smartphone camera’s photo look similar. Sometimes smartphone camera can get more detailed pictures than a digital camera because smartphone can do some software stuff to make photos more gorgeous.