Smartphones vs real cameras

Here's an approximately four month late response to a post by Alex Schroeder, which I stumbled upon while catching up on what's been happening on the small internet while I've been offline. Alex commented on an article which "argues that the camera industry is done for, and that photography is moving to smartphones".

Alex's post "The Smartphone Camera"

In grand internet tradition, I haven't read the article in question (boo, hiss - fair enough). I just wanted to say that, from my perspective, every single discussion of smartphone cameras vs "real cameras" that I've ever read focused on entirely the wrong things. The conversation is always dominated by talk of sensors, lenses, zoom, image quality, etc. I grant that these things matter to some extent, for sure. But IMHO the differences between smartphones and real cameras along these dimensions are totally insubstantial compared to those on another dimension which I also feel is very important: the machine-human interface. In a word, ergonomics.

Real cameras, at least the better ones, are typically designed by people who have actually acknowledged and faced up to a fundamental ground truth: that the things are going to be used by real, three-dimensional human beings, with wrists and hands and fingers and thumbs. As a consequence, they are things you can hold comfortably and securely in one hand without thinking about it. The good ones can be *operated* one-handed by touch alone, because they have actual physical buttons and knobs you can feel and whose placement has been dictated by at least some rudimentary consideration of human anatomy. And actually sticking an honest to God optical viewfinder up to your eye and looking out the lens offers a kind of immersion in the photo-taking experience which nothing else can get close to. But these days that's not even a smartphone vs real camera issue, so let's leave that last point be.

In contrast, it's been decades since any phone designer gave a second, third or even fourth thought to ergonomics, truly. Today's smartphone is optimised to look sexy on billboards, and to fit into pockets - including really small, really tight pockets on clothes which were themselves optimised to look sexy on billboards instead of being comfortable or practical. The result is a thin, slippery, smudgy, poorly balanced usability disaster. This is why there's a thriving aftermarket for ugly bits of collapsible, self-adhesive plastic you stick on the back of the things so they can be operated by real world humans under real world conditions. It's why so many people without those things stuck on there have shattered screens - because smartphones are literally *hard to hold*. A little part of my soul dies every time I try to hold a smartphone such that the following things are all simultaneously true:

The camera lens is pointed at the thing I want to photograph

The screen is pointed at my face, at a shallow enough angle that it's legible

One of my digits is in a position to be able to hit the virtual button to take the shot

None of my other digits are in front of the lens

I have a firm enough grip on the whole thing that I'm not about to drop it and the shot is not likely to be blurred

The camera is braced enough in the right places that the act of tapping the virtual button to take the shot isn't likely to move the lens around too much

I'm not saying it can't be done. Of course it can. But it's not easy, or fast, or natural, or graceful, or elegant. It sparks no joy. It feels like a sad parody of what using technology is supposed to be like, at least to me. Maybe I'm unusually bad at it, who knows. I can't and won't deny that the resulting image quality is entirely acceptable, that it has been for years, and that it will only get better. Of course it is/has/will. I suspect it is indeed true that the consumer market for "real cameras" will continue to shrink year after year. I just wish we weren't kidding ourselves that something important isn't being lost in the process. I certainly don't think professional photographers will ever make this shift, because professionals use their equipment all day, every day, and in those circumstances the level of usability offered by a smartphone is just completely out of the question. Even if the two were perfectly matched in every single other regard, any sane pro would happily pay more for something actually designed to be used first and foremost as a camera.