I’m going travelling in a week or two and decided to dig out my old Canon 350D dslr, from the early days of consumer digital cameras before the rise of the smartphone.
It’s definitely older than I remember, although maybe so am I! 8 mega pixel, with a 512Mb compact flash card.
On the other hand, I have a perfectly serviceable OnePlus 7T, obviously newer, not cutting edge any more but fine.
What do people think? Go retro or stick to the modern?
I respectfully disagree. As long as you have control over your exposure triangle, you can have far more quality control than any phone sensor.
As a thought experiment, your DSLR sensor is 1 pixel. In this situation, regardless of glass quality, exposure, etc the sensor is the limit in this situation.
This same concept can be applied to noise. A FF sensor (24mm x 36mm) is 36x larger than a phone sensor (4mm x 6mm). If the phone sensor has better than 36x noise characteristics (not reduction, as in the technology is better so less noise is produced), it will be better in most situations. Only bokeh would be different as that’s based on incident angles, but in all other areas the phone sensor would be better.
In practice, you may have other limits such as poor glass quality and different controls, however you can have DSLR lenses that are quite bad as well. And also DSLR sensors do modernize with technology. But have you seen the original digital camera sensors? They are sooo much worse.
Plus shooting in raw gives you a ton of flexibility. I’d happily take raw from a DSLR than from a phone to edit.