14 DAY TRIAL // If you happen to like taking photos while on the move and don’t want to carry a digital camera with you all the time, your best bet is a good camera phone.
There’s a myriad of smartphones that promise to offer exceptional camera capabilities that would result in state-of-the-art pictures. Oh well, we would be content if any of these high-end smartphones offered at least on par quality with some of the lesser compact cameras available on the market these days.
Alas, none of the phones promising top-notch photo quality can deliver on this promise, so if you want high-quality pictures while going on holidays, don’t forget to take your digital camera with you.
Just like tablets manufacturers claim their products can easily replace laptops, the truth is this will never happen. I agree that tablets become more and more advanced as they get more features, but so does the laptop.
The same goes for the cameras, which will never be replaceable by smartphones, at least not in the near future. Perhaps it will take people some time to realize that smartphones are too limited when it comes to camera capabilities.
Smartphones will never be equipped with good enough sensors or lenses, because they have to be small and thin, and a decent module camera is too thick to fit into a smartphone.
And if that's not enough for you, we have the facts to prove it.
The test
In order to compare the photo capabilities of some of the high-end smartphones available on the market and see how they fair against a compact camera, we’ve taken the Samsung Galaxy S5, iPhone 5, Nokia Lumia 930 and BlackBerry Z30 and put them against a compact digital camera.
Obviously, there are other smartphones on the market that promise to deliver much better camera features than the phones mentioned earlier, but I’m certain the differences are pretty much negligible.
For this test we chose Sony RX100 M3, a compact camera that features a 20.2-megapixel Exmor CMOS sensor, Carl Zeiss lens with 3.6x zoom and can also shoot full HD (1080p) video at 60fps.
As many of you probably know by now, Samsung Galaxy S5 has a 16-megapixel rear-facing camera with a 1/2.6'' sensor, LED flash, image stabilization and 4K video recording capabilities.
The iPhone 5, on the other hand, packs an 8-megapixel man camera with a 1/3.2'’ sensor, LED flash, no image stabilization and full HD (1080p) video recording.
Nokia Lumia 930 seems to be the best equipped for the purpose of this comparison thanks to its 20-megapixel camera with PureView technology, 1/2.5'' sensor size, optical stabilization image, Carl Zeiss optics, dual-LED flash and full HD video recording.
The results
We’ve set the smartphones to maximum resolution and shot a few pictures under the same conditions. Suffice to say, none of the three flagship smartphones matched Sony digital camera's capabilities, but what’s worse is that they weren’t even close.
Now you may say that at least two of these smartphones have a lower number of megapixels compared to the Sony RX100 compact camera, but we all know that this is not what matters for a camera phone. It’s a module, the lens and the processing software that count when you want to take good pictures.
We’ve added some sample photos in the gallery, so you can check them out and see for yourself how deep the gap between the two technologies is.
And although I do not want to spoil it for you, I can’t refrain from pointing out that Samsung Galaxy S5’s camera is absolutely terrible. Awkward contrast, amazing amount of noise, they’re all present in the picture taken with the Galaxy S5.
Apple’s iPhone 5 had slightly better results, but as you can see, the photo is a bit darker than all the other. There’s also a bit of noise, but the contrast is quite alright.
The best of the three smartphones at taking pictures seems to be Microsoft’s Nokia Lumia 930, mostly because of the PureView technology and the fact that you can take two pictures at once, one that’s processed and saved as JPG and another RAW image that you can process afterwards with specialized software on a computer.
As you can see, the picture taken with Sony RX100 looks stunning in comparison with the other three taken with these high-end smartphones.
Conclusion
Just like smartphones, digital cameras, even compact ones like the Sony RX100 or Samsung Galaxy NX, become smarter and better at what they do.
Manufacturers add a lot of nifty features all the time, like NFC, touchscreens and Wi-Fi, so their products would be competitive. This is why smartphones will never replace the good old digital camera.
