Or, why bother with a ‘proper’ camera - ok, that is being slightly troll-ish. ‘Proper’ cameras still have a place, and will do for the foreseeable future - specifically printing big (something I encourage everyone to do - seriously get your photos off the screen and on a wall) and action / movement in low light, also zoom, but I digress.
On Saturday evening I ventured out to a Candle / Peace festival thing here in Canberra, I’ve been a couple of times before, but not for a few years. I loaded up my K-3 + Sigma 18-35 f/1.8, my Olympus E-M5 Mark II + 17 and 25, and my day-old Google Pixel. I hadn’t had a chance to take too many photos with the Pixel, I had read that it had a good camera, and people were excited by the algorithms and maths that went into constructing the photos, but it’s still a phone, and the sensor is still tiny, and it’s still a phone.
I started taking a few photos with my K-3. Struggling to lock focus in the dim conditions, it took me a few minutes to dial in the settings. Any kid of automatic mode wanted to over expose the scene, trying to make everything 18% grey when there is a lot of black around. I walked around for a while, slowly getting a few shots that were sharp, and exposed correctly. I then switched to my E-M5, this seemed to manage focus a lot better. It was much quicker and more precise, not sure why. I’ve seen it focus hunt for days when my DSLR gets it first time, and I’ve seen the opposite - wind direction is my guess. I put the E-M5 on a tripod and managed to get a couple of shots before a family of toddlers sat in front of me. I then started taking a few shots with my phone. Out of curiosity if nothing else, what would the phone and algorithms make of this scene. On the phone screen they looked good. They looked sharp, and I couldn’t see a lot of noise. I assume when I looked at them on my computer they’d be blotchy and heavily compressed, but they did look quite good.
When I got home I had checked the photos on my computer. They were good. They were surprisingly good. Better than I was expecting. I pixel peeped, and they were holding up really well. I grab my phone, opened the Flickr app and uploaded a bunch. Otherwise untouched, uncorrected, straight to Flickr. The next day I finished going through my photos from my “proper” cameras in Lightroom. There were some that were better, some that were worse. The resolution of the K-3 made cropping a lot easier, and the longer focal lengths were good. But for point and shoot with a general purpose 26(ish)mm equivalent field of view (I think) the Pixel photos were amazing, and workflow from taking photo to upload being seconds it really shortens the time it takes to finish making a good photo.