Your Smartphone Takes Bad Photos

Every year, new smartphones come out. The processors get a little bit faster, new features are added, and the cameras improve. Every time someone upgrades to a new phone every 2-3 years, the device in their pocket gets a fair bit better, faster, and more capable. When it comes to photography, smartphone cameras have come a long way from the days of Blackberry and even the original iPhone. The sensors are much larger, the megapixel count has gone up, new lenses and focal lengths have been added, and there are new software tricks to make our day-to-day photography look better than ever. This 1st-gen iPhone camera retrospective from CNET is very telling. That 2-megapixel camera did not age well.

However, 17 years after the original iPhone was announced, smartphone photography is still no match for a dedicated camera with a full-frame sensor and some high quality optics.

Let me take a step back. A few weeks ago, my wife printed out a bunch of photos from our wedding taken by our photographer and stuck them in frames which I mounted on the wall. For whatever reason, this got me thinking.