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>The reason someone carries a DSLR today is because of the optics, the speed and the control mechanisms. Having shutter speed, aperture, white balance etc. at your fingertips when shooting. Having the ability to switch from a 105mm portrait lens to a 20mm fisheye.

I can see that in 5 years smartphone speed, coupled with advanced phase detection AF, will make smartphone as fast as today's pro DSLR bodies (the likes of the D5, Canon 1D line etc..)

The need to quickly adjust settings(f/stop, shutter, etc..) can be greatly diminished by having even more advanced software. Like a bokeh/portrait mode, where the lens is kept wide open and the phone maintains all other settings, include fake bokeh via depth map.

Different lens focal lengths is a big differentiator. However, if the sensor has sufficiently high resolution, the software can crop the sensor up an extend to largely simulate telephoto. Granted, compression won't be achieved, but it's largely there...

5 years is a long time.

> if the sensor has sufficiently high resolution, the software can crop the sensor up an extend to largely simulate telephoto

The software will in this case be inventing an image, not capturing one. Don't get me wrong - I'm delighted with the improvement in quality that pocket cameras, embodied in smartphones, have achieved in a mere decade. But physics is still physics, and a 6x5mm sensor can only capture so much light.

but traditional physical limitations of an image sensor's light gathering ability is always in context of the sensitivity of the sensor. If the sensor is made even more sensitive, there is more than enough light to create images.

More noise, too, which scales as 1/(pixel size * sensitivity) - that is, decreasing pixel size and increasing sensitivity both raise the noise floor.

This can be filtered to some extent - indeed modern phone cameras already do so quite heavily, to overcome the limitations of their already small pixel size and already high sensitivity. But doing so costs the same detail you'd need to try to invent a "simulated telephoto" image, which would give your fake telephoto process even less to work with than otherwise - guessing you have a neural net in mind here, and while I'm not about to argue that a sufficiently well-trained net won't produce some kind of result given an input of sufficient similarity to its training set, I see no reason to expect that result to bear any particularly photographic similarity to the original input.

I mean, don't get me wrong - what you seem to be suggesting isn't all that dissimilar from how we currently understand the human brain's own optical system to work. But I don't think it is especially likely that many such brains will happily accept another neural network's best-effort guesses as the output of a process that we've all learned to expect will give us representations as precise as is within the capabilities of the devices we use to make them.

6x5mm of your eyes retina, coupled with our brain does a pretty good job, so there is no reason we couldn't achieve similar results.

I love using my old film cameras, and as an amateur, I actually only use an iPhone and film cameras. I don't really see a point using a bulky and short lived dslr to produce nor quick nor great pictures.

As a professional, I guess the issues are different though.

I'm anything but a professional at photography. But the thing about the way our brains interpret visual input is that it's lossy as hell. I don't need my camera to be the same.

The main near- to midterm issue for Canon/Nikon (and, to a lesser degree, the various mirrorless interchangeable lens makers like Fujifilm) IMO is that a fair number of people buy DSLRs who don't really need them. They buy a low to midrange model with a kit lens, set the camera to Auto, and never take the lens off. And only post the pics to Facebook.

Increasingly, there's no reason for that type of user to buy a DSLR. A good phone will handle 90% of their uses for a lot less (incremental) money and effort.

But I agree that there's still a huge gap between people really using their DSLRs as DSLRs and smartphones. And, as for cameraphone accessories, the fact that you can stick awkward add-ons onto a phone to make it a better camera, doesn't mean that you should or that it's something most people want to do.

>The reason someone carries a DSLR today is because of the optics..

LOL, I was not sure of which usage of optics was intended here, had to read the whole sentence.

It was unintentional, but I think both usages apply. If I hired a professional photographer for something and they show up with an iPhone I'm going to laugh them to the door and look for someone else.

Which is a perfectly reasonable thing for you to do. A talented professional may be able to produce relatively good results with equipment that would generally be considered sub-standard. And, under the right conditions, the results might even be excellent for most uses.

But, if I'm paying them to do a job, I expect them to show up with gear that's more or less the professional standard for what they've been hired to do.

The only things DSLRs will always have over smartphone cameras is physical sensor size and glass (optics). External lighting control is possible on smart phones but definitely a fringe option at this point, but that's more a function of market size than physics, unlike optics and sensor size.

Everything else is processing and software. Processing on smartphones is progressing WAY more quickly than DSLR. Takes Canon a couple years for each Digic processor generation. New smartphone image processor generation each phone cycle.

I’d really like to agree with you, but you’ve already been proven wrong. For instance, off-camera flash existed for the iPhone back in 2014 ( http://9to5mac.com/2014/09/06/review-nova-wireless-flash-for... ). That’s just a random m review I searched on.

And maybe not a fisheye, but 360 degree camera attachments already exist.

My gut is many other things either are or will be wrong soon.

The Light Camera technology of integrating multiple small lenses and sensors into a single small flat device could significantly erode the DSLR optics advantage. It will never be as good, but perhaps good enough for most customers.

https://light.co/technology

> Those are things you can never get on an iPhone or Samsung.

Why couldn't you have adjustable white balance, rapid autofocus, high response time, high bit depth, external flash, etc on a smartphone camera? These seem like things which should be possible even with today's technology.

>adjustable white balance

You probably eventually will.

>rapid autofocus

Probably physical limitations. DSLRs have lots of space and dedicated hardware for making this fast.

>high bit depth

No clue

>external flash

sure

I think once the smartphone's internal capabilities are exceeded, a "System" (as in put together from multiple parts) DSLR or Mirrorless has more advantages:

- if you need more parts, eg. flash, you go from having one thing in your pocket to carrying a bag anyway

- dedicated UI and buttons for adjustments while shooting without having to look away from your subject or having to change your grip

- much larger sensors means more light to work with during shooting and post-processing - dedicated glass that you can't quite yet replicate with light-field tech

The smartphone can do many of the things a dedicated camera can, it's just not as good on almost all fronts, and much worse in some aspects. You can under more and more conditions get images that rival DSLRs, but not ALL condititions: If you can control time, light, and subject all at once, a dedicated camera can be matched. If you can't control of only one, grab a dedicated camera.

The tactile UI is one major gripe against smartphone photography for pros and enthusiasts alike, which is why a phone to some extent needs to be smart/automatic, and while today's image sensors straight beat the pants off any predecessing image sensors, physics still poses hard limits on noise and light capture.

Today's image sensors are very close to be able to count individual photons, and making the sensor larger means being able to capture more of them at a time. Tricks are being worked on to extend dynamic range and lower noise (like double exposure HDR), so image quality still increases, but the larger image sensors profit from those developments just as much as the small phone ones. The days of small image sensors being good enough to beat a human eye are still far off.

TL;DR: dedicated tactile UI, physical interfaces, physics, can't quite be beat by all the high-tech we can pack in a smartphone package.