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Regardless of how 'good' a phone camera sensor might be on a spec list, it's looking through a massively aspherical plastic lens that's about 5mm thick and admits a magnitude less light than your Sony camera for any given scene.

I think the best comment on the subject was here in HN years ago; although they're both called cameras, they're really different media. One is like charcoal sketching and the other is like oil painting.

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How so? They may be a different media for a professional photographer, but for a layman (like me) they have exactly the same purpose: I press the button, and I get a picture of my friends / that bird / landscape. And while I can easily tell charcoal sketching vs oil painting apart, I (and most of my friends) cannot tell real camera picture apart from high quality cell phone.

So no, I would not say it's a different media for the modern-ish phones (like pixel 8, iphones, etc...). If your impressions are based on cheap smartphones, they are out of date - there is a whole new world out there.

On a more advanced level, I am awed how a camera with ultra-high-FPS + many GFLOPs of CPU + advanced post-processing algorithms can make tiny lens work like regular ones, while still being thin enough to fit in the pocket.

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