What is your smartphone camera of choice?

I imagine that most people choose a phone for other reasons and are then stuck with whatever camera it has!

I completely agree. It's nice having such capable devices in our pockets. I hope my post didn't come off as one is better than the other, that wasn't my intention.

Not at all Dave. I hope mine wasn’t either, because that wasn’t my intention.

Dan

Current phone: Sony Xperia 5 III

Perhaps, but I'm the opposite. I'm older than most trees and I'm deaf. I obviously don't use the phone for phone calls. I do use text messages but all phones do that. I also use apps like calendar, Keep for lists, and Contacts for, well, contacts. And Maps.

I've been taking photos for pleasure and charity work since 1955. A few years ago I got tired of toting camera and lens and accessories. I started shooting with a phone. Huawei and Pixel kicked it off. They did okay but they were boring. Then I discovered Sony Xperia. It was like using a camera. It was fun again.

I am wondering whether there is something(s) about the Sony that makes it fun again or just a phone with a decent camera making it fun again?

Periscope lenses (coined from a submarine) are “bent optics”. Sorry for the confusing term. Many android devices use periscopes. Currently the iPhone 14 pro max has a “regular” tele that is 77mm (in 35mm terminology) and it is paired with a 12mp sensor. The combo is “less than impressive” to my eye, especially when one compares it to the 48mp main camera.

Perhaps, Apple will do something like this in the 15 pro/ultra/suprema/Godzilla or whatever they call it:

13mm @ 12mp (current)
24mm @ 48mp (current)
48mm 2x crop of 24 @ 12mp (current)
100mm periscope @ 48mp
200mm periscope 2x crop of 100 @ 12mp

Something like that would give lots of usable “focal lengths” between 13 and 200 (with a bit of a gap between 50 and 100).

Anyway, I do think that bent optics hold a lot of potential and they will only get better over time.

You have 4 pockets. Get another phone.

I haven’t used any of those cameras so I am genuinely curious: What parts of the Sony experiences make it “fun again” for you vs. the other camera’s that you mentioned?

It has a user interface that is practical for manually setting the various parameters. The only thing missing is adjusting the f-stop. It's the antithesis of amazing AI in phone cameras. "Please Google Pixel, I'd rather do it myself."

iPhone 14 Pro Max

Pixel 6a. I've been very happy with it. It was the only camera I took on a recent vacation, although I was mainly using it to document things I saw rather than anything more artistic or ambitious. It has an ultrawide lens in addition to the usual phone lens, which was rather useful.

Google photo's editing software works nicely for some quick corrections, usually cropping (can correct keystoning), shadows/highlights and the occasional magic eraser. Computational photography really helps for low light pictures of static subjects.

Two Motorola phones, the Moto G30 which gives me 16mp raw files and the Moto G41 with 12mp raw files and OIS. Of course I use the Gcam apk to get the amazing HDR+ dynamic range in the Raw files. What I wish for is a phone with the main camera around 40mm equivalent instead of 24mm which seems to be the horrible standard for some weird reason - who needs to capture the whole room, or the hole freaking world in one shot? For me thats just idiotic.

My smartphone CAMERA of choice is still the aging Panasonic CM1 with a 20MP 1 inch sensor. I have yet to see anything that can beat it, short of a larger sensor.

I recently have been craving an updated smartphone sporting a 1 inch sensor. So I picked up a Xiaomi 12S Ultra. This camera has a 50MP (quad bayer?) 1 inch sensor. To be honest, I am not sure the new sensor beats the old sensor in my CM1. The jury is still out on that as I am still evaluating it.

The phone part, is head and shoulders better than the phone part in the CM1 though.

While the CM1 had a single focal length lens (something around 26mm eq, I think), the 12S Ultra has 3 cameras. The 1 inch sensored main camera (23mm eq), the 48MP 1/2" sensored UWA (13mm eq) and a 48MP 1/2" sensored periscope telephoto camera (120mm eq max). These are all impressive cameras for a smartphone.

And of course, there is also a "selfie" camera beneath the edge to edge display. It's 32MP (25mm eq).

The only fail, in my book, is that the 12S Ultra does not allow the use of a microSD card.

I’ve seen great results with it.

At the moment i got a s21 Ultra which certainly takes good photos and i like the 10x zoom. However before that i had a Sony Xperia 1 II which even though i was slightly disapointed of its image quality (at least in raw) i think i enjoyed the experience much more. So now im looking to get a new phone this summer, and i think I will go with the upcoming xperia 1 phone this year, especially if they will use their new 1inch sensor found in many chinesephones. If they still stick with the same sensors they have been using since my old 1 II i will maybe stick with Samsung and go S22 Ultra or Iphone 15 pro.

So in short the perfect camerasmarphone have a dedicated shutter button and an interface with easy to use custom settings, that make it feel more engaging and fun than just press a button and all is done imo.