Why a phone is no replacement for a digital camera

When you don’t have your digital camera handy and you’re desperate to take a picture, your mobile phone is certainly better than nothing. But mobile phone cameras are an add-on feature. They are not the main purpose of the phone. As a result, they have limited capabilities.

Resolution
When you take digital pictures, high resolution is vital. Ideally, for maximum flexibility and quality, you want a resolution of ten megapixels or more. This will give you high quality, large size prints.

A mobile phone camera has a low resolution compared to a good quality digital camera. The photos you take with the phone are fine for a phone’s tiny screen. If you restrict their viewing to the screen of a phone, you needn’t worry.

But the moment you transfer your mobile phone pictures to a computer, you find resolution problems. Blow a mobile phone photo up to the size of your computer screen, and you often have a blurry image with significant loss of detail.

The only way to take clearly defined photos is with a digital camera.

Memory
The latest mobile phones have features that include cameras, music players and apps. All of these need digital memory. Any pictures you take with a mobile phone are therefore sharing this memory with music, audio and software.

A digital camera’s memory is for the exclusive use of images. In other words, you can store more pictures than on a mobile phone, especially if you carry a spare memory card.

Fixed Lens
A mobile phone camera has a small fixed lens. The lens in a digital camera is far more flexible. You can use it for optical zoom, for widescreen photos and for extreme close-ups on macro mode.

With some digital cameras you can also screw filters to the lens that improve the tone of photos or help to create special effects. On a digital SLR camera, you can also remove the lens completely and replace it with a more powerful zoom or a macro lens, depending on the subject of your photo.

A fixed lens mobile phone camera therefore restricts you to certain types of photo.

Features
A good quality digital camera has a range of features. You can adjust the tone of an image with the white balance; you can use the blur-free technology to offset any camera shake; you can switch to movie mode and accompany this with sound; you can use the built-in flash; and with some models you have a hot shoe that lets you use external flash units.

A good quality digital camera, even a compact model, can give you results that are sharp, bright and professional. Every one of the features is there to improve the standard of photos you can take.

A mobile phone camera is just for point-and-shoot pictures. This is okay as far as it goes. But the overall quality is such that you shouldn’t use a mobile phone camera to record events that really matter to you. If you do, you may be disappointed.

Jake Reacher doesn’t believe that mobile phones can replace digital cameras. The quality of a digital camera image is better than anything you can take with a phone.