gabriel (2 inches taller)

TG-7 pix: Default "Natural" image tuning preset with sharpness and contrast turned up 1 (one) notch. Auto white balance with no fine tuning. Frame average metering. I used optical zoom and some exposure compensation.

I think TG-7 optical zoom vs iPhone digital zoom is a fair comparison bc part of my point here is I don't care as much about sharpness as exposure and color - and digital zoom is the option the phone presents you with... AND the tg-7 gets softer when you zoom in anyway. So I think it's fair.

The iPhone is an incredible camera which feels like what everyone in the world is using, which is cool I guess, but I'm literally no longer excited about or interested in tools like this anymore - from both physical hardware design and software behavior perspectives

Phones are usually thin and flat because of a vestigial need to fit into small pockets that they're all too big for now anyway. Mine's small but you can't get that anymore. It might be waterproof but I'm more afraid of dropping it than ever before because it's slippery and mostly glass and I use it for everything in my life. All my friends are in there.

But above all of this... As a camera, the iPhone just refuses to take pictures that feel like how I see the world, because of the way it's trying to capture perfect detail and normalized, realistic color in all situations.

I hope this doesn't come off as pretentious - it's opinion and yours is just as valid

For me, photography as art form almost always has to be an exaggeration of reality which amplifies what I felt about seeing a scene. That's usually done with selective focus, intentional control of shadows and highlights to emphasize details that stood out to me, or by gently pushing color further away from perfect realism, in a way that emphasizes the way the light felt to me.

The phone takes pictures with lots of detail everywhere in the exposure so I can show anyone what I saw. But the world just doesn't feel like that to me. Our eyes and brains can see way more dynamic range than most cameras - and phones are getting close to literally looking as HDR as our vision, but that's not what want. That HDR look doesn't capture the way I focus on parts of a scene.

On top of that, I've said it before but the iPhone does something to the color balance which flattens it out in most situations but makes it crazy saturated and weird in some situations including sunsets which just doesn't feel right to me - and I can't adjust it except in post.

All this adds up to the iPhone usually doing it's best to prevent me from capturing how a scene felt.

It gets a fully detailed image in almost any situation - so I almost never like it for art and only want to use it to document things.

It's really easy to look at phone camera specs these days and see "48 megapixels" or more, or if you're starting to be a person who thinks about camera specs a lot, look up the sensor size and be like "ah yeah it's got a 1/1.7" type sensor" and think about how these numbers compare to things like mid 2000's prosumer compact cameras. The iPhone on paper has almost the literal same specs as the Nikon P340 - same sensor size, and at the wide end same max aperture. But there's so much more to it and I think a lot of people understand this already, but it's easy to overlook.

I used iPhone raws for something last month, and they were awful to work with. Without the phone's on-camera processing, the detail was just gone and there was distortion and bad color noise. A lot of the quality we're getting from phones is software, and that's really cool, but as outlined above, it's often not doing what I want. There's also a difference between a lens designed to be a few millimeters thick and a lens designed for a device primarily intended to take photos (even a weird horizontally folded one like the TG series has) - and that affects what you can do with pictures when the camera isn't doing what you want.

On the outside, there's also just something very different about handling a device that's intentionally thick and grippy - an object that's designed to be held like a camera. It's nice to have a tactile way to adjust exposure compensation one handed - etc. Phones just aren't there, and I don't think they're ever going to get there unless design trends change radically.

Did I mention I always feel like I'm going to drop this phone, and I'm scared of breaking the glass it has on both sides? It's hard to care about stuff that's still designed in ways that make me feel like this.

Ok really. This sounds like some boomer shit but I am still going to say it - You're a cyborg and it kinda sucks and most people probably haven't thought about it. 🐸🍲 I truly think that in a way, any technology you use every day becomes a part of you. Beyond "gadgets" - everything from the design of your clothes to the tools you always have on you.

Switching to a watch I didn't have to charge or worry about getting wet improved my life in a way that triggered thoughts very similar to what I'm getting from this camera.

That's a GR pic, but could it have been better if I hadn't been afraid about wading out a little further?

Have you thought about what life would be like if you didn't have to plug in regularly and carefully protect fragile objects you carry around in order to maintain your access to information and the ability to communicate with your friends? It might not be noticeable or matter to a lot of people, but for me, whenever I'm actually out doing something I can feel it subtly holding me back. Something's going to make me need to pause or go home early or not jump in that river or climb that tree. Not just phones, but my other cameras, my work laptop, my iPad. My old watch.
It's not a big deal, but can we be done with this?

What I'm saying is that I'm beginning to want every tool I let into my life to be just as durable as my body if not more, and only need to rest when I do - and I honestly don't think that's asking too much.