Choosing A Lens Chart: Fill & Download for Free

Ok… hold the door! I have not really had anything bad to say about smartphone vs. cheap compact digital cameras aside from overall value proposition, comparing a $100 camera to a $1,000 phone or so.Since I’ve picked on Sony before, today’s victim will be the Canon PowerShot Elph 190IS, which can be yours for about $150. This has a 10:1 optical zoom lens and a 1/2.3″ 20 megapixel CCD (yeah, the cheap cameras still use CCDs for some reason).The Main CameraSo compare this to the Huawei P30 Pro or even the P20 Pro, and certainly, the Huawei has some real advantages. Let’s start with the main camera. Both Huaweis have a 1/1.72″ 40 megapixel camera with a special filter array that allows it to configure as a 10 megapixel camera as needed. That’s going to have a small negative effect on color errors at 40 megapixel, but hey, 40 megapixel. That’s the 35mm equivalent of a fixed 27mm lens, and on the P30, it’s an f/1.6 lens. The Canon starts out at the equivalent of 24mm and f/3.0.So right away, the Canon has a slightly wider angle view, but the Huawai has a pretty significant light advantage —- and its ultra-wide option, too, at reduced quality. That’s about 50% more sensor area and a bit less than 2EV of aperture advantage (maybe 3.8x as much light). And that even before we look at the effects of their new RYYB color matrix, which is curious. So yeah, I’d expect that the Huawei P30 Pro outperforms the average cheap P&S camera, at least at the wide-angle settings.But wait — there’s more! This isn’t new with the P30 Pro or even the P20 Pro. Smartphones have been seriously outperforming cheap compact digitals on wide-angle shots for some time. The first thing is the lens: even in the world of cheap lenses, the smartphone’s moderately wide, fixed focal length (prime) lens will likely outperform the wide end of the optical zoom in a cheap camera, in terms of general sharpness. A zoom lens is an inherent compromise, and while there are very, very good zooms that rival prime lenses, they are not on cheap cameras.Next, since we’re dealing with very tiny pixels, we have to mention the ugly hidden thing: diffraction. When light passes through an aperture, it bends. The more narrow that aperture, the more bending. That limits the maximum possible sharpness, regardless of lens design, to a circle or disc, dubbed the Airy Disc after George Airy, the first guy to do all the math.For that Canon you have tiny 1.4 µm pixels. So you would need an f/2.0 lens or better to avoid diffraction blurring… curiously, Sony has shipped phones with 20 megapixel sensors, but never with a lens narrower than f/2.0. So the effective resolution of the Canon at f/3.0 is about 12–14 megapixels. You don’t notice in everyday shooting, but take a picture with lots of detail, or get really nerdy and shoot a resolution chart, and you’ll see it.So, how about the Huawei? With the larger sensor, despite only about 1 µm pixels, you actually can see the full 40 megapixel resolution with an f/1.8 or faster lens (the P20 Pro had an f/1.8, the P30 Pro seems to have an f/1.6 lens). So we’re good here. The wide angle shot on the P30 Pro will be much better than the wide angle shot on the Canon.Both of these have such small sensors, I’m not going to worry about color depth differences, as I might comparing either to a 1″ or ILC camera. There might be a difference, but that would be an implementation detail, not a consequence of the camera vs. phone thing.Wait, What’s That RYYB Thingy?As all my readers of course know, the photodiodes in a camera sensor don’t see in color… they are actually required to have a linear response across the visible spectrum, or you’ll get into weird noise situations (see: Foveon). So ages ago, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and cameras used film, a Kodak scientist, Bryce Bayer, thought up a cool way to turn a black and white sensor into a color sensor, the pattern we now call a Bayer filter:As everyone knows, each human eye senses color via approximately 6 million “cone” sensors, each of which is sensitive primarily to red, green, or blue light. Our video, computer, and phone displays also usually construct images out of red, green, and blue light. So a Bayer sensor records either the R, G, or B per pixel. But you want RGB pixels when you’re done, right? So for a green pixel, you interpolate between the blue and red neighbors, etc. Modern cameras probably do a bit more sophisticated interpolation, but that’s the basic idea.However, in the early days of digital cameras there was an alternative: the CMYG filter. I had one of these in my Canon Pro90 IS. The problem with an RGB filter, of course, is that a red filter, for example, filters out most of the blue and green light. So your photodiode is only getting about 1/3 of the light that it hits. Going to the subtractive primary filters, a magenta filter blocks only green, a yellow filter only blue, and a cyan filter only red. So you’re getting 2/3 of the light. The greens are there anyway because our eyes are most senstive to green (both red and green cones are green-sensitive, the red just less so). And of course, the math is harder, because we ultimately want an RGB output.Neither Huawei phone has a conventional Bayer filter anyway, but a relatively new idea called a Quad-Bayer pattern. This still delivers RGGB clusters for interpolation at 40 megapixels, but allows quads of pixels to be grouped together to deliver a lower noise 10 megapixel image. The P30 Pro adds one more tweak: they seem to have tossed out all the green for yellow filters, but kept the blue and red. Recall that yellow blocks only blue, so each yellow pixel will record both green and red. The match gets more complex, since the interpolation algorithm will have to subtract red to get green, but it does trade some green sensitvity for some red, and given that we’re least sensitive to blue light (only about 600,000 cones per eye for that), this looks like maybe the way to go. It’ll be interesting to see if it suffers on greens.Those Other CamerasOk, so I can start right off with the P30 Pro’s wide camera, which is an f/2.2 lens on a 1/2.7″, 20 megapixel sensor. That’s the equivalent of a 17mm lens on a full-frame camera, so it would be considered ultrawide. That’s going to be a bit diffraction limted, so expect a real world 16–18 megapixel performance. No one’s going to notice.You won’t find a lens that wide on a cheap or even pricey point and shoot camera. The widest non-fisheye I own for my mirrorless system is 14mm-equivalent, the wide setting on a wide-angle zoom lens (The Olympus M.Zuiko 7–14mm f/2.8 PRO, which is 14–28mm in full-frame equivalence).(wide angle shot taken with a not-all-that-wide-angle lens)LG popularized an ultrawide angle lens phones awhile back, but it’s never been my thing. You can usually shoot multiple shots if you need a wider angle, but by the time you’re there, you don’t necessarily want that wideness going in both directions.The other big news here, though, is their “folded” 5x lens/camera system. At this point, I’d like to clobber half of the phone photography press over their collective heads with a 10x mockup of this lens system, because they keep saying “zoom”. This is 5x prime lens/sensor with a folded light path. The length of the lens is in the plane of the phone, so they didn’t need to make the camera 12–15mm thick or whatever. This approach was used in 2002 by Minolta for the Dimage X, and resurrected a few years ago by a startup called Light for their Beholder-inspired L16, a camera made using sixteen smaller camera phone sensors, eleven of which have folded light paths.In theory, this should allow them to use a larger sensor for that big telephoto. It didn’t quite work out that way, though. The 3x camera on the P20 Pro was an 8 megapixel, 1/4.1″ camera. This one’s now a 1/4″ sensor at 8 megapixels. I guess that’s progress. The f/3.4 lens, though, is kind of a bummer. That means your 8 megapixel sensor is going to perform more like a 3–4 megapixel sensor at best.It’s no field-day for the Canon here, either. At 10x, the lens is down to f/6.9. True, that’s about twice the magnification of the Huawei. We’re seeing a similar loss of sharpness. So depending on where you hit f/6.9, it’s quite possible the Canon will produce a sharper image at 5x. They’re both pretty awful on light at that point, too, between the even smaller sensor and the narrow apertures.Smooth Sailing?But the Canon still has a comeback play: smooth zooming. As you zoom the actual optical zoom lens from wide-angle to telephoto, the aperture gradually drops, the images gradually gets a bit fuzzier, but you don’t get any weird jumps.It’s a bit more complicated with the Huawei. It’s got a software zoom function. From you start with the ultra-wide camera and move to a fusion of both ultra-wide and standard camera. Since they’re shot together, I’ll bet it looks pretty good. At the normal camera setting, 27mm equivalent, it’s just the normal camera.As you start to zoom more, it’s a digital zoom. That’s still 10 megapixels at 2x, but at 3x it’s only 4.4 megapixels. So Huawei employs a trick similar to that of Google’s Pixel 3 “portrait” mode, where they take multiple shots and use image processing to boost resolution. That works reasonably well on still scenes, but if there’s any motion, you can get some really funky and odd looking results. Based on the image samples I’ve seen, they are not as clever as Google in dealing with motion. Or maybe its just the effect of going to a 3x zoom. Either way, optical would be better.After 3x, they kick in the 5x camera and blend that with the digitally zoomed main camera, but at 5x it’s just the telephoto camera. All of this seems to be baked into the standard zoom function in the camera, which is probably good for beginners, but also there to ensure that reviewers like DxO will actually use those functions. DxO doesn’t test via special modes, so many of the cooler functions done in Google’s Pixel, for example, don’t get scored.Or maybe they kick in the 5x camera. That one’s got a minimum focusing distance of 1.7m. So if you’re too close, you get a pretty nasty 5x digital zoom instead.In short, zooming on the Canon is what you’d expect. Zooming on the Huawei is kind of a patchwork. I should mention that, when the main camera is involved, focusing will be faster on the Huawei, thanks to its on-sensor hyrid focus. That’s lost on the other cameras.VideoThe Huawei wins, hands down. Cheaper P&S models are limited to 720p video. They basically just check the box. The Huawei in 4K is shooting at 8x the resolution.Where Is My Mind?As for intelligence, the Canon gets the duncecap. Like most modern P&S cameras, it’s got basic options for controlling JPEG, and it’s got an “AI” exposure mode, which is probably some kind of expert system that helps choose the best exposure based on a library of meter patterns. It’s got basic face detection as a feature in autofocus. It’s designed to be used on automatic — there’s no full manual mode, just programmed and “AI” automatic modes. The latter pretty much picks everything for you.Since the Huawei can use Android apps, it’s technically possible to use it as manual as you’d like, even emulating a professional camera’s interface in some of the better apps. That should mean raw shooting, too. However, it’s unclear how much of Huawei’s special sauce is available — like image fusing and other computational functions — in generic applications. Some of these typically only function full in the manufacturer’s application.While you can get a bit of background blurring in the Canon, there’s no “fake bokeh” mode. The Huawei P30 Pro has it, and it’s pretty good. This is one of the first phones to include a fourth camera, a “time of flight” camera, that fires out laser pulses and accurately measures the returned distance. So between that and its multiple cameras, the computational “shallow aperture” it does is very good. In the DxO test, it outperformed Apple and Samsung.You’ll probably also find the P30 Pro produces more consistently good-looking photos. I don’t know Huawei’s technology all that well in software, but most software companies have been delivering code that “finishes” a photo to look more pleasing, much as a professional or enthusiast would tweak their raw image in Photoshop or Lightroom. Modern phones are designed to take as much as possible out of the hands of users, for photography, as they get “smarter” about it. Low end cameras are too low cost to incorporate these things, and honestly, not the place many companies have been investing, simply because everyone already has a phone.Camera Upgrades?Of course, one might argue that it’s unfair to compare a $150 camera to a $1,100–or-so camera, even if that camera is actually a pocket computer that some people mysteriously still call “phone”. And that’s before you factor in $500-$1000+ a year for network charges. So if you’re really spending as much as $3,000 for two years worth of a good camera phone, you might just look at slightly better P&S cameras.Since I have one, I’ll point to the Olympus TG5. This is a 12 megapixel camera, 1/2.3″ sensor, with only a 4x optical lens, but it’s a good enough lens that even at full zoom, it’s still pretty sharp. It also shoots 4K video, and it’s significantly faster to use than a phone. But the big deal with this one: it’s rugged. You can drop it, take it down to 15m or so underwater, etc. It’s got perhaps the best macro mode in any compact camera — Olympus calls it “microscope mode”, and as a microscope manufacturer, they ought to know. They also back it up with optional LED ring light or ring flash. This one’s built like a tank, and runs around $500.I’ll give the Huawei a bit of an edge on bright light sharpness and low light performance on the normal lens. But departing from that, the Olympus will probably perform better on most things. And after ten years of trying, you probably still won’t break it. I owned one of the older Olympus TG series before this, and I wanted an upgrade, but couldn’t really justify it with mine still good. I eventually gave it to my daughter and cleared way for the upgrade.Once you start to get closer to the P30 Pro’s price range, you can afford a 1″ sensor camera, like this Sony RX100 Mark VI, which will pretty much blow it away. And while this one runs around $1200, Sony keeps their older models on the market for years, at reduced prices. You can get a version with a shorter and faster zoom lens. Panasonic and Canon make lower cost versions of 1″ sensor cameras.The 1″ sensor is 2.7x the area of the P30’s main sensor, so it’s collecting that much more light. It’s a 20 megapixel sensor, too, so while the P30 will have more pixel resolution, the RX100 is going to have considerably better color depth/dynamic range.Also, consider the lens. The lens is roughly 24–200mm in full frame numbers, so an 8.3x zoom. At f/2.8, it’s certainly slower than the P30 at when fully wide (though other versions of the RX100 offer an f/1.8 lens with a 3x zoom). And they key thing here is that, at full magnification, f/4.5 isn’t a small enough aperture for diffraction limiting. So you’re getting an honest 20 megapixels at every focal length. As a result, 1″ cameras also have variable aperture settings.There’s no software bokeh or anything, but the lenses are long enough to deliver honest optical background blurring for portraits. And again, you’re not dropping in quality in order to get that portrait shot. The latest RX100s have fast hybrid autofocus and really fast burst shooting, too.If you want to spend closer to that real $2000-$3000 cost of the P30 Pro plus network over two years, another 1″ camera option is the Sony RX10 Mark IV. This is probably the best and most expensive bridge camera in existence right now, at $1700. Hey, I warned you… and I’m not just reading spec sheets, I own one of these.This has the same sensor as newer RX100s, but the processor from the high-end Sony A9. It can shoot bursts of raw images at 24fps, and buffer about 180 in its stacked sensor. It’s got really good hybrid autofocus.(shot at full zoom at the Firefly Music Festival last June)But most folks are buying it for the lens. That’s an 8.8–220mm Carl Zeiss lens, equivalent to 24–600mm in full frame angle-of-view. It varies only from f/2.4-f/4.0 across that 25:1 range, and everything is sharp. And the 4K video is also excellent… you can use an external mic, including a custom model that slips into the enhanced hot shoe and hooks up directly to the camera.I’m not suggesting that everyone looking at a high-end smartphone is buying it as a camera alone, of course. I use a smartphone, pretty much everyone does. But do consider the real cost of the camera if you’re spending way too much just to get the camera in the phone. Yeah, they are getting better, but so is every other camera. The limited size of a phone has pushed manufacturers into weird solutions, like multiple cheap sensors rather than one really good one, and way more reliance on software. But lots of good does come out of that software, and the things that are generally useful will propagate to cameras, just as the best camera ideas have moved over time to phones.Clearly, Huawei is the one to beat — it’s a shame you can’t easily get these in the USA. I was impressed with the P20 Pro and the fact that finally someone made a phone with a larger sensor that solved the problems Nokia had in their larger-sensor phones (bad low light performance, too fat to be a mainstream smartphone). This P30 Pro just doubles down on that… maybe. Huawei spend a whole year with the P20 Pro at the top of the DxO ratings pile. I suspect a little of that might be that they roll all their special sauce into the standard app mode, rather than bundling them in different modes that the reviewer may not try. But in fairness, users may not, either. But I’d like to see more photos, full sized, and see how the RYYB sensor actually does on color. Anyway, Huawei has the top two DxO mobile slots right now — second place being a tie between the P20 Pro, the Mate 20 Pro, and the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus.For most users, it’s not even about catching up. It’s more along the lines of, I’m going to buy a phone anyway. I’ll always have it with me. Is it good enough as a camera for my needs that I have no need for another camera? That has been true for an increasing number of people since about 2011, when the manufacturers started taking phone cameras more seriously.Read MorePixel Size, Aperture and Airy DisksHuawei P30 Pro camera review - DxOMarkCanon PowerShot Elph 190 IS

Smartphones started becoming “good enough cameras for most people” around 2011. That, of course, meaning “maybe as good as a cheap camera…. and I needed a phone anyway.” And DSLRs have never been the camera for everyone.DSLRs and high-end mirrorless cameras are for professionals and photographic enthusiasts. Most regular consumers are “snapshooters”, not terribly interested in the art of photography these days. And the idea of such folks using any kind of camera at all for anything is relatively new, barely 100 years old.Prior to the 1900s, “most people” were not into photography. A photograph was a thing you sat for, not a thing you did yourself. Hobby photography gradually emerged as an individual hobby around the 1900s. A consumer could buy a camera, shoot photos, and pay someone else to process the shots…. affordable, for occasional use and to well off hobbyists.This was the first “camera for everyone”, assuming relatively small values of “everyone.” The Kodak Brownie was a popular choice for most people for the next 60 years. This took what today we call medium format roll film. The early Brownie was made of cardboard, wood, or sometimes aluminum covered in leatherette; eventually Kodak switched to Bakelite and then plastic. These had no focus, no shutter adjustments — the original “point and shoot” camera. A Brownie would cost you about $1.00 in 1900, equivalent to about $25-$30 in 2018 money. Film and processing was about $2.00, however, which certainly did limit the consumer appeal.There were over a hundred variations of the Brownie over the years. The first Brownie sold about 150,000 copies. The model 2, introduced in 1901, sold for 30 years. This was a very popular camera, the default for consumers.If you wanted something that was a step-up over a Brownie in the 1940s or 1950s, you might you probably had something like the Argus C3. This was a 35mm rangefinder camera, and in fact, it’s largely the reason for 35mm film becoming popular into the 1960s. This is a completely manual camera; you wanted a light meter, you could clip one into the accessory shoe.Some version of the Argus C3 was available from 1939 to 1966. They sold about 2 million of them over this time. Yeah, Apple sells many more iPhones in any given week, but that was a huge number of cameras in those days.When I was a little kid, this was the sort of camera that was “good enough for most people.” This is a Kodak Instamatic camera, using a cartridge system developed by Kodak and introduced in 1963. Each cartridge contained paper-backed 24mm roll film good for either 12 or 24 shots. This camera shot a 1/90th second exposure normally, dropping to 1/40th second with flash. The single-element lens was 43mm f/11, and the image was a 26mm x 26mm square. This an updated “point and shoot” camera — you might not get a great shot, but there was nothing to focus, no settings, no adjustments. Kodak alone made 50 million Instamatic cameras by 1970.Sure, my Dad had a Konica 35mm SLR system, but he was an avid photographer. They didn’t really make consumer SLRs yet, but there were those clearly intended for professionals, and those made for enthusiasts and other less demanding work.In the 1970s, this was the sort of camera that was good enough for most people. This is a Kodak 110 Instamatic camera, which uses a cartridge made with 16mm film. So it was actually a step down from the 126. However, many of these cameras had slightly better lenses and primitive automatic exposure systems, so the resulting images were something of an improvement over the typical 126 camera. Kodak sold 25 million of these in the first three years of production.Right on schedule, Kodak change it up again in the early 1980s with another proprietary film format, the Kodak Disc camera system. The Disc always had 15 shots. The film cartridges all suffered from film flatness… unlike a 35mm, which had a pressure plate to keep the film flat, the 126 and 110 were at the mercy of the cartridge. By going flat, Kodak could use much thicker film with the discs, so they held the focal plane flatter than previous consumer formats. Like the 110s, these had limited automatic controls, pretty much all fixed focus lenses.The mid-1970s also saw the birth of the true consumer SLR, epitiomized by the Canon AE-1. This was a 35mm SLR, but it had auto exposure, easy film loading, lots of plastic making for a cheaper camera. Canon sold this series for about ten years and shipped perhap 6 million units. Certainly there was no hard line between consumer and enthusiast SLRs over the years, but the AE-1 firmly established the consumer SLR. Big numbers for an SLR, but tiny compared to consumer cameras.But the 1980s also saw the rise of a better camera for everyone, the 35mm compact point and shoot. With more sophisticated exposure metering, clever autoloading with motorized film advance, 35mm was on a comeback among consumers.Kodak made another attempt at proprietary film with the Advanced Photo System (APS), used in compact P&S models like this Canon Elph (IXUS in Europe). APS was 24mm film with a magnetic data stripe, so the camera could record some metadata on the film, including your choice of cropping options: APS-C (classic 3:2), APS-H (high-definition 16:9), or APS-P (panoramic 3:1). The film cartridge was optimized for automatic use: you’d load one in, it unspooled in the camera, then loaded back in as you shot. APS has a hard time convincing any serious photographers to give up their 35mm, but it was popular for P&S cameras.But Digital was nipping at the heels of APS and 35mm… sometimes even in the same basic form. This Digial IXUS (Elph in the USA) was basically the same shape and size as its APS predecessors.You can see here that it took about four years for consumer digital camera sales to obliterate film camera sales. And as I suggested, consumer photography was growing over the years. It seems to have exploded, though, in the 21rst century. What was that all about?Well, mostly, it was the fact that early digital cameras were terrible. I had got one, knowing what I was getting into, a PowerShot 350 from Canon. This digital camera shot 640x480 JPEGs. They were fine for the internet at the time, but not even good enough to replace your 110 film 3x5 prints. So people, consumers and professionals, bought digital cameras. And bough them again, and again. Of course, you can see that wasn’t going to last forever… around 2011, sales started dropping off… because digital P&S cameras became perfect. Right?Well… not exactly. Smartphones started taking off in the early 2000s, but they didn’t get really good at photography until around 2011. And you can see that it didn’t take long before the digital P&S — the camera the industry calls “Compact Digital” — largely succombed to the smartphone.And there’s one surprising detail about the rise of smartphones: within some limits, smartphones have started taking better pictures than the lower end compact digital cameras. Remember the shrinking film size in Kodak film formats.. that was a big factor in lower image quality. All lower end digital P&S cameras and smartphones have tiny sensors, which have the same problem versus higher-end compact cameras, DSLRs, and MILCs.But smartphones have punched above their weight class recently, by being forced into a different evolution. The need for 4–5mm of lens focal length in a device that’s supposed to be 7–8mm thick (consumers have rejected fat smartphones) means a phone camera has a fixed focal length, or prime lens. Making just a tiny prime lens, smartphone makers have improved the speed of the lens, going from f/3.0 to f/2.2 to f/1.8 and even f/1.5 on some of the latest models. So they produce sharper images and work in lower light that low-end P&S models, which usually have an f/3.0 or slower lens in order to fit their 8x or 10x+ zoom into a cost and size profile mandated by their design.So sure, no zoom. But most consumer cameras throughout history did not have a zoom, that only started being a regular thing in the 1980s and 1990s, assisted, in fact, by smaller film sizes like APS and then consumer digital.The other thing is that smartphone camera modules are necessarily tiny, but also pretty cheap. Most are probably $15-$25 each, in the volumes phone companies buy. And the phones retail at $800-$1000 sometimes. So there’s room for more than one… like the three camera system used in the new Huawei P20 Pro (currently the best-rated smartphone camera on the market).This really does nothing to advanced camera sales: no one’s choosing a P20 Pro over a Canon or Nikon DSLR. And at $1,000 (and not normally imported to the USA), even this isn’t the phone camera for everyone. But it could replace a cheap P&S camera with a 5:1 zoom. Which is probably why cheap P&S cameras are getting 10x, 15x, 25x+ zooms these days. Not all terribly good zoom, but it depends on your needs.The other thing is that you buy your smartphone for its full use, and get the phone essentially “for free”. Not really, since you may be paying twice as much for a premium phone with a top-ten DxO-rated camera, versus a basic smartphone. But also consider the cost: you have your $1,000 phone, your $50-$100 per month service, etc. So that’s $1,600-$2,200 in the first year, $4,400-$6,800 over four years, assuming one upgrade. Umm… you could get a dandy DSLR rig, including a bunch of lenses that’ll last you your whole life, for that kind of cash. And with that, the hardware to shoot dramatically better images.If you look at the details in that chart, DSLRs and especialy Mirrorless cameras haven’t dropped so much. The have dropped some, but it’s actually one of things that’s starting to fluctuate year over year, rather than just shrink. Why? It was that whole growing pains era of digital photography that sold so many cameras. Consumers and pros alike understood the advantages of digital, but the cameras they bought were wrought with compromise as well. And then, after awhile, not so much. And into modern times, digital cameras largely outperform film, at least from medium format on down. So I have three Micro Four-thirds camera bodies, one from 2013, one from 2015 and one from 2016. They’ve actually replaced my full frame DSLR from 2013, and I’m in no hurry to upgrade. My image quality, shooting speed, etc. are not problems. It’s because of this that we can expect the DSLR/Mirrorless market to drop back close to where it was before the digital era, and before the era of Kodak getting you to replace your consumer camera every 5–10 years.The greatest threat to my DSLR has been my mirrorless ILC system. I have completely gone over to the dark side. I sold off some Canon gear, I keep buying gear for the Olympus system I’ve built, to the point where I actually don’t buy much because I have everything I need. Grouped together, DSLR + MILC are not, as a species, being threatened. Individual companies? Sure, some may be at risk. You have to look back at that digital camera boom and realize that, with todays numbers, things had to change. Olympus and Fujifilm gave up making low-end P&S cameras entirely. Canon, Nikon, Panasonic, Sony, and others still do, but most of their activity is on high-end P&S models, as well as ILCs. Sony may be dropping their SLR-like “SLT” A-mount system in the next few years. Canon has a mirrorless sytem that’s actually catching on despite poor support, and Nikon is rumored to be releasing a professional MILC this year. Change is fun for we camera geeks, but also necesary for them.And sure, you might replace that smartphone every two years or more. The smartphone has had its own cycle of improvements. Since it’s a whole pocket computer system, it’s never one thing that’s been improving every year. But the camera is a big one, at least in part because every smartphone maker can provide their own spin on the smartphone camera. It’s difficult to do the things you can do trivially in a P&S — I can buy a $100 P&S with an 8x optical zoom, but that’s unacceptable in a smartphone, because of the mandatory thickness for those. Clever hardware and software tricks are being employed to make the phone a better camera for everyone.The DSLR and the MILC improve every year as well. But they’re more concerned with capturing the image. Don’t forget, with a smartphone, you not only have the camera in your hand, but the computer, the network, the photo album, etc. So there are things I want on my serious cameras that make no sense on a phone, and vice-versa.And when you add up what you’re actually spending, I’m not saying don’t get a great camera in your phone. I’m saying don’t buy a phone thinking it’s a camera if what you really want is a camera. I’m a serious amateur photographer, I own five ILCs, five “compact digital” cameras, and four camcorders…. probably time to sell off a few :-)But the last new smartphone I bought was in 2015. That was unusual, I usually buy a slightly older used or refurbished model for $200.Read MoreDave Haynie's answer to Is the Huawei P20 Pro camera as good as a DSLR?Dave Haynie's answer to Are smartphone cameras getting better than DSLRs?Dave Haynie's answer to What is a DSLR camera on a phone?Dave Haynie's answer to How can I take DSLR like photographs with a 5 MP mobile camera?

Question: “Why is film measured in millimeters rather than inches?”The question is faulty in that the questioner is, shall I say, focusing on one format that came to dominate the market for still photography roll film and ignoring the history and development of flexible roll film. If one looks at all of the still photography film formats produced by the Eastman Companies from the time George Eastman invented roll film one can count 36 different film sizes. Fully 30 of those were measured in inches. Only 6 were delineated in millimeters.To assert that film is measured in millimeters is simply not correct.But why is this the case and why did the 35 mm format come to dominate the roll film market? To answer that one has to look at what preceded roll film and why roll film was developed.Prior to roll film, photography was done on glass plates, initially so called wet plates. These glass plates generally came in two sizes designated in inches, 8 by 10 and 4 by 5. The plates were not coated with emulsion. Rather these plates had to be coated immediately prior to each use with a wet emulsion (thus the origin of the term “wet plate photography”). The plate had to remain wet until the image was developed. The photographer had to take the wet plate he had just made, put it in the camera, take the photograph, remove the exposed plate from the camera, and, without exposing it to light, immediately take it to a darkroom and develop it. This entire process, had to be accomplished within 15 minutes.George Eastman, employed not as a photographer but as a banker, became familiar with photography when he bought a camera to photograph some land he was considering buying. Well, he had to buy a lot more than a camera, which was a large heavy object in itself. He had to buy a wooden tripod, and heavy, fragile glass plates, and liquid emulsion or the chemicals to make it, and chemicals to develop the glass negatives, and photographic paper, and chemicals to print the negatives onto the paper. And he had to buy a tent! That was needed so that he could do outdoor photography, which necessitated developing those glass plates outdoors. And he had to hire a professional photographer to teach him how to do all of this.There had to be a better way.George Eastman’s first innovation was to develop, manufacture, and market glass photographic plates that were already coated with an emulsion that would remain stable over time. (Photographers in England were simultaneously working on this.) This eliminated the need for photographers to coat each glass plate with emulsion before taking each photograph.Eastman’s next innovation was to replace the heavy and fragile glass photographic plates with something else. The substitutes were first paper coated with an emulsion (acceptable for amateurs but the resulting photographic prints lacked the clarity and resolution required by professionals) and then celluloid. This paper and celluloid photographic “film” of course had to fit into preexisting cameras. So it too was made in the inch dimensions 4 by 5 and 8 by 10.Such large format sheet film encased in metal holders remained in use for decades.It was the type of film I used in my Crown Graphic when I was the photographer for a school paper in the 1960s.And was commonly used by newspaper photographers such as the legendary Weegee.The advantage of these large format 4 by 5 and 8 by 10 inch sheet film cameras is that the extremely large negative, especially when used with fine grained film, allowed one to make extremely sharp contact prints (The negative directly contacts the photographic paper during processing.) alleviating the loss of resolution inherent when one blows up a negative to larger size using an enlarger. This chart give you some idea of the relative size of a 35 mm negative compared to a 4 by 5 or 8 by 10 inch negative. Note that all of the large film formats are measured in inches.The disadvantages of large format sheet film cameras is of course the size and weight but also the complexity and the difficulty of taking quickly spaced sequential photographs. For the process was to: 1) remove film holder from leather case on your hip, 2) insert film holder in camera, 3) remove protective metal cover from film holder, 4) adjust aperture, set shutter speed, focus, take photograph, 5) take protective metal cover from case and place it in film holder in camera, 6) remove film holder from camera and place in another case of exposed film, 7) take another film holder containing unexposed film ad insert in camera, 7) repeat all of above actions for each shot.The next innovations were all produced by George Eastman, his mechanic, and his chemists. They were: The invention of the camera roll or spool; roll film (initially paper backed but then, with the addition of glycerine to the film base, flexible celluloid and camera that could use it; and commercial photographic processing which allowed the amateur photographer to forgo the need to own and use his own laboratory and darkroom. The motto conceived by George Eastman was: “You push the button. We do the rest.” Photography finally became easy, convenient, and fun.But what were these roll film cameras and what were the film sizes? The original KODAK (The word has no meaning.) Brownie Cameras looked like thisand used 117 roll film which had a picture size of 2 ¼ by 2 ¼.The name Brownie referred to the small mischievous imaginary creatures. It was chosen to appeal to the young children who were the intended market for the new very inexpensive (The company barely broke even on the initial models.) KODAK camera line in the belief that they would learn to enjoy photography, purchase lots of film, and eventually buy more expensive KODAK cameras.As a small child in the 1950s I learned photography with Box Cameras like thisThese cameras from the 1920s and ‘30s, which my mother used as a girl, used 130 roll film which had picture dimensions of 2 ⅞ by 4 ⅞ and 620 roll film which had picture dimensions of 2 ¼ by 3 ¼. These were waist level cameras. The cameras had two focusing screens allowing them to be used either in the vertical or horizontal formats. The film was advanced via the cranks seen on the sides of the cameras which had to be turned until the next number in the sequence appeared in the amber tinted round window in the rear of the camera.These cameras were great learning devices as the limited number of exposures per roll of film, the relatively high (by today’s standards) cost of film and processing, and the need to wind the film for the next photograph taught one to consider and compose each shot. That is something that is not always learned by those who learn on digital cameras and quickly take snap shots at essentially no cost without thought or art.(Note: The term “snap shot” was borrowed from and originally applied, not to photography, but to hunting.)One of the next cameras I used was this KODAK Brownie Six–20 Flash Camera.The name Brownie Six-20 reflects its 620 film size. Again the image size was in inches, 2 ¼ by 3 ¼. My father bought this camera as a present for my mother in 1954. How different that era was can be appreciated from the fact that the camera store salesman brought the camera to our home to demonstrate for my mother how to load it with film and use it.Here, to show how inch measurements once dominated film sizes for decades is a list of Eastman KODAK films and the years they were introduced. Unless otherwise noted the picture sizes are in inches.Roll-FilmKodak Roll-Film Sizes101 1895 3 ½ x 3 ½102 1895 1 ½ x 2103 1897 4 x 5104 1897 4 x 5105 1897 2 ¼ x 3 1/4106 1898 3 ½ x 3 1/2107 1898 3 ¼ x 4 1/4108 1898 4 ¼ x 3 1/4109 1898 4 x 5110 1898 5 x 4111 1898 6 ½ x 4 3/4112 1898 7 x 5113 1898 9 x 12 cm114 1898 12 x 9 cm115 1898 7 x 5116 1899 2 ½ x 4 1/4117 1900 2 ¼ x 2 1/4118 1900 3 ¼ x 4 ¼119 1900 3 ¼ x 4 1/4120 1901 2 ¼ x 3 ¼121 1902 1 ⅝ x 2 ½122 1903 3 ¼ x 5 ½123 1904 4 x 5124 1905 3 ¼ x 4 ¼125 1905 3 ¼ x 5 ½126 1906 4 ¼ x 6 ½127 1912 1 ⅝ x 2 ½128 1913 1 ½ x 2 ¼129 1913 2 x 3130 1916 2 ⅞ x 4 ⅞616 1932 2 ½ x 4 ¼620 1932 2 ¼ x 3 ¼828 1935 28 x 40 mm135 1934 24 x 36 mm Perforated 35 mm film in cassette126 1963 28 x 28 mmOK. So where did 35 mm roll film come from? And why did it come to dominate the industry? 35 mm film for still photography was used by Leica in their Leica 1 first sold in 1925. By the mid-1930s the Leica IIIwas recognized as one of the best small format cameras available. It popularized the 35 mm roll film format. My aunt bought one of these while traveling in Germany in the 1930s.(Note: there were other European cameras that used 35 mm motion picture film for still cameras: For example the Austrian Minnigraph Types A and B of 1915 and the Russian Cyclocamera of 1920, and the 1921 Argus and very similar French Eka both in 1921, and the French Le Phototank of 1922. It was the Leica, however, that established 35 mm roll film as a standard for compact cameras.)As you can see from the chart printed above, KODAK offered the 135 35 mm daylight loading cassette in 1935, this was 15 years after European still cameras began using perforated 35 mm film and 10 years after Leica sold their first 35 mm camera. Moreover there were no American made 35 mm film still cameras until 1938 when KODAK introduced the KODAK 35.Prior to this KODAK marketed the 35 mm KODAK Retina, which was really a German camera marketed under the KODAK brand name.The 35 mm cassette film roll had already become by the 1930s a European format used for European cameras and described in European metric measurements.OK. Why did Leica and others choose that format. When the Leica 1 was designed 35 mm film already existed…but it was being used primarily on large reels as motion picture film. That is why, unlike other film formats available at the time, Type 135 or 35 mm film has sprocket holes on each side. What Leica (and others) did was take 35 mm motion picture film in small lengths and use it in compact still cameras.This had significant advantages. Because the film was contained in light tight cassettes film could be changed very quickly in daylight, obviating the need to find a dark room as one had to do to change film spools for conventional roll film cameras. The format allowed a large (12, 25, or 36) number of exposures to be contained on each roll. The sprocket holes permitted easy threading of the film leader into the camera mechanism and allowed reliable and rapid film advance. Moreover, the cameras were compact and thus suitable as travel cameras.And why was motion picture film, the basis for the Leica and all subsequent 35 mm rangefinder and Single Lens Reflex cameras, 35 mm in the first place? Well that goes back to the Lumiere Brothers who developed motion picture photography in France, which had invented the metric system of measurement and had adopted it in 1795. The Lumiere Brothers used reels of 35 mm film for the short 10 minute documentaries and newsreels the produced between 1895 and 1905.