Why Point and Shoots are Not Obsolete

A while back, I wrote a blog post called Are Point and Shoot Digital Cameras Becoming Obsolete? and concluded that yes, they serve as more of a burden than anything. This was back in November. Since then, I’ve had a few students present on their digital cameras for class, where I got a differing opinion. I also went on week long trip to Florida where I decided I’d use my HTC Incredible in lieu of a regular point and shoot. My stance has changed a bit since that trip. Here’s why.

When we left for Disney, I was debating whether or not I should spend the $100+ for a point and shoot to take photos on the trip and ultimately decided I didn’t really need it because I had an 8MP camera on my phone and that would be sufficient. Judging by this photo, you might agree with me:

This is a pretty nice photo if I do say so myself. I have the whole castle, the lighting is good, and it’s framed pretty well. The main reason is that this photo is taken in the middle of the day (well, it’s actually around 9:30am). The sun was out, I was close enough, and the little zoom I did use didn’t adversely affect the photo. Plus, for the main reason I took this pic, uploading it to Facebook, the size is perfect. Now let’s take a look at a photo taken about 12 hours later, from around the same spot:

This was taken during Magic Kingdom’s amazing fireworks show. You can see I don’t capture nearly as much (granted, is it night), the image is grainy, and I’m a little late. As a matter of fact, it took me a lot of shots to even get that. This isn’t the best photo I took of the night, but not of them were really good.

This is not a knock against smart phone cameras- they obviously take nice photos in the day and it’s amazing to even have an 8MP camera inside of your phone. However, hardware restrictions make it difficult to take a really nice photo in any other condition besides sunny. I love taking firework/night photos, and usually will use a good one as my desktop wallpaper. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a really nice photo of any of the firework shows due to the limitations of my smartphone camera.

Anyone who has used both a point and shoot and a smartphone as their primary camera will know the differences are pretty obvious. Here are the main ones:

• Specialized hardware for a better lens, with higher resolutions and faster shutter speeds.
• A number of different shooting modes, including day, night, sports, and yes, even fireworks.
• A battery built for constant photo taking, and nothing else.

The last one is a big one. While I’m super proud of my phone for lasting 12-15 hour days without charging it, neither my brother (who has an iPhone), nor I used our phones as freely as usual because we wanted to conserve battery life as both of use were using them as a camera. The iPhone even died a couple of days (to be fair, my brother texts much much more than me).

So after this experience I’ve done a complete 180 from my stance in November. I’m going to California in August, and you better believe I’ll be purchasing a point and shoot for the trip.