Camera versus Phone

As an experiment, I decided not to take my Sony Alpha 6000 DSLR and lenses on a tour of Austria in June 2024, and survive with just my Samsung S22 smartphone. Never before had I done this on holiday. The former has a native resolution of 6000x4000 pixels using an APS-C sensor, and the latter 4000x3000 using a 50Mpixel sensor ( 8160x6120 in pro mode ). The phone also has an additional optical x3 zoom lens. I took 390 pictures over about 6 days i.e. 65 pictures per day. Below I list the advantages and disadvantages of not having a ‘proper’ camera.

Advantages

• • Your camera kit is literally ‘nothing’. Since you were taking a phone and charger on holiday anyway, there is nothing extra to carry around. My camera fits in my pocket. I am never without it.

  • It is easy to take ‘street photography’ with pictures of random people without being obvious and intrusive. Nobody knows whether you are looking at your phone or taking pictures. Likewise shooting inside buildings when a big camera might make the jobs-worth security guy wave his arms at you.

  • The colour balance was superb for landscape photography, giving emphasis to all those blues and greens. Little or no post-processing required.

  • The Samsung wide angle lens is just what you need for most landscape and city skyline shots.

  • There is no dust to remove from the sensor! The lens is not removable. No dust can get in. Drives me nuts sometimes on the DSLR. I don’t need my sensor cleaning kit with swabs and alcohol. And the upside-down gymnastics when changing lenses.

  • Instant backup to the cloud. I have European roaming at UK rates. As soon as I take the picture, it is available on all my connected devices. No hoping the SD card doesn’t fail! When I got back home, I booted up my PC and all my pictures were waiting for me, having arrived back before I did.

  • Full integration with social media apps like WhatsApp. Take a picture and share it instantly with a fellow traveller.

  • Short, stabilised HD video clips are as easy as taking photos.

  • All photographs are GPS-location stamped. Fantastic when you can’t remember where you took it.

  • A quick selfie is less stressful than handing your valuable camera kit to a stranger with an estimated top-speed higher than yours.

Disadvantages

• I missed a powerful continuous optical zoom. The 3x lens was not as clear as the standard lens, and beyond 3x the digital zoom kills the image quality. At 10x you have a picture for a phone screen only.

• I really struggled with battery life. The S22 has a medium capacity battery ( 3,700 mAh ) but I’m sharing it between photography, messaging, browsing and Google Maps with GPS. Starting a trip at 9am it was 10% or less by 4pm. A stand-alone camera has a battery that can be hammered for a good few days. And you can carry spares.

• Picture quality drops off rapidly in low light. I didn’t take a tripod for the phone. Portraits in dimly lit bars were fine, but a gloomy church interior was average at best.

• Framing is just easier and more accurate through an EVF ( electronic view finder ).

So the advantages outnumber the disadvantages. But the disadvantages are so serious for a lover of travel photography like me that I may be dual-camera-ing on the next holiday.

Andy Barson