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Disappointed by the camera on your smartphone?
Want better low-light performance, battery life, and image quality?
It might be time to invest in a “real” camera setup.
Justin Duino / How-To Geek
There’s not a lot of room inside, which means sacrifices must be made.
This is why smartphones use relatively small sensors.
The larger the sensor, the more light is captured.
The Sony RX100 VII is the king of compact cameras. Its hardware and photo processing software are unbeatable, especially at this size.
Small sensors are the reason that many smartphones struggle in low light conditions.
A smaller sensor also captures less information per exposure compared with larger sensors found on dedicated cameras.
The Sony RX100 VII is the king of compact cameras.
Sony
Its hardware and photo processing software are unbeatable, especially at this size.
These allow you to capture a range of focal lengths using real optics rather than digital trickery.
If you want even more possibilities, you’ll want a camera that uses interchangeablelenses.
Canon
Give old, antique lenses a new lease of life and get a unique look and feel from them.
The only limit to your creativity is the size of your bank account.
Fortunately, there’s a bustling second-hand market when it comes to lenses.
Add 128GB storage to your camera setup with Lexar’s Professional Class 3 UHS-II SDXC card.
Lenses hold their value better than smartphones do!
Dedicated Camera, Dedicated Battery
Your smartphone does everything.
Dedicated cameras have dedicated batteries, and most of them are swappable.
Fujifilm
You won’t wear down your smartphone battery so you’ll have plenty of power left for everything else.
Add 128GB storage to your camera setup with Lexar’s Professional Class 3 UHS-II SDXC card.
you might manipulateshutter speedsto takelong exposures, to blur moving subjects like water, lights, or traffic.
Manipulating these parameters is easier using the myriad of controls you have available on a dedicated camera.
Use the focus ring on your lens to manually focus or zoom with precision.
Take speedlights (or flash units) for example.
Add diffusers and color gels or experiment with bouncing the light to create unique yet repeatable results.
Lens filters are another useful tool.
Graduated neutral density filters are valuable tools for landscape photography.
This prevents you from losing shadow detail in the landscape or cloud detail in the sky.
There are also a huge number ofaccessoriesto help overcome the added heft of using a dedicated camera.
These include camera mounts for attaching your equipment to your person tobags for carrying lots or very little gear.
Sensor sizes are going to have to remain small, though sensor quality will undoubtedly improve.
Future enhancements to low-light performance and overall image quality willlargely depend on improved image processing.
Proper interchangeable lenses are unlikely to make a splash any time soon beyond the clip-on variety.
Though fun, these can’t hold a candle to thebest mirrorless lensesor thebest digital SLR lenses.
This has been tried before and it turns out that most smartphone owners simply aren’t interested.
We’ve got recommendations for thebest mirrorlessandbest digital SLRsif you’re wondering where to start.
