Key pullquote after a lot of waffle on the meaning of "phone":
> Why should anyone who wants to take decent pictures suffer through the pain of spending thousands of dollars on a camera system, many hours of learning how to use the camera and how to post-process images from it, when the alternative is to use a small, portable and idiot-proof device that they have in their pockets at all times?
Smartphones are amazing now at producing decent pictures in adverse circumstances. The amount of manual effort required to produce an equivalent with a DSLR in post processing is therefore going up.
Is there room for a iCamera, with the smartphone processing but large interchangeable lenses? Maybe. Are the camera companies able to build it? No.
> Why should anyone who wants to take decent pictures suffer through the pain of spending thousands of dollars on a camera system, many hours of learning how to use the camera and how to post-process images from it, when the alternative is to use a small, portable and idiot-proof device that they have in their pockets at all times?
Smartphones are amazing now at producing decent pictures in adverse circumstances. The amount of manual effort required to produce an equivalent with a DSLR in post processing is therefore going up.
Is there room for a iCamera, with the smartphone processing but large interchangeable lenses? Maybe. Are the camera companies able to build it? No.