Smartphone or Point and Shot camera?

airmech wrote: »

Sorry for hijacking the thread. What cameras can I buy that are better than the best smartphone? 500 to 800 euro is my budget.

To answer this you need to ask yourself a few questions. Do you just want this for snapshots, or do you want to get into photography? Are you willing to carry a much larger dedicated camera instead of a compact phone?

A smartphone and a DSLR are in no way comparable. A smartphone is a portable device that would generally have an array of quite excellent cameras that will do a lot. They are great for everything from snapshots to more dedicated photography work, all wrapped up in a small package that you use for everything else too.

A DSLR is a much larger piece of equipment and a lot of people buy them and end up not using them as they take effort to carry around. That's not to say that you won't use one, but you need to be aware of what it is, and whether it fits your needs. They also will have much better image sensors, much better lenses and the ability to change them. And obviously they will give you manual control over everything, which is great if you want to get into photography more.

If the question is still whether a smartphone is better than a dedicated camera, then perhaps it's worth comparing to a compact camera. One that will fit into a pocket easily enough, but still allow for a lot of the manual control a DSLR does.