this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2026
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I don't know if I'm alone in this, but I really don't like the basic ergonomics of taking photos with my phone. To me there's no comparison to the weight and layout of a dedicated camera.
Ok top of that, I like to fiddle with settings and focus manually, and I don't want my images to be automatically filtered through AI or scraped by Google.
I can certainly agree that a big part of photography is being in the right place at the right time and using whatever camera you have to take the photo. And I know that the phone cameras these days are pretty good and more than enough for the casual user, but I like a dedicated camera, even a cheap and old one, if only for the experience of taking photos that way.
The ergonomics aren't great compared to a dedicated camera. The camera sensor not being in the middle is annoying unless your subject is far away. Having to hold the phone so that you don't accidentally touch the screen, accidentally block the camera, etc. is not ideal. The shutter is never in a great position, even if you do something like use the volume button as a shutter.
Even flip phone cameras were more convenient than that. With those the camera was roughly in the middle, and you could hold the phone in a way that felt less awkward.
OTOH, the thing that killed cameras for me was the ergonomics of getting the pictures off the camera and backed up online. You either needed to remove the memory card from the camera, make sure you had a USB to memory card adapter, plug it into a computer, drag the files somewhere, etc. then wait for that to complete, and remember to put the memory card back into the camera.
For a short while, the cameras claimed to have WiFi, but it wasn't like you could just connect them to your home router and let the camera connect to the Internet and upload the cameras. No, the camera created its own WiFi hotspot and you had to connect your laptop or something to that hotspot and transfer the files that way.
To me, the killer feature of phone cameras (aside from always being in my pocket) was that to back up the pictures I'd taken I had to... do nothing. I'd get home, use my phone as normal, and within half an hour, the photos were already online and backed up.
There's other camera apps which remove the awful filters that automatically get applied and give more manual control, for example open camera or camera on fdroid