How iPhone Cameras Changed Society

It's seldom discussed, except amongst digital photography buffs, but the various smartphones, led by the iPhone, have largely killed the market for small-sensor, pocketable cameras. But that's just the beginning.

Small cameras were doomed once Apple took photography seriously and managed to get professionals to champion the iPhone. I've always considered them to be nothing more than glorified pinhole cameras, but even I have to admit that they've produced many stunning images.

While it is unlikely that a smartphone camera will knock out the large sensor mirrorless and mirrored DSLR anytime soon, there is probably no reason to have any sort of small camera at all if you have an iPhone or even a Samsung phone.

This seriously disrupts the digital camera business in much the same way the digital camera revolution wiped out the film business. It began with the massacre of the disposable camera, followed by Polaroid, then pretty much all film.

Driving this trend is the advanced signal processing software that takes the always-noisy image from the sensor and fixes it. Over the years these image "engines" have improved to an extreme. So much so that there are giant billboards around my town using the images from an iPhone 7 that are quite stunning.

In the early days of digital photography, the sensors on the cameras were all CCD (charged-coupled devices) designed for imaging. The CMOS sensor came later and began as a curiosity. It turned out that a bare CMOS chip would capture an image although it was not originally designed to do so.

Canon was the first camera company to popularize the CMOS sensor. CMOS has a number of intrinsic positive characteristics including a lack of shutter-lag, much better battery management, and cheaper manufacturing costs. The problem with CMOS was always the "noise" in the image, which was seen as a huge roadblock to its long-term success. So along came a slew of companies developing chips to fix that problem.

Now it's to the point that a small one-third-inch sensor in the iPhone 7 can produce credible Raw images for complex manipulation. (You need a third-party camera app like Manual to shoot in Raw, however.) The result is a fabulous pinhole camera in the iPhone 7, which is pretty much all that most people really need.

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Since the other handset makers have to provide competitive cameras, we now have an entire population with a great camera and camcorder in their pocket at all times.

I wrote a column long ago discussing how small cameras have created Little Brother as opposed to Big Brother. This is playing out all the time now with the emergence of videos showing police gunning down innocent victims. Some municipalities have tried to ban these public uses of smartphone cams, but there is no stopping it. So besides wiping out a market for small cameras and impinging on professional cameras, the societal impact of the camera phone is also remarkable.

The biggest impact can be seen anywhere there is a gathering of people. Phones light up the scene as an ocean of bystanders take snapshots and video footage of everything. It is quite a sight. That image itself—a sea of smartphones in the air—is not something anyone predicted. It was an unintended consequence that is weird, at least to me.