Cameras Succumb to Smartphone Juggernaut

Cameras Succumb to Smartphone Juggernaut

FARHAD MANJOO

Nov. 10, 2013 7:16 p.m. ET

Smartphone cameras traditionally have been better in theory than reality. Start with the shutter lag: Nearly every phone camera I’ve ever used has had an annoying split-second delay between the time you hit the button to snap your shot and the time the shot gets snapped. The lag is just long enough for your kid’s adorable smile to turn into a nightmarish frown.Then there’s the DMV-like photo quality. When you reach for your phone to take a picture, you’re almost always settling for a less-than-stellar image.

Even late-model, high-end phones like AppleInc. AAPL +1.57% ‘s iPhone 5 and Samsung Electronics Co.’s Galaxy S4 were just good enough as cameras.

But suddenly, with Apple’s iPhone 5s, all that has changed. I’ve taken it on an international vacation, to a wedding, to a water park, trick-or-treating and to a couple of children’s and adult parties.

The other day I realized something amazing: While I carried a “real” camera to most of these events, I barely used it. Instead, I used the phone to snap about a billion photos of my 3-year-old son, my 9-month-old daughter, my [age redacted] wife and about two billion pictures of myself. (Slide-show night at my house is endless.)

Lost in the hype and hubbub around the 5s’s gold option or fingerprint sensor is that it marks a turning point in camera phones. There was a time when it would have been crazy to suggest that a phone camera would ever approach the speed and quality of a stand-alone camera. Now, that day is over.

Sales of point-and-shoot cameras have been declining for years and, according toresearch firm IDC last week, sales of more expensive single-lens-reflex cameras are also set to plummet. That makes sense. Today, taking a picture with a phone simply isn’t a subpar experience. For most people, most of the time, a phone is all you need.

What the phone did to the camera isn’t an isolated incident. The story behind the death of the stand-alone camera is a history of the future of almost everything.

The iPhone 5s’s triumph over the camera offers a lesson in how smartphones and tablets will co-opt most other devices in our lives, from PCs to videogame systems to even our wallets and our keys.

Right now, all this might sound impossible. Just wait.

First, about the 5s in particular: What I like best is its “burst mode,” which can take 10 shots a second, thereby eliminating shutter lag.

The camera’s pictures are also fantastic, especially in low light. (Apple improved the phone’s image sensor to make this possible). As a result, the 5s is the fastest, best phone camera I’ve ever used—even better than Nokia Corp.’s NOK1V.HE -1.22% 41-megapixel Lumia 1020.

The 5s is far better than my point-and-shoot, and because it lets me edit and share my pictures, it is often superior to my expensive, interchangeable-lens SLR (whose battery I haven’t had reason to charge in weeks).

I don’t mean to suggest Apple has a camera monopoly here. Though the 5s is ahead now, I suspect most other high-end phones will soon catch up with Apple’s device. But I can’t see how dedicated cameras can beat smartphones now.

Sure, big cameras with zoom lenses will always be useful for professional or semipro photographers, or for times (like at sporting events) when you are far from the action. Yet there are several reasons why smartphones often beat conventional cameras. Phones are small and nearly ubiquitous—you’re more likely to be carrying a phone than you are to be carrying a camera or anything else.

Smartphones also are expensive and insanely profitable, which creates an incentive for manufacturers to keep improving them.

According to tests by the review site AnandTech, the iPhone 5s’s processor is 100 times as fast as that of the original iPhone, a speed gain that surpasses most other parts of the tech business.

Finally and most importantly, smartphones are connected to the Internet, and they run software that can be constantly improved and augmented.

Cameras and most other gadgets, by contrast, are offline, and their software is often static.

It’s no wonder that the most important innovations in photography over the past few years—things like Instagram and Vine—happened on the phone, not on cameras.

What other gadgets are similarly vulnerable to the march of smartphones and tablets?

Portable videogame systems seem doomed. Soon you will be able to connect game controllers to your iPhone that—given the popularity of Apple’s App Store with game developers—will undercut the main reason to buy a dedicated games device.

I’m also quite optimistic that phones will one day replace our wallets. It might sound crazy now, and it will likely take several years, but thanks to payment systems by companies like Square and PayPal and the phone’s inherent connectedness, I highly doubt that I’ll be carrying around a half dozen credit cards by 2018.

And, really, I don’t see how laptops survive the onslaught either. Today, tablets likeMicrosoft‘s MSFT +0.75% Surface are close enough to replicating PCs.

At the rate that mobile processors are improving, it won’t be long until our tablets become replacements for 90% of what we use computers for today, and will give us astonishing battery life and portability too.

Some readers might not believe this. But nobody believed smartphones would run cameras out of town, either. The lesson, here, is to never underestimate how greedy mobile devices are: As much as they do for us now, they will always keep trying to do more.

Today your phone is your camera, game console, TV, music player, e-book reader, alarm clock, fitness log and notepad. What’s next? Everything.