"The default setting on phones is to save storage by only using 12 megapixels, so unless you've changed settings, the 200 megapixel phone loses 94% of its megapixels as soon as you press the shutter. Bad deal!"

The final picture is the result of digital processing of the 200 megapixels, which is quite different from losing the data, all other things being the same. His point is right, but this paragraph isn't worthy of the rest of the essay.

I sometimes use the 200MP mode on my phone - it does render more detail in images and sometimes that's what I want.

To counter the unnatural look of noise reduction I often add a film grain effect.

To expand on the HDR example: There’s this interesting lecture series about computational photography by Marc Levoy, who worked on the earlier Pixel cameras: https://youtube.com/watch?v=y7HrM-fk_Rc

From what I remember, the core thesis is “take a lot of pictures and take the best parts”, which works for a surprising number of cases.

All that really matters is that it exists. If you really care about the quality of your camera, you're going to want to get a dedicated camera. For everyone else (i.e. basically everybody except photographers), literally any phone camera is as good as another.

Any modern flagship has good enough camera capabilities, as long as it has okay low light performance that’s enough for me.

Having tried the iPhone Pro lenses, while impressive, the sensor size is never going to match a full-frame mirrorless.

Easy: you can remove the smart phone and plug it to a USB port with an off-the-self converter, and it works out-of-the-box with the universal video usb driver.

My DroidX from 2010 took better pics than most modern phones. Zooming in on those photos look better! Crazy

personally, I applaud the high pixel count cameras: they will usher in a new era for digital holography, enabling novel holographic digital microscopes and 3D scanning, metrology applications, ...

the main issue is when you blow the image up, the details in the highlights and shadows don't hold up, you need to study Chroma subsampling to understand this. Sensor size is still important, but they're getting closer

Light your subject