It’s not (just) marketing. You can try to “brute-force” your way up in image quality by increasing sensor size, better lens, etc, but there is a point where it gives you diminishing returns.
I’m not deeply familiar with high-end professional cameras, but low-mid pro cameras sort of slept for a long time while phone cameras had to play around the trivial upgrade route of bigger sensors and go the harder route to more intelligent sensors. There is a really interesting article about it that I may try to dig out, but there are such great tricks in modern phones like using the not that great lens stabilization to an advantage where minor movements of our hand will render the same physical position to several adjacent “colored” sensor positions and a clever NN can use this additional information to increase the lost sensors size inherent in colored picture taking. Also, HDR photos simply need intelligence.
All in all, in certain (rare) situations a newer iphone may very well shoot a much better photo than a DSLR camera no matter the comparatively tiny sensor size. Also, just think about the way the black hole was photographed - it also didn’t use an Earth-sized sensor, but the effect was similar if it have used one.
I’m not deeply familiar with high-end professional cameras, but low-mid pro cameras sort of slept for a long time while phone cameras had to play around the trivial upgrade route of bigger sensors and go the harder route to more intelligent sensors. There is a really interesting article about it that I may try to dig out, but there are such great tricks in modern phones like using the not that great lens stabilization to an advantage where minor movements of our hand will render the same physical position to several adjacent “colored” sensor positions and a clever NN can use this additional information to increase the lost sensors size inherent in colored picture taking. Also, HDR photos simply need intelligence.
All in all, in certain (rare) situations a newer iphone may very well shoot a much better photo than a DSLR camera no matter the comparatively tiny sensor size. Also, just think about the way the black hole was photographed - it also didn’t use an Earth-sized sensor, but the effect was similar if it have used one.