I had the DX-3500 I bought in 2001 (and had till I upgraded to a Fuji Finepix S5100 in 2005).
Looking back at the photos it took (on a 32MB CF I bought for USD 32), I'm surprised as to how good they were and how they are comparable (at least without pixel peeping) to a 2014-era smartphone.
I think smartphones, particularly the iPhone, set us back a few years in photo quality where the convenience of an always accessible camera made us ignore the obvious lower quality images that they produced.
If you look at photos on social media from 2004-2010, you'll see that they are often higher quality than more recent photos, though we are now at a tipping point where computational photography has started to make up for the smaller lenses and poorer optics of phone camera.
Comments
I had the DX-3500 I bought in 2001 (and had till I upgraded to a Fuji Finepix S5100 in 2005).
Looking back at the photos it took (on a 32MB CF I bought for USD 32), I'm surprised as to how good they were and how they are comparable (at least without pixel peeping) to a 2014-era smartphone.
I think smartphones, particularly the iPhone, set us back a few years in photo quality where the convenience of an always accessible camera made us ignore the obvious lower quality images that they produced. If you look at photos on social media from 2004-2010, you'll see that they are often higher quality than more recent photos, though we are now at a tipping point where computational photography has started to make up for the smaller lenses and poorer optics of phone camera.