By Todd Ogasawara on August 18, 2009 3:50 AM

iPhone in a Flickr Category of its Own: It Has Overwhelmed Every Other Camera & Cameraphone

At the turn of the century there was a heated debate about whether digital cameras would ever produce photos as good as film cameras. I carried film and digital cameras together for many years starting around 1996 because digital photos weren’t “good enough” during those years. The turning point came, I think, after I bought a Canon PowerShot G3. Its 4 megapixel images didn’t seem as good as even an inexpensive 35mm point-and-shoot camera. But, it had achieved my personal rating of “good enough”. The years that followed that personal turning point included heated discussions about the awful quality of cameraphone photos and how they would never be as good as standalone digital cameras. But, the lesson I learned from the earlier debate is that it is not a question of one technology being better than another. It just a question of: Is it “good enough”.

The L.A. Times article…

IPhone passes Canon Rebel XTi as most popular camera on Flickr

…is an excellent case-in-point. It notes that the most popular camera of any kind used to submit photos to Flickr is now the iPhone. The camera it beat out is another relatively new and highly regarded product: The Canon Digital Rebel XTi. The number of iPhone users probably outnumbers the number of XTi (a digital SLR camera) by a large multiple. So, that is one reason it has overtaken the XTi. However, cameraphones have probably outnumbered standalone digital cameras for years now. So, that isn’t the only reason. I believe the main reason is that the always available iPhone has reach the photographic quality stage of “good enough” for many people. And, iPhone photo submissions to Flickr dwarf the next most popular cameraphone, the aging Nokia N95 (not the newer N96 or N97, btw).

There is no doubt in my mind that nearly any sub-$200 point-and-shoot digital camera produces photos that are superior to the iPhone’s. But, even the small ones are generally not carried everywhere like a phone is. And, taking photos on the iPhone is simpler than every other camera phone I’ve tried over the years. Flickr may need to make charts that tease out the iPhone in the future. It has become a photo device category of its own.