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5 Reasons To Consider A Smartphone With DSLR Capabilities

Smartphone cameras are improving really fast every year. Companies that traditionally focused on a specs race have started working on improving their optics over the last few years. This newfound focus on the cameras has hit the point & shoot cameras hard with sales dwindling. That didn’t stop smartphone companies from continuing to improve their cameras, though.

These days, we find smartphones with DSLR-like capabilities. With a ton of mods, manual camera settings, ability to shoot images in RAW and DNG formats and a lot of other things, smartphones have been improving faster than ever before when it comes to the cameras. Phones like the Huawei Honor 8 come with dual cameras to take smartphone photography to the next level, at a fraction of the price of DSLRs.

In today’s post, we take a look at a few reasons to consider a smartphone like the Huawei Honor 8 with DSLR capabilities instead of getting a DSLR itself.

5 Reasons To Consider A Smartphone With DSLR Capabilities

Portable And Less Bulky

Smartphones are much more easier to carry around than a DSLR. Everyone carries at least one smartphone around with them all the time. If you go for a smartphone like the Honor 8, you don’t have to worry about carrying a dedicated camera along with you. For most use cases of regular users, the Honor 8 and other phones like it should suffice.


In addition to being very portable, smartphones are less bulky as well. While carrying a DSLR is a challenge in itself (what with protective lens covers, camera covers etc), the camera itself is far more bulkier than a smartphone. The simplicity of carrying a smartphone with a great camera trumps over a DSLR in most cases.

Easier And Faster Photo Sharing

Smartphones are made for easing the task of talking and sharing with your family and friends. Clicking a photo with your smartphone and then sharing it with your friends is a task you can complete in 3 taps – something that is unimaginable with a DSLR. Sure, companies are now adding a lot more connectivity options to DSLRs and other cameras, but nothing will beat the ease of capturing a photo and sharing it instantly with a few taps on a smartphone.

Low to No Maintenance

Maintaining a smartphone is a very low-cost affair. Get a tempered glass and a protective case when you buy the phone and that is all you will need over the life of the smartphone.

Compare this to the maintenance of a DSLR – you have to make sure you clean the lenses regularly, avoiding extreme weather conditions to prevent any damage to the image sensor, and carrying around the caps and cases with you at all times. This can become a chore really fast.

Phones like the Honor 8, iPhone 7 Plus etc can not only be extremely great tools for photography, they are also low maintenance devices. Using them like you would use any other gadget should be more than enough.

Easier Learning Curve

Companies have been developing their imaging algorithms extensively over the last few years. With a lot of research and development having gone into this, the default settings and automatic modes have improved drastically.

Coming specifically to cameras on phones like the Huawei Honor 8, you get two lenses to work for you – one 12 MP lens captures images in the regular color mode, while the other 12 MP lens captures a monochrome (Black and White) image. The monochrome lens is able to capture a lot more light and Huawei uses it to enhance the color photo. The end result is that you get a regular color photo with way more detail and light compared to other phones.

All of this is automatic, so you don’t have to worry about the processing and you can concentrate on the subject instead.

Low Price

Buying a DSLR is always a costly affair. While the DSLRs are better than smartphones when it is about just photography, they are an overkill for a majority of users. With smartphones progressing immensely on this front, this couldn’t have been more true. Additionally, getting a good DSLR is not going to be cheap.

Thanks to fierce competition in the smartphone industry, smartphones are priced very aggressively. This is true especially in India and China where companies launch extremely great value for money smartphones at great prices. You can get good smartphones like the Honor 8 at extremely competitive prices.

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Abhinav Singh

Abhinav Singh, a software engineer who is very much interested in social engineering. He is responsible to manage all the social media profiles of Gadgets To Use. He also has a hobby of tracking new apps and gadgets and to share them with our readers as well.