Shooting Stars

Michael Keller/Masterfile

Your conscience is nagging at you. You know that snapping candid photos and shooting priceless video with your cellphone—even a smartphone that’s capable of capturing high-resolution digital images and high-definition video—means that you’ll get less-than-perfect results. You know that the only way to perfectly preserve the memories of family reunions, birthday parties and other occasions is to use a digital camera or HD camcorder. And yet, using your smartphone is just so darned easy. After all, you have it with you all of the time, and you can immediately email or text photos to friends and family or post them online.

Companies that make digital cameras and camcorders are abundantly aware of your dilemma, and they’re doing everything that they can to get you to choose quality over convenience by improving the imaging superiority that their dedicated gadgets deliver over that of smartphones. They are adding to their products more (and mostly meaningless) megapixels, more-sophisticated automatic shooting modes and even some sharing features, such as one that makes it easier to post your images to social-networking websites.

Even without these improvements, digital cameras and full-size HD camcorders still would capture far better images and video, particularly in less-than-ideal lighting conditions, than what you’d be able to capture with the most expensive of smartphones or even pocket camcorders. As a result, it’s worth finding extra space in a bag, jacket, pocket or purse for the right equipment.

HOT SHOTS. No matter how much digital cameras and camcorders improve in performance and shrink in price, it’s understandable why more of us rely on smartphones as our primary gadget for our digital-imaging needs.

Smartphones can capture high-resolution still images and HD video. And they cost less than $200, which is $50 to $200 less than what you’ll pay for a point-and-shoot digital camera or HD camcorder that captures high-resolution still images and HD video. Plus, unlike all cameras and camcorders, smartphones give you access to a high-speed wireless data network, which means that you can beam your images and video via text message, email, or social-network and news sites.

But smartphones still can’t produce the quality of images and video that digital cameras and full-size HD camcorders produce, because the cameras that are on smartphones lack glass optical lenses, many of the latest automatic shooting modes, advanced image processors and other features that digital cameras and HD camcorders have.

Although we still shoot more photos with digital cameras, cellphones are catching up. According to Lyra Research, we will shoot 42 billion images with cellphone cameras this year compared with 33 billion 2 years ago, which is a faster rate of growth than photos that were taken by digital cameras over the same period. According to Steve Hoffenberg, who is director of Lyra’s consumer-imaging research, we use smartphones to take one or two photos at a time, while we use our digital cameras less frequently but shoot a lot more photos when we do. In other words, we pull out our digital camera when we know that we’ll be at an event during which we want to get the best possible ­picture.

However, this balance might change as more smartphones improve their imaging capabilities. For instance, the number of smartphones that are capable of shooting 5-megapixel (MP) images or better has nearly doubled in the past 2 years. Smartphones (particularly iPhones and Android-powered models) can snap digital stills that have image resolutions of up to 8MP, which is as much image resolution as most of us need. (See “Megapixel Madness: A Point (and Shoot) of Diminishing Returns.")