The death of the point and shoot

This is something I've thought about before but it came to my mind again the other day and I decided to post about it.

Who uses point and shoot cameras anymore? Okay, besides your parents, who are always behind on technology anyway.



The fact is that the cameras on our phones have advanced so greatly in the last few years that there is no longer a need to carry another gadget. Shawn's HTC Evo has an 8 megapixel camera and can take HD video. That's better than my Canon PowerShot that I've had for a couple years. The screen is also bigger for viewing the photos.

When I first bought my PowerShot, I took it everywhere with me. It was always in my pocket or my purse. That is until I got a BlackBerry. Once I had that phone I used my camera less and less. Now I have a Palm Pre which sadly has a fixed focus camera, but I still don't carry around a point and shoot. Who does anymore? It's so much more common to walk around a see someone taking a picture with their phone than with a pocket-able camera. It makes so much sense now that phone cameras have come so far. My first camera phone didn't even have a flash but now that's pretty much standard as well as a focus light and a light that will illuminate videos recorded in low lighting.

National Geographic even published a book (The Camera Phone Book: How to Shoot Like a Pro, Print, Store, Display, Send Images, Make a Short Film) about taking photos with your phone a few years back. National Geographic! It's probably already useless to today's phones.

The last thing I used my point and shoot for was to take pictures of furniture and their price tags in a store. Since Shawn got his Evo, we've used it for that purpose. We did use the point and shoot a little bit on our honeymoon. We had both agreed to leave our phones off for the week and thought it best not to take his D40 snowboarding.

So, I see the point and shoot slowly fading away, being replaced by phones, until one day mentioning a point a shoot will be like mentioning an 8-track to today's 9th grader. I definitely don't see p&s technology getting the love that film photography or vinyl records have. The everyday snapshot takers will use their phones while those more serious about photography will have SLRs, the in-betweens will disappear.

The above photo was taken with my Palm Pre.