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Is it worth getting to a Sony RX100M3 mostly for selfies and pictures of friends and family to replace my phone? (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by [email protected] to c/photography

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Hello everyone,

Kind of fell into this rabbit whole yesterday. I usually take pictures with my phone, which is not great at this (Moto G84), so I was considering getting a compact point and shoot camera to have better pictures.

At the moment, my main use case is to indeed take selfies with my girlfriend, or friends/family. I've read a bit about the topic, and it seems like the consensus is that recent phones (less than 5 years) will take better selfies and general pictures than point and shoot cameras.

Is this true?

I see a Sony RX100M3 second hand at 350€, is it worth it?

Thank you for your help

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[–] ZkhqrD5o 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If you're taking selfies exclusively and only want to share them to other people's phones, definitely not. You won't be able to enjoy the quality of your new camera on a screen this small and you'll also need the extreme wide angle that phones usually have. Buy a new phone, it is more than sufficient for that application. Also, if you're living in the EU, starting February 18th, 2027, batteries will be replaceable again, so you should wait for that, if you can.

If you want to enter the hobby or the profession of photography, the answer would be different. But if it is, again, just for phones, phone cameras are perfectly sufficient for that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Also, if you’re living in the EU, starting February 18th, 2027, batteries will be replaceable again, so you should wait for that, if you can.

Good point, looking forward to it!

My use case would be to potentially also print some of those, I guess in that case a camera is more suited, right?

[–] ZkhqrD5o 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Well, again, for home use it will be sufficient. A4 size is the maximum in my opinion. If you want to go bigger than that, you need a proper camera. Phones aren't made for professional applications, they're made for just quickly taking pictures of things that you may find interesting or just take selfies with your family and for that they're perfect. There are in your pocket when you need them and you don't need to fiddle around with settings.

If you want to do something more advanced like colour grading in Darktable, you need to do a bit more to make usable raw files for that application. Downlaod OpenCamera, set it to RAW and standard, Set exposure-bracketing-pictures to 5 and exposure-bracketing-stops to 3. Make sure Camera2 API is selected in the main options menu for this to show up. Then in Darktable you can merge the five photos you have to one big one and you'll have a surprisingly capable raw file. Just to be clear, you don't need to do this if you just want to take quick pictures that look fine. This is just for something more advanced, if you'd like to color grade and post-process your photos in general.

Edit: fixed typo.