28-08-2020, 01:18 PM
I was idly looking at the Canon website the other day, wondering what I'd replace the S120 with. While there might not be exactly that combination of manual control and tiny size, there is plenty of choice at a wide range of price points. There's still plenty of good cameras out there - they're just not as mainstream as they once were. Saying the phone has "totally killed the market" is rather blunt - there's no shortage of clickbait articles out there with titles like that. Depending on who's data you believe, the market is back where it was in the early-mid 2000s, before the peak roughly centred on 2010. It has obviously fallen a long way from that peak, but that would have happened anyway as the technology matured - it's impossible to quantify for sure how much of that was actually down to the smartphone. Some, definitely. Personally, and coincidently, I took a lot more pictures during that peak than I do now because we had 2 small children. But our digital camera purchases, as a household, have been evenly spread out over the last 20 years - the last one was about 2 years ago (not for me, but a family member), and I am actively thinking about the next one. Since we all moved over to second-hand iPhones, we definitely use our phones more, but for anything decent I have the choice of several cameras. For the non-technical, the convenience of a smartphone is what makes the difference. No more faffing around with USB cables or SD memory card readers. No more having to transfer the files to a PC or equivalent. Just keep them in your pocket, backed up to your iCloud account. For most people, most of the time, it's all they need. That's fair enough; that's progress. Given the incentive, it's astonishing what you can do with a tiny sensor, few or no moving parts, and a healthy dose of image processing software.
The 2016 iPhone SE is available second hand on the high street for around £100. Cheaper on-line, but obviously risky. I've bought several from CEX. They let you examine them and power them up to check the battery health, etc. If there is a problem, they sort it out with no hassle. The 2016 SE is still supported, and will continue to receive OS and security updates for another year at least. That's a total of 5 years of full support so far, which represents an excellent ROI for a sub-£400 phone. Of course, they will continue to work after support ends, just like any Android phone older than about 2 years. While I would struggle to personally justify paying £400 on a phone - any phone - I have no problem spending £100 on one. The trouble is, some people read the headlines and believe you need to spend the best part of a grand to own an iPhone, but that's really not the case. The new 2020 SE is also about £400, and according to people who follow these things, it's really shaken up that part of the market. Obviously most will be sold via contracts rather than bought outright, but even if you did, £400 for a minimum of 5 years of full support is not bad value for someone who needs a smartphone.
Society has changed - just look around; even the very poorest can find a way to own a smartphone, for better or worse. If you're happy to not have the latest handsets, the price of entry starts at £0, and PAYG can be feasible for light users. For many, it might be the only device they can access the internet from - money saved from not having a phone line and broadband can easily cover the cost of running a smartphone and then some. Obviously we all have different priorities, and that's fine - many might prefer to use computers connected to home broadband rather than smartphones, but most non-technical folk I know moved over to smartphones and tablets years ago.
I'll split this thread in a minute...
The 2016 iPhone SE is available second hand on the high street for around £100. Cheaper on-line, but obviously risky. I've bought several from CEX. They let you examine them and power them up to check the battery health, etc. If there is a problem, they sort it out with no hassle. The 2016 SE is still supported, and will continue to receive OS and security updates for another year at least. That's a total of 5 years of full support so far, which represents an excellent ROI for a sub-£400 phone. Of course, they will continue to work after support ends, just like any Android phone older than about 2 years. While I would struggle to personally justify paying £400 on a phone - any phone - I have no problem spending £100 on one. The trouble is, some people read the headlines and believe you need to spend the best part of a grand to own an iPhone, but that's really not the case. The new 2020 SE is also about £400, and according to people who follow these things, it's really shaken up that part of the market. Obviously most will be sold via contracts rather than bought outright, but even if you did, £400 for a minimum of 5 years of full support is not bad value for someone who needs a smartphone.
Society has changed - just look around; even the very poorest can find a way to own a smartphone, for better or worse. If you're happy to not have the latest handsets, the price of entry starts at £0, and PAYG can be feasible for light users. For many, it might be the only device they can access the internet from - money saved from not having a phone line and broadband can easily cover the cost of running a smartphone and then some. Obviously we all have different priorities, and that's fine - many might prefer to use computers connected to home broadband rather than smartphones, but most non-technical folk I know moved over to smartphones and tablets years ago.
I'll split this thread in a minute...
