The death of point-and-shoots

IF YOU have a smartphone, chances are you already have a powerful digital camera, and you have been snapping photos and uploading them to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter on a daily basis. Thanks to photo sharing applications such as Instagram, smartphone photography is catching everyone's fancy these days.

In fact, a recent analysis on Flickr, a popular photo-sharing website, indicated that the biggest majority of its members who shared their photos to the popular photo-sharing website came from smartphones, primarily the iPhone 4. That's right, an iPhone, not a Canon or a Nikon.

Most (if not all) of the pictures I've encountered that have been taken from iPhones, Droids and Blackberries, were pretty impressive shots. I can't help but thinking, "With shots like these, who needs a point-and-shoot camera?"

Is this the end of point-and-shoots as we know it? Apparently so. Though current point-and-shoot cameras offer double the megapixels and manual controls to play around with at almost half the price of a premium smartphone, the target demographic for these compact cameras have been ditching them for smartphones.

What makes a smartphone so appealing towards consumers today is its ability to replace all your other standalone devices such as your iPod, your camcorder and ultimately the point-and-shoot cameras. Indeed, for a premium, you get what you pay for.

Several months ago, I wrote about the demise of pocket camcorders such as the Flip and how smartphones such as the iPhone have literally taken over the pocket video recorder marketshare. It was predicted that the point-and-shoot cameras would also follow the same fate, as smartphones are rapidly upgrading their camera hardware to improve image quality.

Drop by to your nearest mobile phone stores and you'll notice the latest smartphones come with 8-megapixel sensors, higher ISOs and 1080p video capture, and that's a vast technological improvement in mobile phone cameras over the years.

But specs aside, the real dealbreaker with smartphones is the ability to instantly share your recent photos online after you have taken that shot via its vast array of photosharing apps. No longer do we have to worry about uploading your images to your computer before others can see them.

The recent launch of Google+ allows Android phone users to automatically backup every single shot into the cloud without you even having to think about it, and the iPhone will follow suit with its upcoming release of iOS5.

And with apps such as Instagram, no longer do we have to fire up photoshop and go through an overwhelming process to tweak your photos. With one simple step, you can magically transform your photos into vintage art. Easy.

At the end of the day, we all rather carry just one device as possible. You have a phone at your disposal in every photo opportunity you encounter and never miss that one million dollar shot.

All these features are turning basic point-and-shoot cameras into a dying breed, leaving the high end compacts and mid-range cameras such as Canon's Powershot series to the more serious photographers and photo enthusiasts.

As for digital SLRs, they are still going to be around for many years. Granted, the convenience and portability of the smartphone camera is still outstripped by the superior image quality and rich feature-sets found on dSLRs, and professionals still need them for their form factor and interchangable lenses to get the job done.

But for the rest of us, a smartphone is all we ever need.