Ricoh officially discontinues Pentax K-series DSLRs after 23 years, ending production as the last major DSLR maker pivots to an entirely new concept. K-mount stays.
Zoom is better than what it used to be and not outright a lie. I still have a dual camera phone (pixel 7, standard camera and superwide), and the picture is reasonable at 2.5x. It’s a 50mp sensor that, by default, only takes ~16mp pictures by only using certain sensor cells. Zooming uses a tighter group of those cells while still making a 16mp picture. But yes, zoomed pictures absolutely lose quality as the cropping starts hitting the limits of a tiny piece of do-all glass. My phone goes to 8x. Meanwhile, the flagship phones with an additional mild-zoom cameras bump up the baseline further. Still, only equivalent to like 40-50mm on a DSLR full frame sensor. Not enough for me, not for the price, so I still lug my DSLR around occasionally, as my eye tends to prefer framing with my phone above 3x - or about 50-85mm on a crop sensor.
The limiting factor with zoom is often stability. There’s no way to hold a phone steady enough for a long zoom, and I don’t think any phone has proper optical image stabilisation.
I’m not sure what you mean by “proper” image stabilisation, but they certainly have at least so.me optical stabilisation. The lens slides around. If you turn it on and look at the camera while tilting it, you can see it move a bit inside the cover. It’s minor movement and was much more obvious when I had the outer lens off, but it’s a tiny camera. From experience with how it tracks objects when zoomed, I beleive it also slides around the active pixel region for digital stabilisation, if you will.
Zoom is better than what it used to be and not outright a lie. I still have a dual camera phone (pixel 7, standard camera and superwide), and the picture is reasonable at 2.5x. It’s a 50mp sensor that, by default, only takes ~16mp pictures by only using certain sensor cells. Zooming uses a tighter group of those cells while still making a 16mp picture. But yes, zoomed pictures absolutely lose quality as the cropping starts hitting the limits of a tiny piece of do-all glass. My phone goes to 8x. Meanwhile, the flagship phones with an additional mild-zoom cameras bump up the baseline further. Still, only equivalent to like 40-50mm on a DSLR full frame sensor. Not enough for me, not for the price, so I still lug my DSLR around occasionally, as my eye tends to prefer framing with my phone above 3x - or about 50-85mm on a crop sensor.
The limiting factor with zoom is often stability. There’s no way to hold a phone steady enough for a long zoom, and I don’t think any phone has proper optical image stabilisation.
I’m not sure what you mean by “proper” image stabilisation, but they certainly have at least so.me optical stabilisation. The lens slides around. If you turn it on and look at the camera while tilting it, you can see it move a bit inside the cover. It’s minor movement and was much more obvious when I had the outer lens off, but it’s a tiny camera. From experience with how it tracks objects when zoomed, I beleive it also slides around the active pixel region for digital stabilisation, if you will.