Post your pictures of Waterloo Region!

[plam]

The Pixel 4a night mode is pretty good. In some ways it's better than a small point and shoot. Cameras with bigger sensors probably do better. What I find phones can't really do is reasonable zoom (eg birds).

Yes, that's what I was implying. You can't use software to recreate what the sensor is not capturing, only optimize what it does capture. And, yes, my reference point is a DSLR or a compact with a reltively larger sensor (such as a Sony RX100).

Being able to select a lens and being able to control exposure, shutter speed and depth of field is something else that I can't do with a phone camera.

That said, I use my phone camera a lot more than I use my RX100 or the DSLRs. Most of the time it's easily good enough, and it's always in my pocket.

The benefit of night mode is that it allows long exposure times and corrects for reasonable jitter, so you can handhold a surprisingly long exposure. Let's see if I can find one such picture. Well, this one totally didn't work in night mode because the bird moves too fast:

https://gallery.patricklam.ca/picture.ph...egory/1348

But here's a night mode pic at 1/5 handheld. I've massively downscaled it but even at original resolution it's surprisingly sharp.

   

Some phone cameras (though not the 4a) allow direct control of the settings, though obviously you can't change lenses.

I also have an RX100 and an a6600. I find that the RX100 isn't great at doing narrow depth of field. Sometimes the 4a does better computationally, but it gets confused when the boundaries are complicated. The a6600 does way better.