Nikon Is ending 70 years of camera production in Japan

I'm not sure what's going on, but this craze about computational photography is ruining cellphone photography for me.

Try to take a selfie with the iPhone 12 Pro. It's awful. If you use the regular camera, it generates an HDR selfie exaggerating every imperfection on your face. And if you use portrait, it applies a fake looking blur and softness to your skin and is incredibly strict on framing.

Camera photography is moving further from realism and I don't want a part of it.

Turn the camera around and you get similar problems. From detail-less low-light images, to sun-saturated indoor shots. It's like everyone took the Samsung model and ran with it.

My DSLR is the only lens I have that can produce a realistic photo nowadays and give me access to the raw sensor data.

Here, the airy disk diameter is the image size. At the same magnification, the image height is proportional to the object size.

Since when the f number is smaller, at the same magnification, substituting in the thin lens formula with the magnification, you find that the object size is inversely proportional to the focal length.

From this you come to the conclusion that, at the same focus distance, the smallest object you can image is a function of the absolute diameter of the aperture.

Intuitively, this is because even though the airy disk has the same size, the focal length is much smaller, therefore the field of view is much wider for the same sensor size, therefore the angular confusion is much bigger, therefore for the same FoV at the same f number detail goes down.

Or put another way, yes the light spreads more, but the sensor on a camera is bigger, so in the end you have much more detail anyways.

This is why, for example, spy satellites despite operating at f/11 or so can resolve much more detail than a cellphone :)

This is a standard exam question if you ever take a Wave Optics class, by the way. But as you say, enthusiast discussion, such as on DPReview, is often based on basic misconceptions about optics :)

I never found those benefits. What would you say they are?

Early on, the problem was mirrorless were slow in autofocus, and they had relatively terrible EV quality. Now they have better autofocus than mirrorless, and more importantly, with the very high resolution EV displays they have now [1], what you see is exactly what you end up getting. You don't have to guess about anything anymore, like what's going to blow out, which is fantastic. What you see in an optical viewfinder with your eye is not what your sensor sees is going to portray. I don't see any benefit to optical viewfinders at this point.

[1] 5.7MP OLED EV!: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1494679-REG/sony_ilce...