V interesting comparisons. The iPhone pics are scarily good. Yes, the Nikon wins, but you have to look close with some of them. It's obvious in the enlarged sections, but 99% of 'picture makers' never go near that size and the vast majority are way smaller. On-screen viewing isn't very demanding of IQ, but that's how everybody views pictures these days - including most of us here.
This is the big dilemma for camera manufacturers. Their bread and butter market, compacts, is long gone. And the middle ground is far from safe either, with smartphones getting better all the time. This is bad new for enthusiasts too, because the development and production of our sophisticated cameras is no longer riding on the back of scale economies lower down the range. DSLRs and mirrorless will become more expensive, lenses too. The only glimmer of hope on that score is mirrorless, as they're much cheaper to manufacture, especially when the mechanical shutter is replaced with electronic switching of the sensor - the shutter/mirror is a very costly item.
The connectivity advantages of smartphones should be relatively easy to fix, if that's what we want.
I wouldn't say the compact market is long gone as such. The cheap end (£80 Argos special anyone?), certainly but a little higher up I'm not so sure?
The competition from camera phones has brought a welcome increase in the design and production of very decent enthusiast compacts.
A few years ago I wouldn't have dreamt of taking a compact with me instead of one of my DSLRs on an extended trip abroad, but right now I'm doing just that with a Sony RX100, and its doing great (threads to follow when I get back!). And the RX100 is smaller than my iPhone
Sure there are times when I would have wanted a manual zoom, FF low light ability and a UWA but for 90% of my shots it has handled itself impeccably. The RX100 on a shot for shot comparison (I was doubling up on some shots with the phone for Facebook updates) blows the iPhone into the water (and my iPhone would have run out of memory weeks ago!!). However, the biggest difference to me was the level of enjoyment whilst using the compact - I didn't feel connected with the subject and was no where near as satisfying to use as the DSLR. But that's just a personal issue for me, and this issue is even worse when I use my iPhone. Maybe it's the ergonomics, I don't know but I miss not having a VF.
Also, with regards to the compact market, now we're getting full frame compacts - who'd have thought?
And as a side note, my iPhone 5 and 6 images look poor on my 23" monitor, they still can't get blues and reds right in less than perfect light without pixelating
As for smart phones fully taking over? I can't see it. They can engineer them to do the same thing as tech improves, but then they'll need interchangeable lenses and larger sensors, external flashes and then, they simply become mirrorless cameras surely (there's only so much they can push it before the product fundamentally changes from one thing to something else)?
For me, my camera phones are still only devices I use for snap shots, this isn't detrimental to the IQ they can achieve though, most of my photographs can't be achieved from a phone camera (my dogs playing being one of my most photographed subjects!) and I know the OPs comparison isn't scientific, but the shots illustrated are simply just that - snap shots.
However, I wonder when Canon and Nikon will dip a foot in this market? I'm surprised they haven't already, even if it's just designing and producing camera phone lenses, it's a large photography sector after all, now the biggest on a device by device basis. That could be a great bread winner for them, which will keep the cost of larger format stand alone cameras down if the sales margin is big enough.
