When reading in photo forums and watching youtube videos about photography these days, I often get the impression that compact camera's are a thing of the past. Since most images these days are produced by smart phones, compact camera's seem to be a dead end. Personally. I hardly shot any images with a phone, because I did not consider image quality good enough for my purposes. However, I recently bought a new smart phone, the Samsung S7, and I have seen some reasonable results from the front camera of this phone on Instagram. Now it seems time to do some test shots my self. It is hard to judge the actual image quality on Instagram because of the small formats intended for looking at the images on mobile devices. In order to taste the right mood, I did only use camera settings and some Instagram filtering as pre/post processing. Except for the last one taken in Gouda these shots are from Rotterdam.

This image below was shot with the S7 front camera using the "pro" option and stored in memory as a DNG (digital negative) file. The file was developed using my routines for raw files in general, using Adobe camera raw and Photoshop. I think detail and sharpness is much better, when looked at in screen filling formats, compared to the JPG filtered via camera settings and / or Instagram filters.

In conclusion, I think, although in good light the S7 can produce acceptable results especially when shooting DNG, I still very much prefer shooting with a dedicated camera. And at the moment the smallest ones I own, the Sony RX100M4 and even the Panasonic GM5 equipped with a small lens, also fit in a pocket of my coat.