Cell Phone Camera or DSLR?

I've been a moderately competent amateur photographer most of my adult life, at least since I got my first SLR in the 1970s and then spent five years working at a camera store, which gave me chance to work with everything from point and shoot cameras to Hasselblads. I now have several digital cameras of varying vintages, the best being a Nikon D5200 DSLR.

But I still take most of my pictures with my cell phone.

There are many reasons for that; the main one being convenience. I almost always have my phone on my person or nearby. The Nikon lives in a camera bag in my office and it's big and bulky and not as convenient to use.

SF author John Scalzi is an avid (and very good) photographer and when his DSLR died, he was wondering if he really needed a serious camera or whether he could get by with the one on his Pixel 4 cell phone. He wrote about that at length on his blog. But convenience isn't everything.

Or to put it another way: cell phone cameras have gotten good enough that they will do 90% to 95% of everything that the average person would ever want out of a camera. And that is an unalloyed good thing! Everyone should have a camera that flexible and useful to them. But if you’re an avid photographer (or a professional photographer), you spend so much more of your time than the average person in the 5%-to-10% area where cell phones fall down, that you become painfully aware of how far they have yet to go, regardless of how far they have come. This isn’t about snobbery (or more accurately, shouldn’t be) — it’s about use cases. For how I use cameras, my Pixel phone, as wonderful as the photography out of it is on a regular basis, still can’t give me everything I want and need, and it’s frustrating for me that it can’t.

As for me, I would still like a "real" camera. The Nikon is OK as far as it goes, but I find it hard to use on the fly. I lust after one of the Fuji X-series camers like the X-T30 or the new X-T4. That's probably out of my price range, but I'm keeping my eyes out for a deal on one of the older models, like the X-T20. The main reasons I'm interesed in those are the compact size and the control interface, which is similar to the film cameras that I learned photography on.