ELI5: What is the difference and/or benefit of a DLSR camera vs. a standard phone camera?

The way the sensor is read and the format that this data is transmitted are very different. Most DSLR's have a lot of low level functionality broken out in software for the end user to manipulate. Your phone camera streamlines most of the operation and provides a compressed data stream output with very few settings options available.

The actual analog to digital process and transmission of data happen extremely fast in a camera sensor. A lot of work is required to take manual control of the process. The hardware/firmware/software development cycle for a phone sensor is very short and the majority of focus is on a standard set of features that work with generic drivers with little low level control functionality.

If the documentation was available for all of the hardware, it would be possible to add a lot of the same low level features to phone sensors, but most of these systems are undocumented, meaning you don't completely own the hardware, and they were made to fill landfills.

/r/explainlikeimfive Thread