Back in 2009 (only ten years ago as I write this) I had a "fold-up" mobile phone. I bought it to make telephone calls - the obvious reason. Then I found that I could also send text messages and that it had "predictive text" (which almost invariably produced results that were risible). It also had a built in camera.

There is an old photographic saying that "the best camera is the one you have with you". That's true enough, if the alternative is no photo at all and, clearly, the phone makers recognised that and decided to join the pocket camera market.

Now, let's look at two images taken early in 2009 at the local football ground, where a fleet of helicopters was based while being used to control a large bushfire running in a nearby National Park. The local volunteer Rural Fire Brigade, of which I was a member, was called in to act as standby airport firefighters. Thankfully everything went well and I had time to take some photos. I hadn't used my phone for photographs until then and I found the images it took were poor quality, to say the least. The first photo below does not warrant enlarging beyond thumbnail size.
Now, don't get me wrong - I'm far from interested in giving up my 'real' camera in favour of using a phone though they do indeed produce quite a good result in good conditions. As might be expected, if the ISO is raised, the image becomes both soft and noisy. But, if there's a photo waiting to be taken and the only thing available is a smart phone, then it's reassuring to know there's a good chance of a usable result. I took this final image (clickable) as a test with the phone's "night" setting. It's not great quality but still surprised me - the settings, after I checked, were 0.5 sec, f1.7, and ISO 12,800!