I like taking pictures, and some years back, I bought a starter-level DSLR—the Fuji X-E3. It's a well-reviewed APS-C camera, and I enjoy taking photos with it. I have four lenses for it, including a decent zoom lens.
It's a wonderful camera…but it basically died to me some time in mid July of 2025. Why then? Because that's when my wife and I were starting to put together our lists of stuff to pack in the car for our 7,000+ mile adventure.
As I considered the Fuji, and what a great job it would do at some of the places we were visiting—especially having the big zoom at Mt. Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial—I put the camera kit on my list. But then, as the trip got closer and I thought about it more, I chose to leave the Fuji at home.
I'm sure I could have taken some wonderful photos with it. But I also would have had to carry at least the camera everywhere we went. And I'd have to either choose one lens for each day's event, or carry the entire camera bag with me so I could swap lenses—which is always a time- and space-consuming process. With the amount of stuff we were going to see, and walking we were going to do, neither choice seemed appealing to me. Add in the fact that I'd also have to keep track of the camera and/or kit whenever we went out to eat, or sat down for a few minutes to look at some scenery, and it became even less appealing.
In the end, the camera kit didn't make the cut—it sat here at home while we toured the country. The camera I did take? My iPhone 16 Pro.
Did I miss the DSLR? I definitely did at the two monuments, as the zoom would have been really nice to have. But other than that, I didn't miss it at all. My iPhone got every shot I wanted it to get, it was always with me, and when I wasn't using it for photos, it just slipped into my pocket. Are the photos as nice as they could have been with my Fuji? Probably not, but they are more than good enough for looking back on to remember the adventure.
I will probably keep the Fuji, but it's clearly lost its role as a main memory-saving machine. The iPhone's photos are more than good enough, and its ease of use and portability are unbeatable. Even more telling is that I only saw a handful of DSLR cameras across all the places we visited—phones have clearly won this war for everyone other than professionals and ultra-serious amateur photographers.