I expect noise to get lower and lower and low light performance to increase, leading to sharper (due to less noise reduction) and less noisier images in the coming years, though, due to the small available physical space and small sensor probably always a step behind larger sensors (like the ones one would find in larger cameras).
Maybe it will be possible to close that gap? For many situations that gap is already quite small when, e.g. comparing many typical image viewing situations with images made under good lighting conditions. On close examination images from cameras with larger sensors would typically still be sharper, though, mostly due to them being able to have a higher resolution with lower noise (though, as I said, in many typical viewing applications those differences are, always depending on the photos and in which context it was made, sometimes imperceptible).
What will not be possible are zoom lenses, interchangeable lenses or, really, any kind of freedom with the lenses at all. Probably also unrealistic is a variable aperture and a sensor size that would allow one to play with depth of field in the first place. That is a fundamental difference that cannot be overcome within the physical envelope of a smartphone that is still recognizable a smartphone and not something else, some weird smartphone camera hybrid.
All that DSLR wankery is kind of pointless, though. The goal here is to make the very goddamn best camera that the physical envelope allows for and smartphones have done an astonishingly great job at that. Those are awesome cameras, no ifs and buts about it. Given what they have to work with they are unabashedly awesome.
DSLRs and other large-sensor cameras are fundamentally different beasts. Comparing them or even holding them up as some sort of great goal for smartphone cameras seems kinda … dumb? … I don’t know, pointless? … short-sighted? to me.
While true, also false.
Take something like the Sony Nex series; mirrorless digital system camera. Not much larger than a (big) smart phone. Sure, bigger than an iPhone. But it might not be that difficult to fit the "rest" of a smart phone into one of those. In fact, it probably have all the parts: battery, (touch?)screen, microphone, wireless radio (not cellular, but that could be changed), speaker (maybe needs to be added).
But a better way to go would probably be some kind of light-field technology. I think that holds more promise for better pictures in a similar form factor, and the possibility of ease of use.
The device itself can obviously be very, very small. Obviously. No one is disputing that. But the lens is the issue if the sensor gets larger and a smartphone with Sony Nex sensor size (APS-C) is impossible.
There is nowhere to go with the available space. Not if you want to keep the smartphone actually smartphone sized.
Also worth noting is that Sony cameras already run a customized and locked-down version of Android, though you wouldn't know from using it.
I think that taking a classical digital still image on a tiny sensor is probably soon going to hit an "ISO-wall", but so far we haven't started doing much trickery with the images apart from simple noise/sharpness/toning treatments.
I think smartphones will lead the development of "cheats" to get better images. Imagine taking a portrait of 3 people in low-light by exposing a 1 second film (maybe including a couple of flashes). The processor then works (very hard) to build together single frame in which everyone's eyes are open, the moving subjects are frozen and sharp, and the shadow detail is pulled from the dark background by averaging out the noise from the thousands of frames.
I think the accelerometer should be used to trace the movement during this exposure, which can be used in combination with the anti-shake blur removal algorithms which are being introduced into various programs now.
Add to this some other technologies like deep learning that can be used to "guess" what's in a region of an image where we have noisy, obscured or OOF data.
I'm optimist, I think we will see not better classical images, but just better images. There will be lots of crazy "three-eyes"-artifacts produced by this, just like we see when programs try to stitch panoramas. Also, it will upset photography purists to no end. It will question the entire notion of what a photograph is.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/01/28/apple-granted-two-...
And then there's the option of having multiple cameras taking the same shot, with different focal lengths (whether fixed or zoom) on each. You're still limited in dynamic range by the photosite size, but as we're seeing now, that's often not so huge a problem in many scenarios. One startup working on such a principle is Light:
http://www.imaging-resource.com/news/2015/04/18/photo-startu...
It seems like the opposite of short-sighted to me; to look beyond the limitations of today's technology and find ways to make the impossible incrementally more achievable over time.
Where we are now is the "nowhere to go" of not long ago.
I had a Kodak DC-1. The notion of "a digital camera the size of a sugar cube" was laughable. Now we've got something even smaller taking pictures most people can't distinguish from a DSLR.
I expect the next breakthrough will be using the display itself as a platform for a phased-array "light as electromagnetic waves" sensor, allowing a software-defined virtual lens for a large-format imager (and oh so much more).
Nowhere to go? We've done amazing things with that nothing for the last 30 years. We're not gonna stop.
The lack of interchangeable lenses, manual control, and RAW files will always limit the appeal of camera phones for pros and more advanced amateurs.
The time it takes between me pressing the shutter button until the camera records the shot as usable data -- this is the important factor. This is what is holding phones back. On phones, I have to wait sometimes up to 0.25-0.5 seconds or even infuriatingly more between the time when I tap the software "capture" reticle and it records the image. This is what is unacceptable in modern phone cameras. By that time the cat has moved, the play is over, my hand has shaken.
On dSLRs this is refreshingly fast. I half-press to focus, complete-press and now I have the image, nearly instantly from a human perception of time, even given the mechanical slowness of the mirror movement. I know the limiting factor is for all practical purposes my own reflexes. For the phone, I know it's crap hardware/software.
Every year I get a new camera (along with new features) from Apple for the cost of $200-300 (New Contract Free Price - Selling my old phone used). That is nearly impossible to do with my SLRs.
For serious travel photography, I enjoy using my 5D2, but there really is no comparison between using my full kit, and using my iphone.
I prefer my iphone.
