The advantages of point and shoot over DSLR

A smaller sensor might not seem to be a great characteristic of a camera, but that’s arguably better. Overall, DSLRs aren’t much better, and maybe even only as good, as compact cameras, with a few exceptions. I think that it’s great that DSLRs usually have higher DR than smaller cameras, but compact cameras still have an advantage: you can use a quick aperture, without needing to increase DOF, an aspect that’s critical sometimes in macro photography. Also, compact cameras offer a higher crop factor than cameras with larger sensors, meaning that it’s easier to take a photo of something that’s very small. To get expansive DOF with an SLR at macro distances while using quick apertures, you’d need to resort to focus stacking, increasing the number of images that you need. A compact camera can more easily capture expansive DOF, in a single photo, which is useful or even necessary when there’s a limited amount of light, or for anything that’s moving. So, you can’t say necessarily that a compact camera is worse for low light photography than an SLR, despite the higher DR of SLRs. For many situations, producing the perfect image consists of various aspects relating to image quality. For instance, when the sun’s setting behind some clouds and I’m trying to get a photo of a sitting fly, and I don’t have any other light source, for the SLR I might be able to up the ISO to be able to use a slower aperture; for the compact, small sensor camera, this is less of an issue, albeit the compact performs more poorly at high ISO; so, one of the photos could have more noise (grain) than the other, but the tradeoff here is that the noisier photo has better DOF. Unfortunately however, compact cameras, unlike SLRs, can’t give you the opposite, which can be desirable, decreased DOF. So the isolation of details isn’t as possible in the compact camera, unless people start implementing computational photography. You can create the effect of shallow DOF, even using Instagram, but this is simply not the same as real DOF. These days, there has been success in creating a time lapse video from gigapixel photos; if you can do that, then you might just be able to create a time lapse using the Brenizer method. We could in fact theoretically create a video while implementing the Brenizer method, but how could this work when there’s movement?!