Over a quarter of photos now taken with smartphones, according to NPD

I'll 'fess up -- on our wish list earlier this week, I was the one who asked (reasonably, I thought) for an Apple Camera. I've been shopping for a DSLR lately, and while the quality of some cameras are great, the interfaces are pretty terrible. I really do wish that Apple would step in and redefine the digital camera interface, matching it with the quality of a professional DSLR lens. But I am probably in the minority at this point, because for most people (as a few of you said in the comments), smartphones are enough.

Indeed, according to a new report from NPD, the percentage of photos taken with a smartphone has jumped from 17% to 27% in the last year, which means more than a quarter of photos taken nowadays (and monitored by NPD, obviously) are taken with smartphones. And those photos are coming at the expense of traditional cameras, which have dropped from 52 to 44 percent.

Most of that image volume is camcorders and lower-end point and shoot devices, however, says NPD. I agree with this -- I bought a point and shoot camera about six years ago, but even that shoots with fewer megapixels and less quality than the iPhone 4 I have (and the iPhone 4S' camera is even better than that). If you have a fairly modern smartphone, or one of Apple's current iPhones, there's really no reason to invest in a point-and-shoot camera, unless you're aiming for one of the high-end features like quick shooting or a zoom lens. A smartphone, as NPD suggests, is almost always "good enough."

That said, I've been playing around with a few DSLR cameras trying to figure out which one I want, and I will say that the ability to manually control the finer aspects of photography, not to mention the quality of a shot that you get directly from a lens, still gives me reason to sometimes want an actual DSLR over a smartphone, and obviously professional photographers need a dedicated camera rather than (or in addition to) something attached to a cell phone.

But maybe, as Apple's on-device cameras get better, the company will end up closing that gap even further. Maybe, if Apple continues to progress the way it has over the next few years, we won't need a separate camera device at all.