The vast, vast, vast majority of pictures are viewed on a 6ish inch screen. You'll have real trouble telling much difference there.

Now if you're blowing things up into a poster, it becomes much more apparent, granted, but it's not a common use case.

not only that, but Google magic eraser made my holiday photos appear like i had my own private island and yacht and i was always happy and smiling and looking at the camera and the sunset and skies, oh my! it just lights up my instas. i don't get what real cameras even do, they have something to do with reality?

seriously though, not all the kids will be coopted into this, and will find cameras are still instruments for artistic expression. but for that we hardly need dpreview and its obsession with optical sharpness and perpetually reviewing every camera in existence as "almost good enough"

You might have it mixed up with DXOMark. DPReview is more "you can sort of tell the difference side by side, but who does that outside a review? They're both good"

If the use case was a 6ish inch screen, that was overkill for medium/large format, which is parent's point.

and film photographers weren't as serious as daguerreotype photographers in the 1840s.

the market shrunk because gatekeeping photographers were insufferable and tone deaf and everyone ignored them because they had an accessible solution that was good enough.

if you want to pursue a convoluted process for self fulfillment, the choice is yours, but almost nobody else will care about the output of your photos or your fine tuned process.

This is my standard for serious photography: https://petapixel.com/2022/05/22/photographer-builds-giant-c...

If you aren't shooting giant format wet plates in your own custom-modified darkroom bus, then you're just an amateur like the rest of us.

The best camera is the one you have ready.