My Digital Life: the camera came back, and the thing people are escaping is the phone

My Digital Life — a column on living well with the technology we’ve got.

The best camera most people have ever owned is already in their pocket, and it came free with the phone. So camera sales climbing again makes no sense. They’re climbing anyway.

This has been building. Worldwide camera shipments rose in 2024 and rose again in 2025 — the first back-to-back increase in nearly twenty years. For scale: the market had been shrinking in a straight line, from about 25 million cameras shipped in 2017 to under 8 million by 2023. Everyone assumed the phone had won. Then it turned around.

And the comeback isn’t coming from expensive professional kit. It’s the cheap little point-and-shoots leading it — the exact pocket cameras the smartphone was supposed to have wiped out. That category jumped around 30% in a single year and is still climbing. The buyers are mostly young: teenagers and twenty-somethings who have never known a world without a phone camera, deciding they want something else.

It’s bigger than cameras

The cameras are the visible edge of something wider. 2026 keeps being called the year of “analog” — a swing back toward things you can hold. Vinyl sales passed a billion dollars again. Film photography is booming, and more than a third of the world’s film shooters are now under thirty. Basic “dumbphones” with no apps have climbed for three years straight. Print, paper, board games, handwritten journals — all back.

The phrase now used for the wider shift is “from bits to atoms” or “Its from bits”: away from a life that exists only as software and screens, toward things with weight. It started as a money story — investment moving out of pure software and into hardware and the physical economy — but it captures something anyone can feel. After years of everything being a file, people want objects again. A camera is the most personal version of that: an object in your hands that does one thing you can see.

What they’re reaching for

The choice of camera says a lot. Many aren’t buying anything new — they’re hunting down twenty-year-old Sony Cyber-Shots and similar early digital compacts on resale sites, the kind whose older sensor renders colour and light in a slightly rough, imperfect way.

The imperfection is exactly what they’re after. A phone photo is processed the instant you take it: software sharpens the picture, smooths skin, brightens faces, balances the sky, and hands you something flawless and slightly lifeless. A cheap old camera does none of that. You get flash glare, a little blur, colours that aren’t quite right. It reads as a moment someone lived, not an image a computer finished. After a decade of everyone’s pictures looking identically perfect, imperfect looks like life.

There’s a reason underneath. A camera does one thing. It cannot buzz. No notifications, no feed, no like-counter, no way to fire the picture into the world the second you take it. The photo just sits on the card until later. For a generation that has never taken a photo without the option to broadcast it and count the reaction, that silence is what they’re paying for.

What leaving the phone behind gives you

You don’t need to be nineteen, or chasing a look, to be a part of this. What a separate camera changes has little to do with picture quality. It’s the separation.

When the camera is the phone, taking a picture and vanishing into the phone are the same motion. You lift it to take a photo, and thirty seconds later you’re reading email — you didn’t decide to, the device carried you there. A camera can’t do that. You take the shot, lower it, and you’re still standing in your own moment. It can only see. It can’t pull you somewhere else.

It changes what you keep, too. A phone will happily hold twelve near-identical shots of one moment, none of which you’ll open again. Pick up a camera with a small memory card and a viewfinder you hold to your eye, and you shoot fewer, more deliberately — and you end up with a handful you return to instead of a bottomless roll you never look at.

Before you go looking

None of this means your phone camera is bad. It’s superb, and for catching the thing in front of you right now, nothing beats the one already in your hand. Keep using it. The idea is a second, slower mode — not throwing the fast one away.

A word on the hype. The viral models are overpriced: the moment a particular old camera trends, resellers push it to daft levels for a twenty-year-old point-and-shoot, and you can end up paying for the trend rather than the tool. But hype isn’t the enemy. The camera that makes you want to pick it up and carry it everywhere is enjoying its hype for a reason. Whatever pulls you to a particular one — legacy, connection, patronage, the thrill of the relic hunt — if it gets you out shooting and it enriches the experience, it’s all good. Just go in knowing what the sticker is really worth. And you don’t need the trendy one to get the part that matters: almost any old compact, or an older “proper” camera, gives you a device that only takes pictures. The separation is what you’re buying; the badge on the front barely matters.

If you want to try it, the low-risk way in is a used compact for the price of a nice dinner, or borrowing one before you buy. Leave the phone in your pocket for an outing, shoot on the camera, and notice how the moment felt, not just how the photos came out. The numbers can’t measure that, and it’s most of what’s driving this.

Nobody needs any of this, the same way nobody needs a Ferrari. But need was never the point. A camera won’t hand you a better version of what your phone already does — it hands you a different experience. It’s unashamedly yours to decide; there’s no right way to do this and no wrong one. To live is to experience. However you come to it, enjoy the ride.

Verify it yourself: the camera-shipment figures come from CIPA, the Japanese industry body that counts every camera the major makers ship — its data is public at cipa.jp; PetaPixel and Digital Camera World have tracked the compact comeback through 2026 (search “CIPA compact cameras 2026”). For the wider analog swing, Fortune and Vogue have both covered 2026’s “year of analog” (search “2026 analog trend film cameras”), and vinyl’s billion-dollar year is in the RIAA’s annual figures at riaa.com. “From bits to atoms” is the investment world’s shorthand for the same tilt toward the physical — search the phrase for the business write-ups.

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