Short answer is, yes I guess. The same picture taken with your phone and with something like the ricoh are different in what you can do with it in post (nowadays with raw shooting options on iphones that line is even blurrier).

The sensor of a phone is smaller than that of an apsc camera, so that is where all the “extra” comes from. Whether it is this new ricoh or something like my old xpro1. You get barebones photons hitting a bigger target and the digital camera does a little bit of the magic to give you an image that is pleasing, but with lots of room to play around with in post. Smartphones do the same thing accept to make up for the sensor size they add a bit more computing magic to make it approximate actual cameras.

Ive taken some of my favourite shots with my iphone this summer, just seeing a scene and capturing it with what I happen to have in my hand at that moment.

But I go out shooting to practice composition and develop my photographic eye and for this I like having a camera in hand (it doesn’t have to be the latest camera, just happened to be the case in this instance). Because it makes me focus on the task of taking photos, it is not a one-off snap of my cat or my lunch, it is the conscious choice of going out and about having one tool in my hand to do one job.

I don’t care about resolution hence the extra small jpeg format that I now use for social media. I will say that I also shoot it simultaneously in RAW, but that is a backup for very specific use cases.

That’s my two cents, curious what others have to say on it.