When you care enough to look at the pictures again.

Cue the chorus, strike up the band, all together now: “Why would anybody buy a camera when they already have a phone that has a camera in it WHYYYY???”

It’s true, phone cams are fine for most purposes in today’s document-everything culture. Show off your righteous cheeseburger, your irresistible duckface, your toddler’s Magic Marker masterpiece drawn on his own face. Run it through a filter, 'gram it or 'book it, harvest the affirmations of your peers. What the picture looks like is beside the point. Ten minutes later you’ll have forgotten all about it.

Now imagine you’ve hired a photographer to take your wedding photos, and she shows up with nothing but an iPhone. Or the same for your kids’ school pictures. You wouldn’t stand for it, right?

OK, then. You admit some moments in life are worth capturing in higher-quality images. The only thing left to decide is where to draw that line. Our own @JasonToon didn’t bother packing a nice camera on his family trips to Amsterdam and Mount Rainier. Only when he printed the photos out did he realize his mistake. Oh, the pictures look alright, because if you take enough photos in a picturesque place, some of them are bound to be decent. But they’re not as vibrant as his family’s memories, so they don’t look at them much. Phone pics don’t capture the magic, really, do they?

At this price, you don’t have to capture that much magic to be worth it. Use it a few times a year. Remember the really special moments with pictures that are so clear, sharp, vivid, and beautiful you won’t just dump them, forgotten, onto some hard drive, never to be seen again. And you’ll still have your phone in your pocket for all those times when you need to take a picture of where you parked in the airport garage or whatever.