You can't get RAW files out of that sensor (well, maybe someone will hack something together, but definitely not out of the box). Also, to rely on Lightroom, iPhoto, or any post-processor to get your photos to look good is a stupid strategy. People who take pictures with phone cameras by and large aren't at all interested in tweaking them later.

The onus is even stronger than on DSLRs to get the defaults and automatic settings right, since you're dealing with a demographic that is even less inclined to tweak, but will judge the results nonetheless.

I think the criticism is completely fair.

I think he means white balance. And since both cameras don’t output raw files Lightroom won’t help you (much) with that. Besides: Consumer cameras should generally have a good automatic white balance since the vast majority of people will never bother to manually tweak.

That whole sensor/lens mixup is probably an honest mistake. He was talking about software vs hardware and not really going so much into detail as that making a distinction between sensor and lens would matter. He was talking about the whole sensor and lens package as a whole.

RAW is good, but you can still get some benefit in crappy cellphone JPGs.

I've had to make batches of personnel photos taken with an iPhone look presentable for a web page on several occasions. A few seconds to set the white balance and normalize the orientation and scale makes a significant difference. It doesn't make it into a great photo, but nothing short of going back with an SLR is going to do that.

Also part of why I think claims about the awesomeness of the iPhone camera should be taken with a pound of salt. It's a fairly nice cell camera, but it's still a cell camera.

Sure, there is some room to play but with JPG it’s possible that some photos are not recoverable. If you get the raw output auto white balance is basically completely irrelevant (beyond convenience). No matter how badly the white balance screwed up, it’s always possible to recover (since it’s all software and you are working with the original input data).

But I don’t think it’s necessary to go that far. Even a budget DSLR that is perfectly capable of shooting raw should have great auto white balance: Most people don’t want to endlessly tweak photos. Better auto white balance means better photos, even if theoretically everything could be fixed in post.

Oh, and just because smartphone cameras are nowhere near as good as DSLRs doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful to compare them with each other, doesn’t mean one can’t be much better than another one.

"it’s always possible to recover"

Only if the initial exposure was good.

See, I wanted to mention that but completely forgot about it while writing. (Still, you might have been a little more charitable with me. I think the context made it pretty clear what I was talking about.)

I was only talking about color, not exposure. (Of course there is only so much white balance can do – but if you get the raw data you can do just as much with the color as the camera, heck, you can even throw more processing power at the problem than the camera ever could.)

Actually, a bad lens can have an effect on color reproduction by not letting all light through equally.

Factors like chromatic aberration are going to be a problem long before relative quantum efficiency.