I write about photography deals for a living. I’ve spent fifteen years telling people which lenses are worth the money, which bodies hold their value, and which kit you can skip without regret. I want to be straight with you about something I’ve been watching happen for the past two years that I think is going to reshape this entire space.

AI is eating gear value.

Not all at once. Not in one product launch. But quietly, line by line, the things that used to justify spending real money on cameras and lenses are being replicated by phone computation. And the secondhand market is starting to notice.

The Pattern I’m Watching

Three years ago, the differentiator between an iPhone shot and a Sony A7 shot was obvious to anyone who looked twice. Depth of field. Low-light performance. Color science. Subject separation. Dynamic range. The list went on, and every item on the list cost money to fix without a real camera.

Today, that list is shorter. Computational depth of field on phones can pass for a wide-aperture portrait lens in good light. AI noise reduction has closed two stops of the low-light gap. Color science is being learned, not engineered, and Apple and Google are training their pipelines on a billion images you and I don’t get to see. Even subject separation, the holy grail of portrait work, is now a one-tap menu in most camera apps.

Dynamic range is the one place where dedicated sensors still genuinely win. Everything else has been getting closer, year over year.

What This Does To The Used Market

The downstream effect is showing up in resale.

I track used prices for a dozen popular bodies and lenses. The Canon RP, the Sony A6400, the Fuji X-T30, all of these used to hold value remarkably well. Two-year resale was often 70-75% of new. In the last twelve months I’ve seen those numbers slip into the low 60s, with the A6400 in particular dropping faster than its replacement cycle alone would predict.

What’s happening is that the entry-level buyer who would have bought a real camera in 2022 is increasingly opting to upgrade their phone in 2026. The AI processing in the latest flagships is “good enough” for what most people actually do, which is post images on Instagram and send them to family. The body doesn’t make a meaningful difference at that use case anymore.

This shrinks the secondhand pool of buyers, which shrinks resale values, which makes the next-cycle upgrade decision harder for working photographers who relied on selling-up to fund their next body.

Where Real Gear Still Wins

I’m not telling you to sell your camera. I’m telling you to be honest about what your gear is for.

There are use cases where AI-on-phone genuinely cannot compete, and those use cases are exactly where you should be spending your gear money:

Optical depth of field. Real shallow focus from a fast lens still beats every computational version when you look closely. The transition at the edge of a subject, the way out-of-focus highlights render, the natural rolloff, these things are physics-based and AI is still faking them poorly when you push past three feet of subject distance.

Telephoto. Phones cannot give you 200mm of reach without quality loss. Sports, wildlife, anything beyond a typical phone’s optical zoom range is still solidly a real-camera category.

Tethered shooting and studio work. Software workflows, lighting integration, color-managed pipelines, none of this exists meaningfully on phones. If you shoot for clients, your gear earns its place.

Speed. Real cameras still buffer faster, focus faster on small fast subjects, and write to fast cards in ways phones can’t match. Sports and event photography rewards the dedicated body in ways the spec sheet doesn’t fully capture.

If your work falls into one of those categories, your gear is genuinely making images that a phone can’t replicate. Buy with confidence.

If your work doesn’t, you’re paying for capabilities you’re not using, and the used market is going to keep telling you the same thing in declining resale numbers.

What I’m Doing Differently

Honestly, I’m buying less gear and holding it longer.

I’m not pre-ordering bodies anymore. I let new releases settle for six months and then look at what the working-photographer reviews say, not the influencer reviews. I’m spending more on lenses (which hold value better than bodies) and less on bodies (which are now depreciating faster). I’m being honest with readers about which use cases actually need a $3000 camera and which ones don’t.

This is a more disciplined posture than I had three years ago. It’s a direct response to what AI has done to the entry-level end of this market, which then reshapes the middle.

The Honest Question

The honest question for anyone reading this is: what is your camera for?

If you can’t answer that in a sentence, the secondhand market is going to keep telling you that maybe you don’t need it. If you can answer it, and the answer involves any of the use cases above, then spend the money and don’t think twice.

I’ll keep tracking deals. I’ll keep telling you when something is worth the spend. But the playbook has changed, and pretending it hasn’t is how working photographers end up sitting on gear that loses value faster than they can sell it.