Minolta A1 vs. iPhone 13 Pro, or the king is naked

Rishi Sanyal wrote:

Your setup with 2/3" sensor, 50mm focal length, F4.5, with a min focus distance of - and I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt & suggesting you shot at the closest focus distance possible - let's say 0.5m, gives you a DOF of 2cm.

The iPhone image, shot at about 2cm w/ a 13mm F15.5 equiv lens has a DOF of .08cm, 25x less than yours. In fact, as I'm composing the frame it's wildly changing as the camera-subject distance changes from handshake & subject/photographer movement. Not only is it difficult to compose the frame, it's amazing AF can even keep up. Naturally, I have no control over what's in focus, and manual focus it out of the question.

With that much needed perspective, and taking into account the much smaller sensor on the iPhone, are the results surprising? Or, in context, are they perhaps impressive, if you assess the detail at the focus plane and consider the roughly 25x less depth-of-field than your example?

(Please correct me if I'm off on my calculations or assumptions)

Wow, why so defensive? I wasn't attacking you, I was pointing out how phone cameras definitely didn't break the laws of physics and they definitely are not better than advanced digital compact cameras, let along interchangeable lens cameras, despite all the claims from phone makers.

First of all, I mentioned that the iris in my shot would be slightly out of focus and there may be some motion blur.

Replying to your comment in the gallery (not here), yes, I shot my wife's picture straight on and you shot from an angle. I clearly said that the iris in my picture is somewhat out of focus, but still shows some detail. Your picture shows lack of detail even within the focus plane.

Focal distance in EXIF data shows 25 cm distance (shortest possible).

I used this DOF calculator:
https://www.vision-doctor.com/en/optical-calculations/calculation-depth-of-field.html

I input 3.4375 µm CoC diameter (equal to pixel pitch of 5 mpix 2/3" sensor), 50 mm focal length, f/4.56 and 250 mm working distance for my shot.

iPhone 13 Pro data: 4.032×3.024 mm sensor (1/3.27" tube size). Pixel pitch equal to 1 µm, so diagonal pixel count is 5040, and the diagonal length is exactly 5.04 mm, which means focal length equivalent is 8.585× nominal. For 13 mm equivalent focal length, the actual focal length is 1.514 mm.
For your iPhone shot, I input: 1.575 µm (equal to pixel pitch of the iPhone UWA camera sensor if it had 5 megapixel instead of 12), focal length 1.514 mm, aperture f/1.782, 20 mm working distance.

The resulting total depth of field for A1 is 0.78 mm and for iPhone is 0.98 mm. If I drop the CoC diameter to 1 µm, the DoF is 0.63 mm, but then we'd be comparing pixel sharpness, not sharpness of a resolution-independent medium like print of full screen. Even if you wanted to argue for per-pixel sharpness, DoF is in the same order of magnitude and nowhere close to 25× difference.

Oh, and the Minolta out of camera JPEG didn't have any fancy processing, let alone computational photography features and in my opinion, still comes out ahead.