I moved from 40D to M. I have never look back. Cell phone is a good tool as long as you look at the picture on the cell phone. My wife uses the 7S and I use the M50 and M2 when we travel. When we look at the picture on our device. a lot of time the picture from 7S actually beats the M's, for both indoor and out door, especially indoor. After we go home and look at them at the full computer screen (24") the table turns. At pixel level, it is even worse. I am still searching for an anwer. May be someone in the forum can shine some light on it
The display on the cell phone is developped to be very good with a lot of pixels in a very tiny area (same level of pixel the phone camera has), where the display on your camera is just a control display with less pixels, to frame the picture and check if parameters are well adjusted. Even if they made big progress on camera screens lately, they stay below a phone, because it is not the purpose.
The number of pixel on the cell phone is high, but with a little sensor. It fit perfectly for a little screen with high definition, for both, pixels are very tiny. But light per pixel is very low and to compensate the loss of light they make aftertreatments that lower again the quality of the picture, but fit perfectly for their screen. No secret, all little artificial effects you can find on a phone are lowering the quality of the picture (but they are smart enough to make it not visible on the phone screen).
Then if you want to display this kind of picture in a bigger screen, even if the number of pixel is the same, you will make the defects biggers visually. You can experience it just printing a phone picture on postcard size.The result will be bad and not homogeneous. Because making a picture bigger than the original shot is the baddest thing you want to do. You can limit the loss using a good software, but it is never good enough. In most cases, the way you display (computer OS, print website) will drive the oversize and you will not be able to control it or make adjustments, so it is often bad.
In the other hand, the picture from the camera is standardized and calibrated by the manufacturer to fit the more common and wider screens or uses like your 24".
If you check your pictures from the M into the phone you should allready see a better comparative level, but not yet totally in favor of the camera because depends on the OS/software/app/website that will reduce the picture to display it. Esay to eperiment with gradients or over exposed areas on instagram or facebook.
This is the proof these medias (mainly phone app) reduce the quality of your picture when you post it, so a big quality for this kind of media is useless. The phone manufacturers know it, and this is their main market, so they do what is necessary for it but not more.
If you process your pictures from your camera on a software like lightroom, you can export it in the best ratio quality/size for the use you plan after, so with a camera, it is possible to fit perfectly a phone screen, but also a good quality print or wider screens.
To sum up:
- Phone picture are ok for phone/phone app use only, no tool can adapt keeping quality for bigger sizes.
- Camera picture are ok for almost every uses when you use the good tool to fit the size.