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It's a dumb trend. You can mimic 90% of this look with a phone pretty easily by reducing dynamic range and adding some noise in post. Xenon flash is what makes the biggest difference imo.
Decent digicams made by well known brands from mid 2000s onward produce results that really aren't that different from smartphone photos. Ancient crappy late 90s digital point and shoots are a somewhat different story, they give more of a uniquely shit digital look.
I noticed this digicam (and camcorder) trend emerging a while ago, and had a thought of buying some for resale purposes in the future, but realised that market is really saturated, there are tons of forgotten digicams laying around. I doubt their value will ever inflate as much as Mju II and Lomo LC-a for example, and if it does, it's really difficult to guess which model will be sought after. Years ago though, I ended up buying a few old Fuji super CCD sensor digicams I managed to find for cheap, Finepix 710 and Finepix 700. They make nice soft photos with for the time unbelievable dynamic range. I'm sure some would think it "looks like film"... that CCD cult idea is what grinds my gears way more than this zoomie digicam thing.
Why do some people claim CCD "looks like film" now? I'm old enough to remember when those cameras were new and back in the day nobody thought they do. I did notice the difference in the look when I switched from CCD Nikon D80 to CMOS Canon 60D, but calling it film like is a huge stretch. What was very strange to me is that older CCD did look better than newer CMOS, smoother, warmer, less noisy, but only on base iso, as soon as you went over it cmos started showing it's strengths (that's why every manufacturer switched).
