Just a thought, but in a few years all old ugly photos can be refined, upscaled, content edited, rotated and animated - in 32K ultra. It could even recognize the exact mobile model a random photo was taken with and pre-set the best filters.
It prolly won’t matter much if the photo is taken with a hundred year old handheld plate camera or a brand new digital mounted one - it will look great regardless.
Are you sure photo hardware is the way to go ? I think I would just use whatever you already have and upgrade the pictures later when the software allows it.