Another thing I hate about a lot of recent camera hardware is the move toward cheap plastic, everywhere.
I shoot pretty much only with old manual-focus lenses from days of yore. Most of my lenses are older than I am. They're all made of metal, built like a tank, and way easier to use. No fidgety UIs or menus to manipulate, perfectly calibrated infinity focus (slap the focus ring to the end until it stops and landscapes are perfectly sharp 100% of the time), rock-solid, don't break under pressure inside my bag, and they just work, no questions asked.
Totally agree about the lack of Arca-Swiss adoption by camera manufacturers. Camera bodies and heavy lenses could easily have a built-in Arca-Swiss shape at the bottom and still have a 1/4-20" screw hole for people who need it.
Concerning arca mount, I would prefer the camera without it. I wouldn't want the extra bulk when using no mount. I'm not seeing the problem with screwing a mount plate on and leaving it there. If you really want it to be permanent, get some Super Glue. Modular design in camera equipment makes for compatibility, adaptability, reusability, etc.
On this note, I am a professional photographer and have worked professionally with any form of digital, video, emulsion movie or still camera on the market and never have seen rubber on the bottom of a camera that i can remember. Maybe some have it but it's always on the plate if anything in my experience.
Screw mount is lame design I agree but arca mount is not at all a replacement for it. It's a different mount option, which itself requires a modular attachment solution which the screw mount is.
The Arca Swiss mount isn't even among the best quick-release plate systems, when it comes down to it. You could argue for a long plate back in the days when lenses were mostly unit-focus and the CG would shift; these days with just about everything being internal focus, a fully-captured plate is an immensely better solution than a dovetail plate (hopefully) captured with clamping pressure in one dimension.
As for the GP' complaint about plastics, it just shows that there's no experience there with minor dents requiring major repairs that would have been harmless bounces with a filled polycarbonate. Probably never dealt much with focus shifts or lens element alignment problems in severe heat or cold either. They use appropriate plastics on the pro-grade stuff where they use it because it's better, not because it's cheaper.
At the time that was my deciding factor picking between canon rebel something vs nikon d80 (2006, when it was brand new). Photo quality-wise they were so well matched, until i read a review where the author said, the canon is plastic and the nikon metal and the metal makes you feel you have a real tool in your hands instead of toy. (also i'm not the most careful person metal stronger then plastic, typically)
Given that you're often hand holding a camera, being lighter is a significant advantage, it can often be the difference between a stable or a blurred shot.
And good plastics are plastic in the traditional sense of the word: if you drop them, they'll absorb the force by deforming and then spring back into place. Metals deform permanently. In a car that's an advantage, you can just hammer it back into place. With a precision instrument a bent tool is just as bad as a broken one.
I don't know how a Rebel compares against a Nikon in a drop test -- I've dropped my Rebel without issues, but no major drops, luckily. But I can compare the pre-unibody MacBook Pros with Thinkpads from the same era. In the store, the original MacBook Pros felt and looked a lot more solid, but they were really crappy cases. OTOH, the ThinkPad's were tanks. Their plastic cases had a magnesium frame, giving them the best of both worlds. Of course, once Apple switched to unibody and ThinkPad's have started to compromise to compete on thickness the story hasn't been so clear.
That's true an over years read many people that dropped their canon rebel and they were surprised it didn't shatter into a million pieces and often still worked as good as before. Some brought it to service centers just to be sure.
I never dropped my camera though, but i do run into things a lot, doors, doorposts, fences and most of all tiny people.
Though with a bit typical lens 70-200 or some people often bring, i doubt the difference in weight of the body plastic vs metal is really noticeable. (plastic rebel XTi 556 grams vs 668 grams metal nikon d80)
I'm not the most careful person with my camera gear. All my bodies and lenses have taken some blows here and there from, as i said, doorways, people, brick wall corners etc, flew through the car once, i just never let it slid from my hands on the ground or something.
Typical i have a shoulder or wrist strap, ads (no im not affiliated) peakdesigns' or blackrapids' straps and wrist bands
If any reading this still use the neckband with their cams, checkout black rapids systems or peak designs. It's so much more comfortable then 2+ kg dangling from your neck.
> Given that you're often hand holding a camera, being lighter is a significant advantage, it can often be the difference between a stable or a blurred shot.
> And good plastics are plastic in the traditional sense of the word: if you drop them, they'll absorb the force by deforming and then spring back into place.
That's not what I was taught plastic meant. I was taught both plastic and elastic materials deform under force, but the elastic ones (not the plastic ones) return to their original form once the force is gone …
If you drop an iPhone hard enough it wil dent. Drop a polycarbonate phone: no problem. Windows phone wasn't a great OS, but the Lumia line were absolute tanks.
Well, a great many connectors (even, or rather, especially industrial ones) are made from PA6 or 66 with some glass fiber fill; including the actual contact carriers (if they are a separate part). FR4 is somewhat hygroscopic as well; moisture expansion causes real problems for some applications. Never heard of issues with PA connectors.
"Plastic" actually stands for "thermoplastic", meaning they can be easily deformed when hot. At normal temperatures, a thermoplastic material can be pretty elastic.
In mechanical engineering, plastic deformation does refer to permanent/non-reversible changes (as opposed to elastic deformation) past the elastic limit. That said, plasticity is more commonly used to suggest malleability.
Elastic deformation is reversible with a release of the driving force, plastic deformation isn't.
Typical metals will have an elastic zone, where they act like springs, and a plastic zone, where they don't, and then they fracture. Brittle materials have a relatively small plastic zone, ductile materials will have a large one.
I carry my camera all the time, so I'm not super upset about it being made of plastic rather than metal. The plastic of which it's made has a higher tensile strength than any casting-grade aluminum; machined aerospace aluminum would be stronger, but would also cost a lot more to make and thus to buy, and I don't mind having paid an entry-level price for my entry-level DSLR.
I beat the crap out of a Canon Rebel XT for about 12 years before finally replacing it. Still worked fine, no issues, I just wanted better high ISO performance.
> I shoot pretty much only with old manual-focus lenses from days of yore. Most of my lenses are older than I am. They're all made of metal, built like a tank, and way easier to use. No fidgety UIs or menus to manipulate, perfectly calibrated infinity focus (slap the focus ring to the end until it stops and landscapes are perfectly sharp 100% of the time), rock-solid, don't break under pressure inside my bag, and they just work, no questions asked.
This is what I love about the Asahi Pentax Spotmatic-era cameras.
The only dial on the camera sets shutter speed and the sensitivity of the light meter.
If you go out on a nice day and practice shooting with "sunny 16" technique you don't even need a light meter, just set your aperture and shutter speed and get creative.
On pro cameras, at least, although they have plastic outsides it's pretty strong plastic, and the actual chassis of the camera is cast alloy (usually magnesium-aluminium).
A nikon D3/D4/D5 will withstand a huge amount of abuse - at least as much as my more obviously metal pre-digital SLRs did. Another issue to be aware of is when using large, heavy lenses, a lot of stress gets put on the mount point and that most modern pro-orientated DSLRs are actually stronger than their old film equivalents in this regard, as the engineering has improved over time.
Re: arca-swiss plates - the reason camera companies don't do this is because of the licensing fee (source: I've talked to a bunch of them, and this is always their reply). I'm sure Thom is aware of this, but the licensing fee is not insignificant, and with extreme pressure to control costs it's not surprising that companies very rarely do this. Of course I personally would be very happy to see them included, but I know there are a bunch of people that don't use them, and would resent the extra cost to include them.
My D7100 is pretty tough and fairly new. My issue now is the weight. If I carry the D7100, 70-300, and wide angle it's a lot of weight to lug around. I do it because it takes amazing pictures, but I'm not going to pretend I like the weight.
Perhaps Apertus° could be convinced this way to build a digital still[-focused] camera. Mirrorless is getting quite good these days too, so it might not be much different from a digital cinema camera.
You aren't kidding, man. This is how Red got started if you substitute the gripes for (functionally similar) ones from motion picture cameras.
$100k for a camera with a base sensor just barely better than a flip-phone camera, and the size and shape of an old over-shoulder ENG rig. In 2006. What happens if we put a 21 megapixel DSLR sensor in a box?
I would be really interested to see a similar thing happening in reverse. Gopro hits a niche, but not quite.
Tangentially related: I find that being able to run android apps on my camera (not my phone with its tiny lens) is extremely useful. I bought the Samsung galaxy camera 2, but I don't know of any other such product.
Not saying this solves anything, but Samsung also did the Samsung Galaxy NX a year before the Galaxy Camera 2. It's sorta a DSLR-shaped detachable lens camera that runs Android.
From a cursory Google search: Nikon COOLPIX S800c, Panasonic Lumix DMC-CM10. So the big players are investing in Android.
This just shows how different users have different needs. I do not want my camera to be "smart", I want it to measure the amount of light that comes trough the lens, tell me if it's too much or too little, then capture and save the data on some storage. I can take it from there.
My ideal solution would be something like the failed Siliconfilm project which was a digital sensor you'd put into an analog camera 35mm film compartment.
I was hoping that the author would add something about the UIs of these cameras. The bodies of modern DSLRs are jampacked with every kind of knob, control, button, dial, and dongle that you can possibly think of.
To a large extent, that's kind of the whole point — these cameras are for professionals and professionals ostensibly need to be able to adjust every aspect of their picture. But in practice, 95% of users aren't using 95% of these adjusters 95% of the time. Most people are changing their aperture, exposure compensation, and a small handful of other things, and yet, dozens of other readily-available and features are still bolted onto the camera that get used roughly never.
There are other downsides besides complexity too. Fuji's mirrorless X100 series is a popular camera with consumers and for years it's shipped with an exposure compensation dial right at the top edge of its body. For just as many years the thing's been loose enough and with little enough inset from the outside that whenever you throw it in a bag or something, there's a pretty reasonable chance that it'll come out cranked all the one way or the other. Sometimes you don't notice, and there goes your shot.
The possible fixes are pretty easy — either move it in so it's less prone to accidental adjustment, or take the units off the thing so that it could optionally be reset every time you turn the camera on, but Fuji will probably never fix the problem – the way things are is the way things are, and they should stay that way.
It would be insanely great if instead of just cargo culting what they themselves have done in the past and what everyone else is doing, camera manufacturers started to think about optimizing these designs for the benefit of the user a little bit. Unfortunately, they never seem to.
> Sometimes you don't notice, and there goes your shot.
That's because you're not using the EVF, which you should be. The single most useful feature combination I find on the x100 series cameras is the EVF combined with the exposure compensation dial. This relates to the following annoyance from the article:
> No focus information in viewfinder
Any need for this is negated by a well implemented electronic viewfinder. Fuji are killing it on this aspect. An EVF will give you: exact framing, exposure, white balance, focus, and depth of field. You get none of this in a traditional optical viewfinder. It completely removes the need to "chimp" and you can concentrate on shooting photographs rather than reviewing what you just shot.
> That's because you're not using the EVF, which you should be. The single most useful feature combination I find on the x100 series cameras is the EVF combined with the exposure compensation dial.
That's a fairly strange assumption to make. A performant EVF is one of Fuji's greatest innovations, and also one of its most conspicuous. Of course I'm using it.
Unfortunately, sometimes you're shooting from the hip (literally or figuratively), and not verifying every setting before you do. Sometimes, the EVF is almost unusable because you're out in bright sunlight. The existence of an EVF doesn't compensate for poor body design.
If you're shooting from the hip then, by definition, you're not using the EVF. I'm surprised you've had problems in bright sunlight, I can't ever recall the EVF being hindered by that (I've spent three years shooting a project with the local ski club with the camera so it's fair to say I've seen plenty of bluebird days).
> The bodies of modern DSLRs are jampacked with every kind of knob, control, button, dial, and dongle that you can possibly think of.
That's what I actually like on the more "expensive" camera's, the ability to control everything just with single click/rotation.
I'm mostly shooting manual, on my Canon 5D I have a dial for apperture, smaller dial for shutter speed and a knob for the focus point(s). When I used Canon 500D from my friend, I couldn't use it in manual as this requires you to push one button, to then change the shutter speed with a dial (the same one that controls the apperture (or vice versa I can't remember anymore)).
But I think canon is doing it alright as the "entry" level DSLR's like 500D are meant for normal users who just want a point and click camera for most of the time, and don't need that many knobs and dials. While the professional versions have a lot of controls.
But then again, this all goes to personal preference, and most users will buy a camera that they like to use, with or without many controls. I haven't seen anyone with a 5D saying "I'm not happy with total control of my camera", but I heard more people say "Damn, I wish you could change this value much faster and not go to the touchscreen"
Yeah, I'd definitely concede that some people are making pretty frequent use of this stuff, but I meant to suggest that if you really started looking around, you might be in the minority. Optimizing for the majority of buyers would probably involve removing a few things that most people are probably never going to use.
> But then again, this all goes to personal preference, and most users will buy a camera that they like to use, with or without many controls. I haven't seen anyone with a 5D saying "I'm not happy with total control of my camera", but I heard more people say "Damn, I wish you could change this value much faster and not go to the touchscreen"
There might be a few other options for design around this type of thing. I really like Leica's approach here for example: keep the settings that are really often needed on the body, relegate the less-frequently used features to menus, but then provide accessible custom profiles that are totally user-configurable and which can be switched between easily. After doing a few test shoots with a Leica Q, it feels like a nearly perfect compromise to me.
>Optimizing for the majority of buyers would probably involve removing a few things that most people are probably never going to use.
You think people aren't buying cameras on the level of the 5D because there are too many buttons and knobs, and not because the market for a $2.3k US camera is small to begin with? The thing could be completely smooth and still only dedicated camera aficionados or professionals would buy it at that price.
> That's what I actually like on the more "expensive" camera's, the ability to control everything just with single click/rotation
I use Nikon and have gone from D200, D300, and now a D700 because I love the quick and direct access to a lot of the controls. The consumer bodies are great cameras but once you become accustomed to the layout it is really useful and logical. I presume the Canon pro range is similar.
Nikon is known to be one of the best at quick access through shortcut physical buttons. The problem with Nikon is discoverability is bad, but once you're in the know it's awesome. According to some, the shortcuts are better than what Canon provides. I've never even held a Canon camera so I can't comment. :)
> The bodies of modern DSLRs are jampacked with every kind of knob, control, button, dial, and dongle that you can possibly think of. ... But in practice, 95% of users aren't using 95% of these adjusters 95% of the time.
Amen. I've been casually shooting with a Nikon D70 and now a D7000 for around 15 years now. Here's an illustrated guide to every single physical control on the D7000, which isn't even a high-end camera:
...and for many of those I'd need to read the manual to find out what they even do (Fn? Lv?) and I struggle to find any reason I'd need to twiddle with, say, the image compression (QUAL) so urgently that it needs a dedicated shortcut button.
> ...and for many of those I'd need to read the manual to find out what they even do (Fn? Lv?) and I struggle to find any reason I'd need to twiddle with, say, the image compression (QUAL) so urgently that it needs a dedicated shortcut button.
Right! Physical buttons and dials are great, but after a certain point adding new ones isn't an improvement to the interface anymore. Too many of them makes the interface overly complex and more prone to accidental adjustment. `QUAL` is a perfect example of something that belongs in a menu.
> But in practice, 95% of users aren't using 95% of these adjusters 95% of the time.
Not a snark: maybe 95% of users didn't need a semi-pro DSLR and should have gone with a smartphone or a point-and-shoot instead? The remaining 5% need those knobs and controls, and would be left with a less useful camera if they were removed or simplified.
I'm in that 5%, for sure. When looking for a smaller camera than my DSLRs to carry around I was tempted by the Ricoh GR and Sony RX100 series, but ultimately their lack of manual controls turned me away and I went with Fuji's X100T.
I want long lenses for taking pictures of my kids playing soccer. The phone on my camera just isn't going to work for that. Nor will point-and-shoot telephotos because they're too slow to focus.
> features are still bolted onto the camera that get used roughly never
I see your argument about making sensible choices on smaller form factors but DSLRs aren't point and shoot.
There's only one button I "roughly never" use on my D750 (the little "i" button). Everything else gets a hot supper. And it's not just that I use those features, I mean I use them all the time. In environments where I need the muscle-memory to affect them quickly. Things like ISO, bracketing, flash and focus and aperture priority modes. I don't think I'm unique.
I won't tolerate a camera that forces me to disengage with what I'm doing so I can fanny around in a menu system.
I've been using a Sony A6000 lately, which has a great auto mode that will pick pretty much every parameter for a shot for you and do a good job of it. As you learn more about the camera and photography you can start taking more control.
However, I've found that smart phone cameras have gotten so good that they match or even beat the A6000 for a lot of shots so I tend to use it only for very specific kinds of pictures now.
Maybe they HAVE thought of these things, and what you think consumers want in cameras is wrong? I disagree with almost everything you want for cameras and would consider them worse products if they implemented them. Not everything should be a shitty tap-screen mobile interface awash in whitespace and crappy icons. Physical controls are better, when you don’t have time or attention to fiddle with displays. That you don’t understand that is not a failure on the part of camera companies.
There are actually very few controls that you need to fiddle with while you're taking the picture. Take white balance for example - you only need to set it when lighting conditions change, it's very unlikely that you need to change it on every shot. A touchscreen for that would be better than having to scroll through the choices with a control wheel or buttons.
The modern trend of replacing descriptive text with icons needs to die.
They are already aware of this, and already tweak cameras accordingly. Have you ever compared the buttons, switches and dials on a Rebel to a 5D? Every time I try to shoot with a Rebel I find myself wondering where all the buttons I want to use have gone.
I could only imagine if Apple took all of their camera expertise from the iPhone and all of their existing Chip expertise and all of their Operating Systems expertise to create a Semi-Pro Mirrorless camera.
Imagine full iOS integration, super fast A-11 Bionic chip (same as iPhone), high throughput wireless components, custom OS (like WatchOS), developer API, W2 chip for Bluetooth pairing, OLED screen, and beautiful lightweight aluminum housing.
That would completely change the market. But we can only dream.
This is closer to what a real world vision of my description would look like. However as others mentioned, it’s an incredibly small category relative to everything else Apple do. Apple isn’t one for distractions.
Beats worked because it built on their iPhone and music streaming strategy rather than replacing pieces of either.
Leica Q is a really nice camera that compromises between ease of use and high quality optics. No need to bring Apple into the mix. I’ve owned many M series bodies and lenses but I still use the Q the most often.
How many years in a row are people going to make this proclamation? First it was not making screens anymore, then it was Final Cut Pro X, then it was iOS and the iPad, then it was the Mac Pro. Never mind that the Mac Pro is a great machine, and they've already announced the iMac Pro and hinted at a newer Mac Pro that is more in line with people's expectations. At this point, no matter what they do, people will say, "they don't care about the Pro market anymore." It's ridiculous.
I don’t think Apple will venture into dedicated camera equipment. The iPhone camera is one of the big selling points and keeps people upgrading. Apple will not sacrifice their cash cow for a comparatively niche market. A dedicated device also goes against the unification that Apple seems to pursue.
Especially considering that they're delving into multiple cameras, phased array cameras would let them create 'virtual' apertures the size of the phone back, for example.
I would very much enjoy playing with something along those lines.
> Apple will not sacrifice their cash cow for a comparatively niche market.
I never understood that reasoning. As an individual, I can't simultaneously develop 10 different products, but a large company sitting on billions in cash could develop 1000 niche products simultaneously.
In fact, some large companies (Procter & Gamble, 3M, General Electric) have thousands or tens of thousands of products.
To use your Apple example, why couldn't Apple create a professional camera division, giving them $25 million startup money, and tell them to never bother the iPhone team, but do give them access to the source code, engineering drawings, and contacts in the supply chain.
It seems very fashionable for tech companies to be very narrowly focused. They work on the one thing that is making the most money at that moment. If any experimental development isn't a wild success, it's shut down right away. All of those make sense if you're an individual or struggling startup, but if you have billions just sitting there, what's the harm in trying many things at once?
Big companies usually work either by C-level exec fiat or by middle management promotion plans. Neither of which usually want small fish. If you work for a $100 billion company and you say: I need $25 million to pursue an idea that might make the company 2x or 3x, there's a good chance they'll say: no, sorry. We prefer to invest that $25 million to either improve our $5 billion product or invest in an idea that could become another $5 billion product.
It's just not elegant to try to put everything under one company. Better to buy back 25 million of stock from an investor, who can then buy one of those startups and run it independently.
Bad PR when you eventually close them down. See Google: they ran Reader for eight years and gave people plenty of time to migrate. Half a decade later, it's still used as an example of why they can't be trusted. Regardless of whether that's justifiable or not, it's an harm to the company's image. Better to just dump money into external startups (see Google Ventures) and then acquire them if they're interesting.
I think there's several arguments why Apple would not want to attack this niche market.
The strongest one is talent dilution. If they poach talent from existing teams, then the new project must be more profitable to make that a good idea. Building a new team from scratch is not an easy task - you need management that can guarantee the same level of productivity/QA that other teams have. The team leads that can produce this kind of top quality are rare - why would you spend them on the niche market instead of advancing your main product? (unless they can find a leader who is only interested in the camera niche)
The second one would be the profitability of this niche market. Why wouldn't Apple just invest money in P&G stock(or whatever, I don't know much about the stock market) - do they really expect the investment into the camera niche market to bring better gains?
I know Procter & Gamble owns a ton of brands, and I don't know if there's any cross-effect when one brand fails. My suspicion is that Apple won't be able to get away with low scrutiny, even if they spin off their own "NotAppleAtAll" cameras. This may be a third concern for them.
Less related, but many of P&G's products are direct competitors, e.g. Ariel and Tide laundry detergent. Perhaps that's just not a business model that Apple is interested in pursuing?
I think this is slightly changing at Apple, and in my opinion will slowly make things much worse.
One of the first things Steve Jobs on returning to Apple did was to cull what he felt were unnecessary products, and product groups. You could argue that Apple is large enough now to have thousands of products, but what was clear is that Jobs had the defining vision and no single person can have a single defining vision of thousands of products.
To use your example you cannot create a camera division and not allow inter-group communication because you are then building products in exactly the same way as someone like Sony. You end up with disconnected systems, nothing integrates together well and in-fighting between the groups.
I remember looking for a 32" Sony TV a decade or so ago, and there were 5 or 6 different models all at slightly different price brackets and with different discounts everything became muddled. Sony of course were simply capturing every portion of the market they could, from the person who wanted the cheapest to the person who wants the best.
I'd like to see Apple re-focus, make single models of iPhone, iPad, MacBook, iMac and the Apple Watch. Stop trying to capture as much of the market as possible and just focus on a limited number of highly integrated devices.
>I'd like to see Apple re-focus, make single models of .. MacBook, iMac
Apple made multiple models of iMacs and MacBooks (and PowerBooks) under Jobs - I think this would be a horrible idea, for computers specifically you just can’t address everyones needs with one size of laptop/desktop screen.
"As an individual, I can't simultaneously develop 10 different products, but a large company sitting on billions in cash could develop 1000 niche products simultaneously."
Because the question faced by large companies, and even merely medium-sized and small companies, is not what can we do, but what's the best thing to do.
If I've got a product line with 100 engineers that is making me a million per engineer, and I've got a product line with 5 engineers making a quarter million per engineer, and I decide I'm going to hire 10 more engineers, even though it is true that I can't guarantee that the scaling numbers will hold when I add more engineers, it is still often the rational choice to assign those 10 new engineers to my very profitable product. In fact it can make sense to eliminate the product line with 5 engineers and put them on the really profitable product. The fact that I could do 11 projects with 10 engineers each isn't very interesting because odds are that the other 10 projects won't be as profitable, and I won't get anywhere near as much money.
Meanwhile, some other company in the market might very happily take on the less profitable, but still profitable, smaller niche. They can do it with different degrees of overhead, maybe in a different cheaper location, and perhaps with fewer compliance requirements bearing down on them, etc.
There are, of course, endless, endless nuances and "what ifs" you could play. This comment is not a course in resource allocation for business. It's just a comment intended to point you in the direction of answering the question "Why don't GooFaceZonaSoft do all the things?" in a reasonable manner. It also explains why GooFaceZonaSoft still acts resource constrained quite often, and why despite the fact the tech industry tends to develop very large giants at the top there's always, always a ton of smaller companies and there's never any risk that the entire industry is all going to consolidate into one big company, because the first thing that mega corporation would do is divest a ton of the less profitable sub-businesses, which would promptly reform externally.
If you create a premium product that is successful but limits the room for your mass product you risk a competitor eating your mass product, if you don't limit the mass product then you likely trash your premium product. There needs to be a natural need for the premium offer that partitions the product space such as cost of materials or design, and allows you to pull huge margin from the niche to discount the risk you take on it.
They only have so many people, and they’re already having trouble delivering the products they have now. I think the airpods are just now available in stores as of a couple weeks ago. And the same thing for the iPhone X, most people probably won’t have them until 2018.
This isn't Apple's MO. They are big on secrets, big on integration, big on higher ASP but fewer products (though that's changing with increased Apple's market cap).
Apple continues to be unique and continues to be questioned as to the viability of their uniqueness.
The Full Frame and above DLSR market is not really shrinking though. It's certainly not a huge market, but it's ripe for disruption since the pace of innovation of the current incumbents is very, very slow.
The DSLR market is shrinking, simply because everyone who wants one already has one and there are no compelling reasons to upgrade. There was a golden period of a few years where if you wanted a decent camera a DSLR was the best option, so the market expanded quickly. Those days are over.
Adding the features identified in the post would cure the "no reason to upgrade" problem, at least temporarily. But the market for serious cameras is pretty much fixed and easily saturated.
I was talking about "Full frame and above" please don't just my comment about DSLRs in general. APS-C size sensors DSLRs do not fit in my description, and that is the category that is shrinking the most.
OK, that may be true. But I propose that it's still a temporary situation, as APS-C DSLR users upgrade. The larger sensor camera market will saturate as well.
You are absolutely right. It makes no sense for them to invest in something like that. Especially at the scale that they operate at. iPhones have completely changed what photography means at a basic level.
However, I would still love to have something like I described.
> That would completely change the market. But we can only dream.
No, it really wouldn't. Look at the heavyweights right now, they all either have a ton of expertise in optics or in sensors. That market cares more about glass selection, sensors and taking pictures than bells and whistles like iOS would provide.
An alternative - a partnership with Canon on Nikon where they would build a shell around the iPhone that would accept DSLR lenses, and build an iOS app to have all the DSLR features, with deep integration (like panorama, could make use of the other lens, AI, etc). They make more money on lenses anyway, let apple sell razors while they continue to sell razorblades. Furthermore, the case itself would cost $100-$200, which coupled with the phone would be > $1000, while the "normal" DSLR sensor shell is already about $600, so it still leaves room for both products. Also, it would even lower the barrier to entry to purchase DSLR lenses for current iPhone owners, which would increase lens sales. Assuming it works from a technical perspective, I don't really see a downside with this business model.
It would only make sense from a financial perspective if the market they were entering (think: auto) is bigger than the one they could be endangering (mobile).
Also, would they then be making camera sensors? Or would they just figure Sony (whose profits they'd be stepping on) would just take it? Do they have a 2nd source for this critical component?
No - what Apple will do is evolve the iPhone camera(s) and computational photography, over and over every year, pushing it further and further until most of the needs for a mirrorless camera are gone.
Rather than disrupt the high end consumer camera market with a camera in 2 years, they’ll do it with iPhone in 5 or 10 years.
My pet-peeve with modern DSLR's is that none of these manufacturers seem to care about motion-cadence with their video offering. There's been amazing leaps with 4k video and now 10 bit image depth with the Panasonic GH5, but the footage looks so damn robotic and souless compared to cinema cameras from Arri and Red.
I obviously don't expect a $2000 dslr to match a $50k Alexa in image quality, but surely they must be able to make the motion of the images smoother and less CCTV looking.
Blackmagic put out an amazing little pocket camera a few years ago with gorgeous colours and buttery smooth motion, why can't the big guys follow suit?
I think a lot of the problems relate to the experience of the person behind the camera.
Often you can see the choppiness when things are moving. That to me looks like they are using a high shutter speed which is inappropriate for cine work. In still photography if you take a picture of a waterfall on a bright day at 1/1000 you'll see every crisp drop, shooting at 1/30th will give a little bit of smoothing motion blur. Using a DSLR shooting at 25 frames a second and leaving the shutter speed on auto can result in a sequence of 1/1000 second shots which will look choppy. What they should be doing is using Neutral Density filters so they can choose the appropriate aperture for the shot whilst keeping the shutter speed at 1/30 or there abouts. This will give the smoother motion images but does take skill and time.
My other bugbear is many cameramen appear to have forgotten what a tripod is. The camera wobbling about can occasionally add to the atmosphere but most of the time it is just annoying and distracting. Again a combination of lack of skill and production values.
> My other bugbear is many cameramen appear to have forgotten what a tripod is. The camera wobbling about can occasionally at to the atmosphere but most of the time it is just annoying and distracting. Again a combination of lack of skill and production values.
With projection and home displays lagging camera technology, I'd be surprised if the opposite didn't happen. You can do a lot of shake reduction with 2x the pixels you intend to keep.
Also I think a lot of the shake these days is added in post, partly to cover for production flaws and partly to add "atmosphere" as you say.
It's not camera shake creating blurry images I'm talking about, it's the cameraman 'wobbling' about so the image isn't steady. The images will still be sharp, just the camera moving about a bit.
Yea, over the years my best shots have been shot using a heavy tripod. There are times when I don't want to lug around that Manfretto tripod--a tripod that looks like you could mount a machine gun on it.
I've tried monopods, but my best shots are all taken with a tripod.
During panning shots (horizontal, vertical), in recent films the image is blurry and uncomfortable (for me). Similar panning shots in earlier films seem cripser and more "comfortable".
Is there a technical reason (shutter speed fashion) ? Or is it in my head ?
It's called 'Rolling Shutter'. This was never a problem until the advent of using CMOS sensors for motion recording. It basically started with the Canon 5D and iPhone video.
As a camera operator, this crap technology gave me my first gray hairs. It allows for the processor and write tech in the camera to only handle one line of pixels at a time instead of the entire frame. In response, camera departments had to invent the term 'Global Shutter' to describe the proper way to do it, in which the entire frame is captured at once.
I've got the Blackmagic pocket. I'd say the main difference is being able to shoot raw video. It's just like butter in grading compared to 8bit video. And their colour science is good.
I think we'll have h265 10bit video in most cameras (and mobile phones) pretty soon, and that will be a marked improvement in terms of colour and dynamic range of video footage.
Some higher end Sony and Canon dSLR's shoot raw video, but I guess it's generally a niche feature, most people wouldn't want to shoot or edit raw video.
Wouldn't you think that's the global shutter of the camera? Raw definitely helps with pushing the image in colour grading, but I always thought the nice motion cadence on the BMPCC comes from the fact that the global shutter scans the entire image at once when capturing a frame, which makes it more filmic and less jittery than rolling shutter sensors which scan a series of parts of the image to create the frame.
The BMPCC has a rolling shutter. Some other Blackmagic cameras have global shutter. I don't personally think there is a huge difference unless you're doing fast camera movement`
I think the video quality is down to reasonably high dynamic range sensor, and RAW sequence capture, meaning you can actually access all that dynamic range
I thought they added a switchable global shutter mode, no? Maybe i'm getting it confused with another model. Probably!
I'm only now looking into DSLR's for a low-light option. Funnily enough, the ones that stand out to me are the Samsung NX1 and the Fuji XT2. Samsung oddly has great motion cadence, but awful macro-blocking. Fuji, unsurprisingly, has beautiful colours. Unfortunately both are only 8 bit, which is kind of a deal-breaker for me.
As an aside, how rare and cool to get to geek out on Hacker News over this stuff!
Sony A7r ii is the low light king, there is a new version due in the next couple of months.
I am not going to be buying another camera with 8bit video, so will be holding out until there are more 10bit options out there. HEVC has a 10bit profile and it will be everywhere because of HDR TV's and phones, but might take a year or two to get popular in cameras.
It's amazing in low-light, but I find the colours are pretty washed out and the image can band pretty bad once you apply post processing to get it looking half decent. That's been my experience with it anyway. Didn't know they have a new model - great to hear.
Using an ND filter to get a slower shutter speed is the way to go. The more expensive cameras usually have a ND filter built in. Shooting at 24fps is possible on most modern cameras these days.
If you want to have the ability to adjust the amount of blur in post shooting at 120fps+ allows for that workflow but it’s a pain to do.
It's more to do with the way motion is captured by the sensor than shutter rates, ND or applying motion blur. Someone else posted an article about global-vs-rolling shutter, which gets to the heart of that jittery video look common to CMOS sensors found on DSLRs.
Also, in film, people generally keep the shutter angle at 180 degrees. So for 24 frames per second, the shutter speed is usually 1/48 of a second.
As for codecs, that's actually where some of these cameras are making leaps and bounds. The GH5 I mentioned is capable of 10 bit recording, which means you could record ProRes HQ with an external recorder.
To learn about what you're calling "shakiness", look up 'rolling shutter'. It's a way of processing only one row of pixels at a time. CMOS sensors all have this problem. They are able to have much cheaper and slower processors in cameras this way but he result is garbage and nobody notices except people like myself who worked in camera department and operator, and even many of them didn't understand.
Only after a decade of trash CMOS sensors are people starting to realize that cameras did not get exponentially better overnighy. They got worse.
Even RED cameras use these CMoS sensors, albeit very fast ones. Alexas have proper global shutters along with most Blackmagic cameras.
There's not much to capturing motion besides shutter speed and frame rate. Mostly the latter.
Rolling shutter aside, given the same settings, there should be no real differences between Arri, Red and those DSLRs in motion capture (and not in image depth, dynamic range, resolution, and color science), and I don't think there are.
All kinds of movie, TV and documentary work use high end DSLRs from Canon and co, and the motion is just fine.
Of course the idea is that motion is usually set to 24fps in both those cameras and Arri, Red etc. If you want "smooth" motion of the hi-fps variety, jack up the fps. But then it would be soap-opera like and not what most people associate with cinematic motion.
When I bought my most recent DSLR, I had to pick between a slighly older model with GPS or the latest model with wifi. They were essentially identical other than that I think, maybe touchscreen?
Same with the 6D.
It seems even when power is off it runs the GPS, so you leave it switched off overnight, and the next day your battery is always dead.
Of course, it also doesn't work, because the camera sleeps it along with everything else when it goes idle, so it never has time to get a good lock.
The way you solve this is by disabling idle sleep. That doesn't hurt the battery, either; it kills it.
This is legitimately frustrating, unlike a lot of the frankly scattershot and silly business in the article. (XQD on entry-level cameras? Five times the media cost? Yeah, the market wasn't small enough already...)
I bought a Canon point and shoot a few years back to use in situations where I'd be worried about losing the camera (e.g. on a ski lift) and I got one with GPS - it has to be the crappiest GPS in existence, it does work but takes about 30 minutes to get a fix, which is pretty much unusable.
Canon 5d IV here. I tend not to notice a significant issue with battery life when I have the GPS on (always). I do notice if use the live view mode though.
This is one of my favorite features of the Nikon D500 - enable link to snapbridge (app on android/iOS), all photos are automatically geotagged, as long as you have the phone in range.
1. 1/4" is a common, but terrible option. The suggestion is to replace it with a builtin plate for the current status-quo, the common Arca-Swiss mount.
2. Optical remotes aren't for selfies. Smartphones on stupid sticks are for selfies.
3. Most new cameras have WiFi. It doesn't affect battery life when you're not using it. They're just usually really slow, so picture upload/sync that should take 1 min tops take 1 hour instead.
Remote live-view and exposure/focus control works quite well, though, as it doesn't need that much bandwidth. There's also BLE, which in my camera allows remote control from smartphone without affecting battery life in any measurable way (BLE consumption is negligible).
4. Camera batteries are insanely expensive (and no, they don't contain anything magic or special, unlike what they want you to believe—apart from DRM, they're completely standard batteries worth about $20 retail when branded), they're DRM'd to avoid third-party manufacturing (which leads to more recent battery copies being unable to show charge level due to skipping this circuitry), they're often change shape just to force you to buy new batteries and chargers instead of reusing them, they don't support common charging specs (USB and Qi, for example—it would be practical to be able to juice up the camera while its in the bag between shootings), ...
Others do too (Watson, Wasabi, ...), but they're all made by reversing the bloody DRM, and those companies state that they're having problems reverse-engineering the DRM of the newer batteries (the actual battery management/protection circuitry is entirely standardized, and costs nothing).
LP-E17 is an example of a still non-reversed battery. Duracell doesn't have one, and those that do sell third-party clones pretend to be the DC adapter battery dummy to make things work, resulting in no battery gauge.
Why would camera manufacturers do that? So they can force you into paying 60 USD for the extra batteries you need to have. Preferably multiple times, as you change camera bodies.
I would imagine that if they lowered their crazy income margin, people would buy more original batteries, even if they kept the DRM. Instead, people buy good third-party batteries for 1/6th of the price, sometimes giving up on the battery gauge to do so.
Yes, it's the highest order of shitty behaviour. For the record, I have two Duracell EN-EL15's and they both work (including the gauge) with my Nikon D500.
> Optical remotes? I don't take selfie. I press the button.
The OP had a specific complaint about cameras not having an IR receiver at the back, i.e., for non-selfies. Remotes are useful for bulb shots, for reducing camera shake, and many other things.
I think he was mostly joking about it being for non-selfies.
Depending on exact location, the accepted angles should be slightly less than 180 degrees in front of the camera—you don't need to be anywhere near the subject, unless you got a fisheye mounted.
It's just a bit silly that the default approach wasn't RF, rather than optical, even if they put receivers on all sides of the camera. Some new cameras have BLE though, which is nice and solves most problems (although I prefer physical remotes to poorly written apps).
Then you have see by yourself that IR receiver are for selfie if they are on front... It strange when you are right people still downvote you.
Sorry if the majority of people buy DSLR without using it correctly. It's like owning a Apple, or a Gaming computer but don't understand nothing at all or do it by trends. Same apply with camera where everybody know everything.
Majority of people in the street have DSLR and take selfie by hand. You know now why it sucks.
It’s funny, but for several of the authors main criticisms an old camera of mine would have done well:
A 60mp leaf credo on a Rollei HY6 body.
Histogram and blinkies processed from the raw image, the lenses where all made of extremely solid metal, it had a built in arca Swiss like tripod play on the bottom, a giant 3.5 inch touchscreen, USB 3 transfer and tethering, could charge the batteries from USB and run off USB power, and the lenses all had great depth of field and distance scales.
And the viewfinder was ludicrously massive!
Downside, it weighed ~2.5kg total or something and ate batteries, and hated any iso over 200. And cost something like 30000 when new.
Tangentially related: I plan on buying a Sony a7s Mk2 this year. Aside from the screwmount and the battery issues, how is this camera affected by the other problems mentioned in the article (vibration, especially)? Is there anyone here who regularly shoots video with this camera?
Sensor- and lens-based stabilization takes care of the problem, as long as you don't kick your tripod. The problem isn't camera specific, and the long tele lens problem is more serious (although also pretty much fixed entirely by stabilization—some in-lens stabilization is hardcore enough that you can violently shake the setup with a tele mounted, and the image feed will still be perfectly stable).
Used one on a trip in Europe. The light gathering is astonishing, both photos and video. Street shooting at night in dimly lit rural towns, almost every shot looks better than it did to naked eye.
Only took two very small lenses, FE 2/28 and FE 1.8/50, both gave results that belie their size and cost. It autofocused down to light levels that would need a 15 second exposure at f2 (candlelight is EV 4, autofocuses down to EV -3). It autofocused on stars.
The main thing I can't get over is its uncanny ability to nail tack sharp focus on the iris of either the main face in my image or the preferred registered face among many faces, at arbitrary distances from face larger than frame to far enough away focus doesn't matter.
Yep, and the A9 is, with ~3k4€ just for the body, outside of my price range unfortunately :(
The A7s2 costs ~2k€, I'll have to spend at least a grand on lenses and another grand for the XLR/mike head and the external battery pack... thanks for the heads-up on the performance though, hope the A7S will live up to expectations ;)
I think that a more-realistic competitor of the A7SII is the Fuji X-T2. The Fuji has a wonderful feel, the UX is really impressively simple and just 'feels right'.
Had I not already invested in another system, I'd probably have gone Fuji.
Ignore the other poster who recommended buying an a9. If all you want to do is video (and you want a sony) then the a7s2 is the best machine for the job, a9 is more trying to be a fast sports shooter. I have the A7R2 and even its video is pretty darn good, no S-Log3 and not the same amazing (it really is this good) low light performance as the A7S2 though.
The only gripes which I have with the Sony systems are the unintuitive menu systems and unergonomic body styles, compared to Canon DSLR's though of 5D / 1D ilk (and most recently, the Leica SL which is just a dream to handle).
Other than that, technically, on paper, they are amazing cameras.
p.s: IBIS is amazing, you can take pretty much any old lens and all of a sudden it's stabilised.
As an economist: isn't this 'just' an example of software eating the world?
One the one hand, quality camera's should keep upgrading the periferal hardware to keep match with modern IT-supplies and on the other hand keep a focus on durable products. Why wouldn't producers do this? Cost savings and probably price competition.
The competition (smart phones) have a whole different market. They have a product that people (regretably?) replace every 2-3 years. The market dictates the newest techniques. Pictures are sensors + software. Software has a much shorter improvement cycle. Hence, I would expect a continuously larger part of the camera market to 'fall' for the smartphone camera. Heck, the 'official' advice from my preferred reviewers is not to buy a small camera anymore, but use the savings for a better smartphone.
And then you have large old-camera corporations struggling because their highest margin products (just a guess that that was the little cameras in the former days, not the professionaly product) are falling away. So they don't have the money to keep their high-end products up quality wise nor the institutional awareness to quickly adapt. Cycle a few times... Read OP.
> The competition (smart phones) have a whole different market. They have a product that people (regretably?) replace every 2-3 years. The market dictates the newest techniques. Pictures are sensors + software. Software has a much shorter improvement cycle. Hence, I would expect a continuously larger part of the camera market to 'fall' for the smartphone camera. Heck, the 'official' advice from my preferred reviewers is not to buy a small camera anymore, but use the savings for a better smartphone.
The old corporations in the field (Canon, Nikon, Sony) should make you pay for better firmwares (i.e. plugins or at least revisions) so that they have an incentive to keep improving their existing DLSRs. I think on my previous body there was only ONE update in x years and that did not bring anything new on the table.
Thanksfully nowadays we have MagicLantern for Canon DSLRs at least, which brings a ton of additional features for photo and video. It's still not at a parity level with the software available on phones and the like, but it's a big jump vs the base firmware nonetheless.
Good point. That would be a camera as a platform-model. We're half-way there in re-assembling a market structure that can withstand the 'new' pressures. The only way for a truely decent product, would be a decoupling of 1. camera as high quality parts for making great pictures, 2. camera as a communications device, 3. software.
Alas, I can think of exactly no digital examples of that market structure to work. Perhaps the old-school PC hit that mark. How many of those are still around? Perhaps we can see cloud computing as hitting that mark (separating 1,2,3), but still we need a complete device (1+2+3) to interact with the cloud.
At least Fuji and Olympus have realised the new model cycle is getting longer so they are releasing new firmware features until the replacing model is launched.
Canikon aren't doing new features in firmwares, seems more like bug fixes and Sony is somewhere inbetween at least with the A7-series...
Sony A7 series have also some kind of small apps you can buy and download from their store to your camera. Haven't seen that many apps there =(
>> Took me an hour-plus to download the timelapse app.
Oh wow. I had the same experience. In my case I just wanted to update the existing apps I had installed. Apparently you need a Sony entertainment account to install apps (it must be a new requirement as I never had one when I installed the apps in the first place).
I tried for 15 minutes to create an account using the camera.
* My A6000 doesn't have a touch screen so I had to use the camera's wheels to operate the on-screen keyboard
* The account creation page is non-responsive.
You would think Sony Entertainment Network's account login/creation webpage would be responsive so it would be usable within the camera OR there would be a completely different page. NO, it is the same desktop, non-responsive page including Google's painful anti-bot script which requires me to select 10 images that represent street signs using the camera wheel.
Amazingly, I could actually use the A6000 to create an account, but it kept erroring out when submitting. Finally, I realized it would be easier to just use my laptop and to my surprise it still failed because their account creation was down. About 10 attempts later it still failed with a slightly different error, but I still received the account creation success email (?) and was able to login fine after that.
Why would they try to compete with smartphones? Dropping product differentiation when the competition comes from "a whole different market" doesn't really make sense.
They're not choosing to compete with smartphones - smartphones are eating into their market thus forcing competition. As smartphone cameras have improved the more they've eaten into the market. Note that this argument does not require that all users of their cameras would ever consider using a smartphone instead.
Indeed. 'Big corp' would find it very hard to react when a profitable segment of their portfolio drops out (smartphone vs. simple camera / so you're struggling financially), while competition or complexity ramps up in another part of their portfolio (high end camera / I figure a new market structure is needed, but never before tried out).
Snarky: It's just not thaught that way in business schools. Lookup Nikons financial trouble. Canon has no financial trouble, but seems to be quickly moving to other markets that are profitable (medical supplies). So perhaps they will just drop out of this market in a few years.
What market? Smartphones and high end cameras aren't really comparable. They compete in the sense that they're both able to take pictures, but they don't compete across all possible dimensions. I mean, I could be wrong, but these don't look like substitute goods. Smartphones and crappy cameras certainly are, but not not smartphones and high-end cameras. But using cheaper parts does make cameras crappier, so doing so in order to engage in price competition is choosing to compete with smartphones.
Which is what I don't understand. Because, as far as I know, firms should engage in product differentiation as long as it's possible.
What I do know is that I have not bought/used a dedicated camera since about the time smartphones came along. Nor have any of my family members - they all used to have dedicated cameras used to take holiday photos, photos of their children, birthdays and so on. Now they just use their phone.
This must have an effect on the camera manufacturers.
Camera makers do or have produced cameras with lesser or comparable qualities (for at least certain classes of use, such as for everyday users). These compete against smartphones. Another case is the users who might buy a higher end camera but now find that decision hard to justify when for their purposes smartphones are at least adequate. A third case is there being less of a demand for professional photographers these days, in part because of smartphones, which also is a kind of competition that higher end cameras have to deal with.
The bar of what smartphone cameras are capable of doing keeps rising, keeps eating into the territory of what previously required a standalone camera.
All these things are competition that eat into profits, which in turn may affect those companies' abilities to produce high end cameras. Eg they may only be able to use cheaper components compared with what they could afford in the past.
As I wrote the other day in a different context, when prices got low enough, a lot of people bought DSLRs with cheapo kit lenses, turned the control dial to Auto, and lugged them around to take snapshots for posting to Facebook. For the most part, smartphones have gotten good enough that, if that's how you use a DSLR, you should mostly leave it at home.
Many people do have a number of lenses and use DSLRs for creative control but they may not even be a minority. Heck, I'm a relatively serious amateur photographer and I often don't bother carrying a dedicated camera today if I know I'll just be doing some occasional casual shooting.
I'm mostly one of those people, but I still often lug the DSLR because even the best smartphone cameras still suck at shooting distant subjects. They may have a lot of megapixels, but the lenses and sensors are so small that once I crop the shot down I end up with something I would be ashamed to even post on Facebook. Even the cheapest DSLR kit zoom lens produces dramatically better images.
On a recent vacation I found myself leaving my 70-300mm on my dslr for times I need reach, and using my iPhone7+ for other shots. Worked out pretty well.
The companies historically creating cameras had a business model creating low to high end cameras. That's unravelling. Coping with quickly changing markets is hard. So even though smartphones and high end cameras aren't compatible and not substitute goods, the institution creating those cameras suffer with no good alternative as of yet. Hence the movement towards crappy high end cameras.
Yeah, I see it now. But then it ceases to be an issue of direct competition between high end cameras and smartphones and becomes an issue of shrinking economies of scale and scope e.g. raw material orders become smaller and lose previous supplier discounts and crappy camera designs which were "subproducts" of better designs are no longer feasible and thus all the cost falls on high-end designs instead of being split among several models.
The point is that as software improves, phone cameras are starting to compete in the traditional dslr arena. On my last vacation I took a roughly 50/50 split in pictures between my dslr and iphone7+.
Of course the dslr can do more, but the ease that a phone + software can make a wide range of really nice pics is eating into the consumer level dslr market. I like taking pictures, so I don't mind fidgeting on my dslr for the perfect shot. Meanwhile my wife has taken multiple great looking pics on her phone is wondering what I'm doing ;)
>I mean, I could be wrong, but these don't look like substitute goods.
Smartphones have destroyed the compact consumer camera market. There is no hyperbole there. Professional cameras? Sales of those are going down also, depending on how you define them of course (SLR is probably appropriate to call "professional")
Sales of prosumer and up SLRs are going down primarily because newer models don't add enough useful features to justify the price. The new Nikon D850 looks like a great camera, but if you have a D810 that's working just fine the minor improvements that the D850 bring could be hard to justify for the price tag ($3.3k US).
People who buy that level of camera understand, moreso than the general public, that, for example, an increase from a 36 to a 45 megapixel sensor may be nice, but in the end the photos both cameras produce are still great and whoever sees them in print or exported for the internet would never be able to tell the difference.
My ideal camera is just a simple autofocus camera which has two modes of operation. Standalone and paired with a phone. Standalone mode is built for speed - just manual controls, snap and shoot. No screen, no buttons at the back nothing. Just the PSAM dial, front and back wheels for shutter aperture control.
When paired with a phone - AF and all the gimmicky stuff to be done using the phone's interface which will also act like a viewfinder. Of course you can still use manual controls on the phone app. You can even edit the images on the phone and like the OP says, bloody mount the camera somewhere, sit in your tent and shoot. What all fancy stuff you can do - once you have all the controls on the phone. Automatically fire when a bird takes off and fun things like that.
If Sony would stop making as many smartphone models and add a couple of those engineers to their DSLR team, they should be able to solve most of these issues pretty quickly.
Sony makes about 5 different smartphone models each year. If they focused on shipping just one or two I guess they'd have more time to develop a better DSLR?
This would give them a big advantage over Nikon and Canon. Sony has a lot of knowledge and experience that Nikon and Canon don't have. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, USB-c, batteries are all great in their smartphones. Why not use that to make their cameras better?
Seems like they mostly did this with the a9, though the dig in the article about the upper card slot being slow is annoying, and Sony's mobile app for WiFi image transfer is bizarre, requiring the phone and camera to join a camera-created network, even though the camera can be manually configured to join your own access point.
Profit margins on camera bodies are extremely low (for resellers sometimes around 1%). All profit is made on accessories like lenses, bags and tripods.
So I can imagine that RnD is limited to chips and software instead of body work.
I feel that a lot of these problems are not purely born out of lazy engeniering but has to do with the review culture. In camera land as well as any other consumer products reviewers have quit a lot of power. If you get a bad review it can destroy your product. As most reviewers converse to the same opinion it is very tempting to please the reviewers. So if you create a semi pro camera is had to have a tripod mount even if most buyers have to use it. For a long time and party true today a simple interface was not something the reviewers would like.the interface should look like the Pro DSLR to be taken seriously. When Sony launched the original Xperia z every reviewer said the waterproofing was a gimmick now day's you get faulted for not having it. In the car world reviewers are constantly patting the top op the dashboard no other human does this as a result more car companies are making an effort to give it a nice feel, but stuff like a good feeling steering wheel seem more important to me. There are countless examples f reviewers dictating what is important with out looking at true usability but by looking at an spec sheet and see if it is 'better' than before
And they do the same thing phone companies do, don't support the device. I have a camera with wifi that got a shitty remote app on release and that's it. There is so much potential with remote controls, but no.. it can only take pictures on auto settings. At least document the API if you are lazy...
Camera itself got some bugfix updates, but is missing some essentials as working as a web cam, supporting timelapse, etc...
I have a Canon DSLR and my biggest frustration is with the software. I do a lot of night photography and the longest exposure possible is 30 seconds. To go beyond this you need to buy an external shutter release. It should be a simple thing to add a few more options with longer exposures to the menu.
Also, doing things like HDR or stop-motion can be a pain. Better software or the ability to run apps could solve this.
Camera software reminds me a lot of car software (entertainment and nav stuff) in that its obviously a bit of an afterthought and its a checkbox exercise and they don't give much thought to the actual user experience.
e.g. My wife has a lovely Audi but when I drive it I get very frustrated by how long the nav/entertainment system takes to start up...
If you are a tinkerer, you could (most likely, depending on model) use a custom firmware such as Magic Lantern. Gives you basically anything you could imagine, but that Canon couldn't imagine. http://www.magiclantern.fm/
Magic lantern truly is, well, magic. When my 30D died, I bought an 50D with some ambivalence; I wanted a "real body" and can't justify the price tag any of the #D series, but the 50D can't record video. Then I installed magic lantern, and now it can record video and so much more. Didn't end up shooting much video, but the photography features are so numerous and useful.
Canon have finally added a builtin bulb timer to many of their latest-gen models, as well as an interval timer. Of course, the most likely reason for not doing it sooner had to do with wanting to sell remotes rather than any technical difficulty.
And it's time movies started being high FPS. Low FPS is mainly a relic from a time film was expensive and the technology to produce it tough. Their usual excuse is that low FPS solutions do motion blur well.
I wonder what, say, 100 fps video shot with an exposure of 1/25 would look like. You'd need 4 cameras or a special camera to record it, but that could be simulated. It would probably look bad, but maybe in an exciting new way? Has anyone tried that yet in, say, Blender?
I love 1/4-20 sockets. Attach my camera to a flash bracket? Yep. Attach an eyebolt to attach a carabiner to attach a neck strap? Yep. Attach a hand strap or a 40mm, 80mm, or 200mm Arca Swiss plate. Yep. Yep, Yep and Yep.
There's nothing stopping a photographer from permanently attaching an Arca-Swiss plate to the bottom of a camera body with a bit of cyanoacrylate or some screws if it makes better photographs. For me, walking around with an Arca-Swiss plate on my camera made me appreciate that 1/4-20 socket is flush. Walking around with a 120mm plate made me appreciate that the 1/4-20 socket is flush both top to bottom and front to back.
Like everything in photography 1/4-20 and Arca-Swiss are defined by engineering tradeoffs. The cost of slower direct attachment of 1/4-20 is in exchange for the physical strength of bolted connection and the flexibility adopting a broader standard affords - I can build a camera mount from general components available at the hardware store (including round stock and a 1/4-20 die in a statistically unlikely universe).
edit: I left out all the electronic/software rants because photography is undergoing Cambrian explosion in regards to controls and computation (but mirrorless cameras are nothing new).
As a Bogen hex plate user, I would be aghast at having an Arca Swiss mount on the bottom of my camera.
Furthermore, a permanent Arca Swiss would prevent innovative designs such as the Really Right Stuff L brackets (which would be my choice if I were to ever switch QR plate systems).
Furthermore, many QR plates are protected by patent. Having the classic screw isn’t.
No kidding on standard components. When we have family gatherings and want to take a self timer group shot and I don't have a tripod, the shade attachment screw at the top of a lamp usually fits into my camera's tripod socket. The shade mount is sturdy enough to hold A small camera in place while also allowing enough pivoting and turning to frame up the shot.
It's like the old phone jack that Apple wants to be rid of--a common and cheap standard that attaches to every known thing in the universe already. And replace it with what? A proprietary system that may be better in some ways, but reduces your choices. Now, I also use the Bogen hex pads--which means if I am out with my Nikon, or my Hasselblad, or my Fuji 6x9, or even my Wista VX, I am good to go.
Comparing the 1/4"-20 tripod mount to the 1/8" TRRS jack isn't a great comparison.
The tripod mount has been a standard for decades and decades.
The phone headphone jack fractured into competing standards years ago. Works fine for listening, but once you want to use a microphone you're dealing with different pinouts for different manufacturers, balkanized auto detection and signaling, incompatible plugs sizing, grounding issues with the phone case, etc. It wasn't a pristine situation when Apple left it behind.
It is a good comparison to make with TRS connectors, which got hit in the crossfire. It's been a standard for decades and decades. As you say, it works perfectly for listening. And for those of us that don't want remote controls or microphones on our headphones, the connector is an unfortunate casualty of "progress".
>once you want to use a microphone you're dealing with different pinouts
This is true, but ultimately they are all variations on the 1/4" phone plug, which has been a standard across multiple industries since the advent of the telephone. Adding another ring to a TRS, or changing the pinout, is a minor variation compared to Apple's alternative. The phone plug is so ubiquitous that I think the comparison is valid.
The only thing wrong with the 1/4-20 mount is that there's only one. Camera manufacturers should add a second one half an inch to the side so that plates can be mounted with two points of attachment, which would eliminate concerns with twisting and loosening.
Wanting to force the weight and cost of Arca Swiss on everyone is just selfish. In fact most of these complaints are just examples of wanting everyone else to subsidize features they might not need that this guy happens to want.
The Qi demand on the other hand is just dumb. Wireless charging requires close proximity, so you'd have to set your camera down just so or it would fail to charge. With different lenses changing the balance point and accessories like portrait grips changing the shape, many people would never get Qi to work properly. Plus in a world where enthusiasts largely have multiple batteries anyway, wireless charging built into the camera seems utterly useless. I'd rather rapidly charge my battery in a dedicated charger than leave my camera on its own charging pad all the time.
For some applications, Velcro on the bottom of the camera and top of the accessory might mitigate twisting. I've also read about people using compressible materials to increase friction. For what it's worth, there's nothing preventing modifying a camera to add a second screw.
Drilling into the body of a camera that costs multiple thousand dollars to add a second screw seems like a risky maneuver and definitely warranty-voiding. I would personally advise against this.
Adding Velcro doesn't seem to me like it would do much for vibration or slippage (large rotation, yes, small scale rotation, not so much), since Velcro is not a rigid connection. Rubber or similar spacers can help but it's still not great. I use a plate that's got a lip on it to prevent twisting (which was a happy accident, because I actually ordered the wrong plate).
To me, the degree to which a camera is likely to see a built in Arca Swiss plate is inversely proportional to the degree to which it costs multiple thousands of dollars because the higher the price the more modular the design. The reason for more modular designs is that the variety of systems with which high end cameras are designed to integrate tends to be higher. Or conversely the more likely the camera is to be designed to lock the photographer into a proprietary systems sold by the camera manufacturer.
In terms of adding a second screw, a multiple thousand dollar camera body is probably not the ideal first subject for a person who has never disassembled a camera or done similarly fine grained work. Such a person should perhaps hire a technician or practice on broken equipment first in cases where such modifications seem worth the effort/cost. Hoping camera manufacturers would design around the edge case is not much of a plan.
I think the inverse proportionality is probably wrong since entry-level cameras generally never get mounted on anything. Arca Swiss mounting on my mom's camera wouldn't be particularly useful.
I don't think a multiple-thousand dollar camera body is a good target for invasive modifications unless it's already out of warranty, regardless of whether the change is being made by someone with the appropriate skills. I also doubt that the result of such a modification would be very good anyway. Without being part of the initial design (e.g. a captive nut embedded in the base), the best aftermarket modification would likely be based on either threads tapped directly into the body or a nut essentially glued in place.
I mentioned cyanoacrylate for those reasons -- although other adhesives might be better, it seemed like a place to start. Anyway, one of the themes of my comment was that if it's a problem there are alternatives to hoping the camera manufacturers will address what is mostly an edge case that can be mitigated with attention to detail during the selection of accessories and their use in the field. I mean after a while, experience will lead to checking if the plate has become twisted before operating the shutter. It might take years for someone to recognize the problem and gain that habit and most people with cameras probably will never even experience it as a problem because it never is for them...because most people don't use a tripod most of the time.
That's a pretty good idea, especially if the camera body has indentations that the set screw can really bite into. A second screw socket in the camera body would be better, though. It would be 100% backward compatible and solve the issue completely.
Unless you're taking serious action shots on a violently shaking platform, even a hand tight 1/4-20 isn't going to shake or blow loose. Is loosening a theoretical or actual problem?
Depending on what you're mounting the camera on, it can be a real problem. A moderately-heavy lens attached to a tripod head turned 90 degrees for a portrait can definitely put enough torque on the screw to loosen it. This is most likely just going to be an annoyance, though, because the camera will droop but won't actually come loose. On the other hand, if you're using a "rapid" bottom-mounted camera strap, the possibility of the screw backing out and dumping your camera on the ground is very real.
"I definitly have had issues with the tripod socket mount coming loose during carry. It is rare, and usually only after a very long time of not adjusting it but I came within a wisker of dumping my F5 one time and the D300 has seen it loosen up a couple times."
I'll second this, and note that this is a problem more significant in practice than in theory.
Speaking as a physically inept "software and pure maths" person with consequently no authority whatsoever on this matter, I believe this is mostly on account of the usual "thumb-screw and rubbery no-slip pad" construction of typical non-camera-specific mounting hardware: while it's hard to imagine any lens without its own tripod mount is capable of enough torque to loosen even a hand-tightened bolt, as soon as the non-slip pad ceases to be effectively rigid, very little torque is required to loosen the bolt. And as with most (all?) "rubbery" materials, stiffness of a given non-slip pad at constant compression is a function of temperature.
I absolutely agree... While Arca-swiss is ok, having this as "the #1 dumb thing camera companies do" really made me lose confidence in this article. I mean, seriously - it is the one thing that remains compatible with every single camera in the whole world made for the last 80 years...
I think you're missing the point. If camera manufacturers just molded an Arca Swiss dovetail into the bottom edge of their cameras, then you could have both solid, easy QR compability and the 1/4 socket--simultaneously.
The way it works now, you have to use the 1/4 socket to get QR compatibility.
When I use my flash bracket, I bolt the flash bracket to the camera. When I use the camera with flash bracket with my tripod, I bolt an Arca Swiss compatible plate to the flash bracket using another 1/4-20 hole in the bracket. A third 1/4-20 hole allows me to leave the $0.75 1/4-20 eyebolt (stainless steel no less) I use for a carabiner + neck strap on the flash bracket.
That said, from an engineering perspective the long term durability of a plastic molded dovetail when clamped in a metal Arca Swiss clamp might be a challenge because the Arca Swiss system is not designed around that degree of dissimilarity of material hardness (not that I have anything against plastic). One of the characteristics of Arca Swiss connections is that they are not based on a formal standard and this leads to minor dimensional variability among components that is mitigated by clamping the clamp tighter or buying components from a company like Arca-Swiss at the prices their products command.
Potential durability aside, a molded in dovetail would increase the bulk of a camera and generally the trend seems to be away from camera bulk all things being equal. While a molded in adapter might increase stability in some cases, in others it would decrease it. Setting a camera on a table is an obvious case. Any other mounting is also going to be through a longer lever arm and with a higher center of gravity.
The QR dovetail would be metal. Most high end cameras have metal shells on the bottom, and that's really what Thom is writing about: high end cameras.
EDIT: and it would not stick out awkwardly on the bottom. It would be engineered as part of the shape of the camera itself, while keeping a flat bottom that sits level, with the 1/4 threaded socket.
A dovetail would change the way a camera feels in-hand. For all the non-Arca-Swiss users, a dovetail would forever be caught on things without adding utility.
I'd prefer dual 1/4 threads on the bottom of the camera, then you could add the Arca Swiss dovetail and it wouldn't have the rotation issues. Also, the aesthetics and feel of the camera body wouldn't change.
Another thing with the 1/4" socket is that it's so easy to whip something up real quick to attach the camera to whatever. It could literally be as simple as pulling a hex bolt out of a box and tightening it in.
My biggest complaint is that they keep thinking we want Wifi more than we want GPS on high end cameras. Really, hooking up to a wire at home is far easier than adding on GPS data in the field. If I can only have one, give me GPS.
So many of these complaints can be leveled at manufacturers of pretty much every piece of tech widely used. As soon as a company becomes big, it's a race to the bottom for every silo manager to make his particular silo the leanest which leads to less quality materials, cheaper parts, and an overall worse product.
Dell and HP are the most brutal examples. Dell laptops I work on regularly are put together so incredibly cheaply, it's infuriating.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 274 ms ] threadI shoot pretty much only with old manual-focus lenses from days of yore. Most of my lenses are older than I am. They're all made of metal, built like a tank, and way easier to use. No fidgety UIs or menus to manipulate, perfectly calibrated infinity focus (slap the focus ring to the end until it stops and landscapes are perfectly sharp 100% of the time), rock-solid, don't break under pressure inside my bag, and they just work, no questions asked.
Totally agree about the lack of Arca-Swiss adoption by camera manufacturers. Camera bodies and heavy lenses could easily have a built-in Arca-Swiss shape at the bottom and still have a 1/4-20" screw hole for people who need it.
On this note, I am a professional photographer and have worked professionally with any form of digital, video, emulsion movie or still camera on the market and never have seen rubber on the bottom of a camera that i can remember. Maybe some have it but it's always on the plate if anything in my experience.
Screw mount is lame design I agree but arca mount is not at all a replacement for it. It's a different mount option, which itself requires a modular attachment solution which the screw mount is.
As for the GP' complaint about plastics, it just shows that there's no experience there with minor dents requiring major repairs that would have been harmless bounces with a filled polycarbonate. Probably never dealt much with focus shifts or lens element alignment problems in severe heat or cold either. They use appropriate plastics on the pro-grade stuff where they use it because it's better, not because it's cheaper.
And good plastics are plastic in the traditional sense of the word: if you drop them, they'll absorb the force by deforming and then spring back into place. Metals deform permanently. In a car that's an advantage, you can just hammer it back into place. With a precision instrument a bent tool is just as bad as a broken one.
I don't know how a Rebel compares against a Nikon in a drop test -- I've dropped my Rebel without issues, but no major drops, luckily. But I can compare the pre-unibody MacBook Pros with Thinkpads from the same era. In the store, the original MacBook Pros felt and looked a lot more solid, but they were really crappy cases. OTOH, the ThinkPad's were tanks. Their plastic cases had a magnesium frame, giving them the best of both worlds. Of course, once Apple switched to unibody and ThinkPad's have started to compromise to compete on thickness the story hasn't been so clear.
I never dropped my camera though, but i do run into things a lot, doors, doorposts, fences and most of all tiny people.
Though with a bit typical lens 70-200 or some people often bring, i doubt the difference in weight of the body plastic vs metal is really noticeable. (plastic rebel XTi 556 grams vs 668 grams metal nikon d80)
Huh?
Typical i have a shoulder or wrist strap, ads (no im not affiliated) peakdesigns' or blackrapids' straps and wrist bands
If any reading this still use the neckband with their cams, checkout black rapids systems or peak designs. It's so much more comfortable then 2+ kg dangling from your neck.
Lighter camera ~ more vibrations.
That's not what I was taught plastic meant. I was taught both plastic and elastic materials deform under force, but the elastic ones (not the plastic ones) return to their original form once the force is gone …
I do prefer ABS-PC or ASA for a lot of my more-adverse condition cases. They're much more heat resilient, and chemical/UV resistant in ASA's case.
Typical metals will have an elastic zone, where they act like springs, and a plastic zone, where they don't, and then they fracture. Brittle materials have a relatively small plastic zone, ductile materials will have a large one.
This is what I love about the Asahi Pentax Spotmatic-era cameras.
The only dial on the camera sets shutter speed and the sensitivity of the light meter.
If you go out on a nice day and practice shooting with "sunny 16" technique you don't even need a light meter, just set your aperture and shutter speed and get creative.
A nikon D3/D4/D5 will withstand a huge amount of abuse - at least as much as my more obviously metal pre-digital SLRs did. Another issue to be aware of is when using large, heavy lenses, a lot of stress gets put on the mount point and that most modern pro-orientated DSLRs are actually stronger than their old film equivalents in this regard, as the engineering has improved over time.
Re: arca-swiss plates - the reason camera companies don't do this is because of the licensing fee (source: I've talked to a bunch of them, and this is always their reply). I'm sure Thom is aware of this, but the licensing fee is not insignificant, and with extreme pressure to control costs it's not surprising that companies very rarely do this. Of course I personally would be very happy to see them included, but I know there are a bunch of people that don't use them, and would resent the extra cost to include them.
https://www.apertus.org/
$100k for a camera with a base sensor just barely better than a flip-phone camera, and the size and shape of an old over-shoulder ENG rig. In 2006. What happens if we put a 21 megapixel DSLR sensor in a box?
I would be really interested to see a similar thing happening in reverse. Gopro hits a niche, but not quite.
This just shows how different users have different needs. I do not want my camera to be "smart", I want it to measure the amount of light that comes trough the lens, tell me if it's too much or too little, then capture and save the data on some storage. I can take it from there.
My ideal solution would be something like the failed Siliconfilm project which was a digital sensor you'd put into an analog camera 35mm film compartment.
Yes, different needs. Actually the reason why I want android is mostly that I automate the upload of new photos to Amazon.
I was hoping that the author would add something about the UIs of these cameras. The bodies of modern DSLRs are jampacked with every kind of knob, control, button, dial, and dongle that you can possibly think of.
To a large extent, that's kind of the whole point — these cameras are for professionals and professionals ostensibly need to be able to adjust every aspect of their picture. But in practice, 95% of users aren't using 95% of these adjusters 95% of the time. Most people are changing their aperture, exposure compensation, and a small handful of other things, and yet, dozens of other readily-available and features are still bolted onto the camera that get used roughly never.
There are other downsides besides complexity too. Fuji's mirrorless X100 series is a popular camera with consumers and for years it's shipped with an exposure compensation dial right at the top edge of its body. For just as many years the thing's been loose enough and with little enough inset from the outside that whenever you throw it in a bag or something, there's a pretty reasonable chance that it'll come out cranked all the one way or the other. Sometimes you don't notice, and there goes your shot.
The possible fixes are pretty easy — either move it in so it's less prone to accidental adjustment, or take the units off the thing so that it could optionally be reset every time you turn the camera on, but Fuji will probably never fix the problem – the way things are is the way things are, and they should stay that way.
It would be insanely great if instead of just cargo culting what they themselves have done in the past and what everyone else is doing, camera manufacturers started to think about optimizing these designs for the benefit of the user a little bit. Unfortunately, they never seem to.
That's because you're not using the EVF, which you should be. The single most useful feature combination I find on the x100 series cameras is the EVF combined with the exposure compensation dial. This relates to the following annoyance from the article:
> No focus information in viewfinder
Any need for this is negated by a well implemented electronic viewfinder. Fuji are killing it on this aspect. An EVF will give you: exact framing, exposure, white balance, focus, and depth of field. You get none of this in a traditional optical viewfinder. It completely removes the need to "chimp" and you can concentrate on shooting photographs rather than reviewing what you just shot.
That's a fairly strange assumption to make. A performant EVF is one of Fuji's greatest innovations, and also one of its most conspicuous. Of course I'm using it.
Unfortunately, sometimes you're shooting from the hip (literally or figuratively), and not verifying every setting before you do. Sometimes, the EVF is almost unusable because you're out in bright sunlight. The existence of an EVF doesn't compensate for poor body design.
That's what I actually like on the more "expensive" camera's, the ability to control everything just with single click/rotation.
I'm mostly shooting manual, on my Canon 5D I have a dial for apperture, smaller dial for shutter speed and a knob for the focus point(s). When I used Canon 500D from my friend, I couldn't use it in manual as this requires you to push one button, to then change the shutter speed with a dial (the same one that controls the apperture (or vice versa I can't remember anymore)).
But I think canon is doing it alright as the "entry" level DSLR's like 500D are meant for normal users who just want a point and click camera for most of the time, and don't need that many knobs and dials. While the professional versions have a lot of controls.
But then again, this all goes to personal preference, and most users will buy a camera that they like to use, with or without many controls. I haven't seen anyone with a 5D saying "I'm not happy with total control of my camera", but I heard more people say "Damn, I wish you could change this value much faster and not go to the touchscreen"
> But then again, this all goes to personal preference, and most users will buy a camera that they like to use, with or without many controls. I haven't seen anyone with a 5D saying "I'm not happy with total control of my camera", but I heard more people say "Damn, I wish you could change this value much faster and not go to the touchscreen"
There might be a few other options for design around this type of thing. I really like Leica's approach here for example: keep the settings that are really often needed on the body, relegate the less-frequently used features to menus, but then provide accessible custom profiles that are totally user-configurable and which can be switched between easily. After doing a few test shoots with a Leica Q, it feels like a nearly perfect compromise to me.
You think people aren't buying cameras on the level of the 5D because there are too many buttons and knobs, and not because the market for a $2.3k US camera is small to begin with? The thing could be completely smooth and still only dedicated camera aficionados or professionals would buy it at that price.
I use Nikon and have gone from D200, D300, and now a D700 because I love the quick and direct access to a lot of the controls. The consumer bodies are great cameras but once you become accustomed to the layout it is really useful and logical. I presume the Canon pro range is similar.
Amen. I've been casually shooting with a Nikon D70 and now a D7000 for around 15 years now. Here's an illustrated guide to every single physical control on the D7000, which isn't even a high-end camera:
http://kenrockwell.com/nikon/d7000/users-guide/controls.htm
...and for many of those I'd need to read the manual to find out what they even do (Fn? Lv?) and I struggle to find any reason I'd need to twiddle with, say, the image compression (QUAL) so urgently that it needs a dedicated shortcut button.
Right! Physical buttons and dials are great, but after a certain point adding new ones isn't an improvement to the interface anymore. Too many of them makes the interface overly complex and more prone to accidental adjustment. `QUAL` is a perfect example of something that belongs in a menu.
Not a snark: maybe 95% of users didn't need a semi-pro DSLR and should have gone with a smartphone or a point-and-shoot instead? The remaining 5% need those knobs and controls, and would be left with a less useful camera if they were removed or simplified.
I see your argument about making sensible choices on smaller form factors but DSLRs aren't point and shoot.
There's only one button I "roughly never" use on my D750 (the little "i" button). Everything else gets a hot supper. And it's not just that I use those features, I mean I use them all the time. In environments where I need the muscle-memory to affect them quickly. Things like ISO, bracketing, flash and focus and aperture priority modes. I don't think I'm unique.
I won't tolerate a camera that forces me to disengage with what I'm doing so I can fanny around in a menu system.
However, I've found that smart phone cameras have gotten so good that they match or even beat the A6000 for a lot of shots so I tend to use it only for very specific kinds of pictures now.
The modern trend of replacing descriptive text with icons needs to die.
Imagine full iOS integration, super fast A-11 Bionic chip (same as iPhone), high throughput wireless components, custom OS (like WatchOS), developer API, W2 chip for Bluetooth pairing, OLED screen, and beautiful lightweight aluminum housing.
That would completely change the market. But we can only dream.
Beats worked because it built on their iPhone and music streaming strategy rather than replacing pieces of either.
Also, the Mac Pro fiasco makes me doubtful that Apple wants to be in any pro markets anymore.
I don’t think Apple will venture into dedicated camera equipment. The iPhone camera is one of the big selling points and keeps people upgrading. Apple will not sacrifice their cash cow for a comparatively niche market. A dedicated device also goes against the unification that Apple seems to pursue.
I would very much enjoy playing with something along those lines.
I never understood that reasoning. As an individual, I can't simultaneously develop 10 different products, but a large company sitting on billions in cash could develop 1000 niche products simultaneously.
In fact, some large companies (Procter & Gamble, 3M, General Electric) have thousands or tens of thousands of products.
To use your Apple example, why couldn't Apple create a professional camera division, giving them $25 million startup money, and tell them to never bother the iPhone team, but do give them access to the source code, engineering drawings, and contacts in the supply chain.
It seems very fashionable for tech companies to be very narrowly focused. They work on the one thing that is making the most money at that moment. If any experimental development isn't a wild success, it's shut down right away. All of those make sense if you're an individual or struggling startup, but if you have billions just sitting there, what's the harm in trying many things at once?
And from this we get the innovator's dilemma :)
Bad PR when you eventually close them down. See Google: they ran Reader for eight years and gave people plenty of time to migrate. Half a decade later, it's still used as an example of why they can't be trusted. Regardless of whether that's justifiable or not, it's an harm to the company's image. Better to just dump money into external startups (see Google Ventures) and then acquire them if they're interesting.
The strongest one is talent dilution. If they poach talent from existing teams, then the new project must be more profitable to make that a good idea. Building a new team from scratch is not an easy task - you need management that can guarantee the same level of productivity/QA that other teams have. The team leads that can produce this kind of top quality are rare - why would you spend them on the niche market instead of advancing your main product? (unless they can find a leader who is only interested in the camera niche)
The second one would be the profitability of this niche market. Why wouldn't Apple just invest money in P&G stock(or whatever, I don't know much about the stock market) - do they really expect the investment into the camera niche market to bring better gains?
I know Procter & Gamble owns a ton of brands, and I don't know if there's any cross-effect when one brand fails. My suspicion is that Apple won't be able to get away with low scrutiny, even if they spin off their own "NotAppleAtAll" cameras. This may be a third concern for them.
Less related, but many of P&G's products are direct competitors, e.g. Ariel and Tide laundry detergent. Perhaps that's just not a business model that Apple is interested in pursuing?
One of the first things Steve Jobs on returning to Apple did was to cull what he felt were unnecessary products, and product groups. You could argue that Apple is large enough now to have thousands of products, but what was clear is that Jobs had the defining vision and no single person can have a single defining vision of thousands of products.
To use your example you cannot create a camera division and not allow inter-group communication because you are then building products in exactly the same way as someone like Sony. You end up with disconnected systems, nothing integrates together well and in-fighting between the groups.
I remember looking for a 32" Sony TV a decade or so ago, and there were 5 or 6 different models all at slightly different price brackets and with different discounts everything became muddled. Sony of course were simply capturing every portion of the market they could, from the person who wanted the cheapest to the person who wants the best.
I'd like to see Apple re-focus, make single models of iPhone, iPad, MacBook, iMac and the Apple Watch. Stop trying to capture as much of the market as possible and just focus on a limited number of highly integrated devices.
Apple made multiple models of iMacs and MacBooks (and PowerBooks) under Jobs - I think this would be a horrible idea, for computers specifically you just can’t address everyones needs with one size of laptop/desktop screen.
Because the question faced by large companies, and even merely medium-sized and small companies, is not what can we do, but what's the best thing to do.
If I've got a product line with 100 engineers that is making me a million per engineer, and I've got a product line with 5 engineers making a quarter million per engineer, and I decide I'm going to hire 10 more engineers, even though it is true that I can't guarantee that the scaling numbers will hold when I add more engineers, it is still often the rational choice to assign those 10 new engineers to my very profitable product. In fact it can make sense to eliminate the product line with 5 engineers and put them on the really profitable product. The fact that I could do 11 projects with 10 engineers each isn't very interesting because odds are that the other 10 projects won't be as profitable, and I won't get anywhere near as much money.
Meanwhile, some other company in the market might very happily take on the less profitable, but still profitable, smaller niche. They can do it with different degrees of overhead, maybe in a different cheaper location, and perhaps with fewer compliance requirements bearing down on them, etc.
There are, of course, endless, endless nuances and "what ifs" you could play. This comment is not a course in resource allocation for business. It's just a comment intended to point you in the direction of answering the question "Why don't GooFaceZonaSoft do all the things?" in a reasonable manner. It also explains why GooFaceZonaSoft still acts resource constrained quite often, and why despite the fact the tech industry tends to develop very large giants at the top there's always, always a ton of smaller companies and there's never any risk that the entire industry is all going to consolidate into one big company, because the first thing that mega corporation would do is divest a ton of the less profitable sub-businesses, which would promptly reform externally.
If money could buy great products, Microsoft would still be relevant.
Apple continues to be unique and continues to be questioned as to the viability of their uniqueness.
(edit: clarity)
Adding the features identified in the post would cure the "no reason to upgrade" problem, at least temporarily. But the market for serious cameras is pretty much fixed and easily saturated.
But that, too, would be moving in the wrong direction.
However, I would still love to have something like I described.
They kind of did when they released the MacBook Air.
No, it really wouldn't. Look at the heavyweights right now, they all either have a ton of expertise in optics or in sensors. That market cares more about glass selection, sensors and taking pictures than bells and whistles like iOS would provide.
Also, would they then be making camera sensors? Or would they just figure Sony (whose profits they'd be stepping on) would just take it? Do they have a 2nd source for this critical component?
Rather than disrupt the high end consumer camera market with a camera in 2 years, they’ll do it with iPhone in 5 or 10 years.
I obviously don't expect a $2000 dslr to match a $50k Alexa in image quality, but surely they must be able to make the motion of the images smoother and less CCTV looking.
Blackmagic put out an amazing little pocket camera a few years ago with gorgeous colours and buttery smooth motion, why can't the big guys follow suit?
Often you can see the choppiness when things are moving. That to me looks like they are using a high shutter speed which is inappropriate for cine work. In still photography if you take a picture of a waterfall on a bright day at 1/1000 you'll see every crisp drop, shooting at 1/30th will give a little bit of smoothing motion blur. Using a DSLR shooting at 25 frames a second and leaving the shutter speed on auto can result in a sequence of 1/1000 second shots which will look choppy. What they should be doing is using Neutral Density filters so they can choose the appropriate aperture for the shot whilst keeping the shutter speed at 1/30 or there abouts. This will give the smoother motion images but does take skill and time.
My other bugbear is many cameramen appear to have forgotten what a tripod is. The camera wobbling about can occasionally add to the atmosphere but most of the time it is just annoying and distracting. Again a combination of lack of skill and production values.
With projection and home displays lagging camera technology, I'd be surprised if the opposite didn't happen. You can do a lot of shake reduction with 2x the pixels you intend to keep.
Also I think a lot of the shake these days is added in post, partly to cover for production flaws and partly to add "atmosphere" as you say.
Though perhaps with two cameras and/or some grid projection...
That's easy to check; if there is no parallax then it was definitely added in post.
I've tried monopods, but my best shots are all taken with a tripod.
During panning shots (horizontal, vertical), in recent films the image is blurry and uncomfortable (for me). Similar panning shots in earlier films seem cripser and more "comfortable".
Is there a technical reason (shutter speed fashion) ? Or is it in my head ?
An example of a different shutter mechanism producing an odd effect, this picture https://www.flickr.com/photos/sorenragsdale/3192314056/ shows that what the camera sees isn't always the truth!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNVtMmLlnoE
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP1elMR5qjc
As a camera operator, this crap technology gave me my first gray hairs. It allows for the processor and write tech in the camera to only handle one line of pixels at a time instead of the entire frame. In response, camera departments had to invent the term 'Global Shutter' to describe the proper way to do it, in which the entire frame is captured at once.
I think we'll have h265 10bit video in most cameras (and mobile phones) pretty soon, and that will be a marked improvement in terms of colour and dynamic range of video footage.
Some higher end Sony and Canon dSLR's shoot raw video, but I guess it's generally a niche feature, most people wouldn't want to shoot or edit raw video.
I think the video quality is down to reasonably high dynamic range sensor, and RAW sequence capture, meaning you can actually access all that dynamic range
I'm only now looking into DSLR's for a low-light option. Funnily enough, the ones that stand out to me are the Samsung NX1 and the Fuji XT2. Samsung oddly has great motion cadence, but awful macro-blocking. Fuji, unsurprisingly, has beautiful colours. Unfortunately both are only 8 bit, which is kind of a deal-breaker for me.
As an aside, how rare and cool to get to geek out on Hacker News over this stuff!
I am not going to be buying another camera with 8bit video, so will be holding out until there are more 10bit options out there. HEVC has a 10bit profile and it will be everywhere because of HDR TV's and phones, but might take a year or two to get popular in cameras.
If you want to have the ability to adjust the amount of blur in post shooting at 120fps+ allows for that workflow but it’s a pain to do.
Or is it something else like a bad video codec?
Also, in film, people generally keep the shutter angle at 180 degrees. So for 24 frames per second, the shutter speed is usually 1/48 of a second.
As for codecs, that's actually where some of these cameras are making leaps and bounds. The GH5 I mentioned is capable of 10 bit recording, which means you could record ProRes HQ with an external recorder.
Only after a decade of trash CMOS sensors are people starting to realize that cameras did not get exponentially better overnighy. They got worse.
Even RED cameras use these CMoS sensors, albeit very fast ones. Alexas have proper global shutters along with most Blackmagic cameras.
Rolling shutter aside, given the same settings, there should be no real differences between Arri, Red and those DSLRs in motion capture (and not in image depth, dynamic range, resolution, and color science), and I don't think there are.
All kinds of movie, TV and documentary work use high end DSLRs from Canon and co, and the motion is just fine.
Of course the idea is that motion is usually set to 24fps in both those cameras and Arri, Red etc. If you want "smooth" motion of the hi-fps variety, jack up the fps. But then it would be soap-opera like and not what most people associate with cinematic motion.
Of course, it also doesn't work, because the camera sleeps it along with everything else when it goes idle, so it never has time to get a good lock.
The way you solve this is by disabling idle sleep. That doesn't hurt the battery, either; it kills it.
This is legitimately frustrating, unlike a lot of the frankly scattershot and silly business in the article. (XQD on entry-level cameras? Five times the media cost? Yeah, the market wasn't small enough already...)
Here's a Google Engineer's word on the issue: https://www.itworld.com/article/2833266/mobile/why-gps-eats-...
It doesn't geotag my D500 photos unless I've opened SnapBridge already on the phone, despite it being marketed as always on.
Perhaps when I upgrade in a few months the situation will improve.
Optical remotes? I don't take selfie. I press the button.
Wifi? lol, no thanks. I want a camera not a phone and I don't want 1 hour of battery.
Battery problem? where? just buy battery pack...
2. Optical remotes aren't for selfies. Smartphones on stupid sticks are for selfies.
3. Most new cameras have WiFi. It doesn't affect battery life when you're not using it. They're just usually really slow, so picture upload/sync that should take 1 min tops take 1 hour instead.
Remote live-view and exposure/focus control works quite well, though, as it doesn't need that much bandwidth. There's also BLE, which in my camera allows remote control from smartphone without affecting battery life in any measurable way (BLE consumption is negligible).
4. Camera batteries are insanely expensive (and no, they don't contain anything magic or special, unlike what they want you to believe—apart from DRM, they're completely standard batteries worth about $20 retail when branded), they're DRM'd to avoid third-party manufacturing (which leads to more recent battery copies being unable to show charge level due to skipping this circuitry), they're often change shape just to force you to buy new batteries and chargers instead of reusing them, they don't support common charging specs (USB and Qi, for example—it would be practical to be able to juice up the camera while its in the bag between shootings), ...
There is nothing but battery problems.
http://www.duracelldirect.co.uk/
LP-E17 is an example of a still non-reversed battery. Duracell doesn't have one, and those that do sell third-party clones pretend to be the DC adapter battery dummy to make things work, resulting in no battery gauge.
Why would camera manufacturers do that? So they can force you into paying 60 USD for the extra batteries you need to have. Preferably multiple times, as you change camera bodies.
I would imagine that if they lowered their crazy income margin, people would buy more original batteries, even if they kept the DRM. Instead, people buy good third-party batteries for 1/6th of the price, sometimes giving up on the battery gauge to do so.
https://www.batteriesplus.com/replacement/battery/nikon/enel...
But it's the same price as B&H's Nikon?
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/735929-REG/Nikon_2701...
...And the Duracell has less 84% of the maH.
I've had success with Wasabi.
The OP had a specific complaint about cameras not having an IR receiver at the back, i.e., for non-selfies. Remotes are useful for bulb shots, for reducing camera shake, and many other things.
Depending on exact location, the accepted angles should be slightly less than 180 degrees in front of the camera—you don't need to be anywhere near the subject, unless you got a fisheye mounted.
It's just a bit silly that the default approach wasn't RF, rather than optical, even if they put receivers on all sides of the camera. Some new cameras have BLE though, which is nice and solves most problems (although I prefer physical remotes to poorly written apps).
Sorry if the majority of people buy DSLR without using it correctly. It's like owning a Apple, or a Gaming computer but don't understand nothing at all or do it by trends. Same apply with camera where everybody know everything.
Majority of people in the street have DSLR and take selfie by hand. You know now why it sucks.
A 60mp leaf credo on a Rollei HY6 body.
Histogram and blinkies processed from the raw image, the lenses where all made of extremely solid metal, it had a built in arca Swiss like tripod play on the bottom, a giant 3.5 inch touchscreen, USB 3 transfer and tethering, could charge the batteries from USB and run off USB power, and the lenses all had great depth of field and distance scales.
And the viewfinder was ludicrously massive!
Downside, it weighed ~2.5kg total or something and ate batteries, and hated any iso over 200. And cost something like 30000 when new.
Comparison for video:
https://www.dpreview.com/articles/2661726126/alpha-better-so...
Field notes:
Used one on a trip in Europe. The light gathering is astonishing, both photos and video. Street shooting at night in dimly lit rural towns, almost every shot looks better than it did to naked eye.
Only took two very small lenses, FE 2/28 and FE 1.8/50, both gave results that belie their size and cost. It autofocused down to light levels that would need a 15 second exposure at f2 (candlelight is EV 4, autofocuses down to EV -3). It autofocused on stars.
The main thing I can't get over is its uncanny ability to nail tack sharp focus on the iris of either the main face in my image or the preferred registered face among many faces, at arbitrary distances from face larger than frame to far enough away focus doesn't matter.
The A7s2 costs ~2k€, I'll have to spend at least a grand on lenses and another grand for the XLR/mike head and the external battery pack... thanks for the heads-up on the performance though, hope the A7S will live up to expectations ;)
Had I not already invested in another system, I'd probably have gone Fuji.
The only gripes which I have with the Sony systems are the unintuitive menu systems and unergonomic body styles, compared to Canon DSLR's though of 5D / 1D ilk (and most recently, the Leica SL which is just a dream to handle).
Other than that, technically, on paper, they are amazing cameras.
p.s: IBIS is amazing, you can take pretty much any old lens and all of a sudden it's stabilised.
One the one hand, quality camera's should keep upgrading the periferal hardware to keep match with modern IT-supplies and on the other hand keep a focus on durable products. Why wouldn't producers do this? Cost savings and probably price competition.
The competition (smart phones) have a whole different market. They have a product that people (regretably?) replace every 2-3 years. The market dictates the newest techniques. Pictures are sensors + software. Software has a much shorter improvement cycle. Hence, I would expect a continuously larger part of the camera market to 'fall' for the smartphone camera. Heck, the 'official' advice from my preferred reviewers is not to buy a small camera anymore, but use the savings for a better smartphone.
And then you have large old-camera corporations struggling because their highest margin products (just a guess that that was the little cameras in the former days, not the professionaly product) are falling away. So they don't have the money to keep their high-end products up quality wise nor the institutional awareness to quickly adapt. Cycle a few times... Read OP.
The old corporations in the field (Canon, Nikon, Sony) should make you pay for better firmwares (i.e. plugins or at least revisions) so that they have an incentive to keep improving their existing DLSRs. I think on my previous body there was only ONE update in x years and that did not bring anything new on the table.
Thanksfully nowadays we have MagicLantern for Canon DSLRs at least, which brings a ton of additional features for photo and video. It's still not at a parity level with the software available on phones and the like, but it's a big jump vs the base firmware nonetheless.
Alas, I can think of exactly no digital examples of that market structure to work. Perhaps the old-school PC hit that mark. How many of those are still around? Perhaps we can see cloud computing as hitting that mark (separating 1,2,3), but still we need a complete device (1+2+3) to interact with the cloud.
Canikon aren't doing new features in firmwares, seems more like bug fixes and Sony is somewhere inbetween at least with the A7-series...
Sony A7 series have also some kind of small apps you can buy and download from their store to your camera. Haven't seen that many apps there =(
Oh wow. I had the same experience. In my case I just wanted to update the existing apps I had installed. Apparently you need a Sony entertainment account to install apps (it must be a new requirement as I never had one when I installed the apps in the first place).
I tried for 15 minutes to create an account using the camera.
You would think Sony Entertainment Network's account login/creation webpage would be responsive so it would be usable within the camera OR there would be a completely different page. NO, it is the same desktop, non-responsive page including Google's painful anti-bot script which requires me to select 10 images that represent street signs using the camera wheel.Amazingly, I could actually use the A6000 to create an account, but it kept erroring out when submitting. Finally, I realized it would be easier to just use my laptop and to my surprise it still failed because their account creation was down. About 10 attempts later it still failed with a slightly different error, but I still received the account creation success email (?) and was able to login fine after that.
Edit: Formatting.
This seems more like an issue of quality control.
Snarky: It's just not thaught that way in business schools. Lookup Nikons financial trouble. Canon has no financial trouble, but seems to be quickly moving to other markets that are profitable (medical supplies). So perhaps they will just drop out of this market in a few years.
Which is what I don't understand. Because, as far as I know, firms should engage in product differentiation as long as it's possible.
It's a great question and I don't know.
What I do know is that I have not bought/used a dedicated camera since about the time smartphones came along. Nor have any of my family members - they all used to have dedicated cameras used to take holiday photos, photos of their children, birthdays and so on. Now they just use their phone.
This must have an effect on the camera manufacturers.
The bar of what smartphone cameras are capable of doing keeps rising, keeps eating into the territory of what previously required a standalone camera.
All these things are competition that eat into profits, which in turn may affect those companies' abilities to produce high end cameras. Eg they may only be able to use cheaper components compared with what they could afford in the past.
I know lots of people who used to carry DSLRs everywhere but who now only carry their iPhone.
Many people do have a number of lenses and use DSLRs for creative control but they may not even be a minority. Heck, I'm a relatively serious amateur photographer and I often don't bother carrying a dedicated camera today if I know I'll just be doing some occasional casual shooting.
Of course the dslr can do more, but the ease that a phone + software can make a wide range of really nice pics is eating into the consumer level dslr market. I like taking pictures, so I don't mind fidgeting on my dslr for the perfect shot. Meanwhile my wife has taken multiple great looking pics on her phone is wondering what I'm doing ;)
Smartphones have destroyed the compact consumer camera market. There is no hyperbole there. Professional cameras? Sales of those are going down also, depending on how you define them of course (SLR is probably appropriate to call "professional")
People who buy that level of camera understand, moreso than the general public, that, for example, an increase from a 36 to a 45 megapixel sensor may be nice, but in the end the photos both cameras produce are still great and whoever sees them in print or exported for the internet would never be able to tell the difference.
If Sony would stop making as many smartphone models and add a couple of those engineers to their DSLR team, they should be able to solve most of these issues pretty quickly.
Sony makes about 5 different smartphone models each year. If they focused on shipping just one or two I guess they'd have more time to develop a better DSLR?
This would give them a big advantage over Nikon and Canon. Sony has a lot of knowledge and experience that Nikon and Canon don't have. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, USB-c, batteries are all great in their smartphones. Why not use that to make their cameras better?
So I can imagine that RnD is limited to chips and software instead of body work.
Camera itself got some bugfix updates, but is missing some essentials as working as a web cam, supporting timelapse, etc...
Also, doing things like HDR or stop-motion can be a pain. Better software or the ability to run apps could solve this.
e.g. My wife has a lovely Audi but when I drive it I get very frustrated by how long the nav/entertainment system takes to start up...
There's nothing stopping a photographer from permanently attaching an Arca-Swiss plate to the bottom of a camera body with a bit of cyanoacrylate or some screws if it makes better photographs. For me, walking around with an Arca-Swiss plate on my camera made me appreciate that 1/4-20 socket is flush. Walking around with a 120mm plate made me appreciate that the 1/4-20 socket is flush both top to bottom and front to back.
Like everything in photography 1/4-20 and Arca-Swiss are defined by engineering tradeoffs. The cost of slower direct attachment of 1/4-20 is in exchange for the physical strength of bolted connection and the flexibility adopting a broader standard affords - I can build a camera mount from general components available at the hardware store (including round stock and a 1/4-20 die in a statistically unlikely universe).
edit: I left out all the electronic/software rants because photography is undergoing Cambrian explosion in regards to controls and computation (but mirrorless cameras are nothing new).
Furthermore, a permanent Arca Swiss would prevent innovative designs such as the Really Right Stuff L brackets (which would be my choice if I were to ever switch QR plate systems).
Furthermore, many QR plates are protected by patent. Having the classic screw isn’t.
The tripod mount has been a standard for decades and decades.
The phone headphone jack fractured into competing standards years ago. Works fine for listening, but once you want to use a microphone you're dealing with different pinouts for different manufacturers, balkanized auto detection and signaling, incompatible plugs sizing, grounding issues with the phone case, etc. It wasn't a pristine situation when Apple left it behind.
My next phone will also have a headphone socket.
This is true, but ultimately they are all variations on the 1/4" phone plug, which has been a standard across multiple industries since the advent of the telephone. Adding another ring to a TRS, or changing the pinout, is a minor variation compared to Apple's alternative. The phone plug is so ubiquitous that I think the comparison is valid.
Wanting to force the weight and cost of Arca Swiss on everyone is just selfish. In fact most of these complaints are just examples of wanting everyone else to subsidize features they might not need that this guy happens to want.
The Qi demand on the other hand is just dumb. Wireless charging requires close proximity, so you'd have to set your camera down just so or it would fail to charge. With different lenses changing the balance point and accessories like portrait grips changing the shape, many people would never get Qi to work properly. Plus in a world where enthusiasts largely have multiple batteries anyway, wireless charging built into the camera seems utterly useless. I'd rather rapidly charge my battery in a dedicated charger than leave my camera on its own charging pad all the time.
Adding Velcro doesn't seem to me like it would do much for vibration or slippage (large rotation, yes, small scale rotation, not so much), since Velcro is not a rigid connection. Rubber or similar spacers can help but it's still not great. I use a plate that's got a lip on it to prevent twisting (which was a happy accident, because I actually ordered the wrong plate).
In terms of adding a second screw, a multiple thousand dollar camera body is probably not the ideal first subject for a person who has never disassembled a camera or done similarly fine grained work. Such a person should perhaps hire a technician or practice on broken equipment first in cases where such modifications seem worth the effort/cost. Hoping camera manufacturers would design around the edge case is not much of a plan.
I don't think a multiple-thousand dollar camera body is a good target for invasive modifications unless it's already out of warranty, regardless of whether the change is being made by someone with the appropriate skills. I also doubt that the result of such a modification would be very good anyway. Without being part of the initial design (e.g. a captive nut embedded in the base), the best aftermarket modification would likely be based on either threads tapped directly into the body or a nut essentially glued in place.
I would not feel comfortable either 1) drilling into the bottom of my DSLR, or 2) taking it apart to see if I could safely drill into a given spot.
I would say there's quite a lot preventing me from modifying it, and even more to prevent normal users.
These positions line up with some locations on various medium and large format cameras (where there is a lot of weight in play).
But I agree. I think for the majority of shots it doesn't make that much difference.
e.g. https://www.photo.net/discuss/threads/black-rapid-and-other-...
"I definitly have had issues with the tripod socket mount coming loose during carry. It is rare, and usually only after a very long time of not adjusting it but I came within a wisker of dumping my F5 one time and the D300 has seen it loosen up a couple times."
Speaking as a physically inept "software and pure maths" person with consequently no authority whatsoever on this matter, I believe this is mostly on account of the usual "thumb-screw and rubbery no-slip pad" construction of typical non-camera-specific mounting hardware: while it's hard to imagine any lens without its own tripod mount is capable of enough torque to loosen even a hand-tightened bolt, as soon as the non-slip pad ceases to be effectively rigid, very little torque is required to loosen the bolt. And as with most (all?) "rubbery" materials, stiffness of a given non-slip pad at constant compression is a function of temperature.
The way it works now, you have to use the 1/4 socket to get QR compatibility.
That said, from an engineering perspective the long term durability of a plastic molded dovetail when clamped in a metal Arca Swiss clamp might be a challenge because the Arca Swiss system is not designed around that degree of dissimilarity of material hardness (not that I have anything against plastic). One of the characteristics of Arca Swiss connections is that they are not based on a formal standard and this leads to minor dimensional variability among components that is mitigated by clamping the clamp tighter or buying components from a company like Arca-Swiss at the prices their products command.
Potential durability aside, a molded in dovetail would increase the bulk of a camera and generally the trend seems to be away from camera bulk all things being equal. While a molded in adapter might increase stability in some cases, in others it would decrease it. Setting a camera on a table is an obvious case. Any other mounting is also going to be through a longer lever arm and with a higher center of gravity.
EDIT: and it would not stick out awkwardly on the bottom. It would be engineered as part of the shape of the camera itself, while keeping a flat bottom that sits level, with the 1/4 threaded socket.
Dell and HP are the most brutal examples. Dell laptops I work on regularly are put together so incredibly cheaply, it's infuriating.