If you look at the bigger chart further down the page you can see that the market for interchangeable lens cameras is still a lot bigger than in 2003 or even 2007.
Full frame sensors are getting popular and able to fetch higher prices.
Meanwhile I have a camera body that was introduced at the end of 2012 and it's working just fine for photos and Full HD videos. I'm in no rush to upgrade, my guess is i'll keep using it until 4K60P video capable interchangeable lens camera bodies become more affordable, perhaps in 2021 or so.
It's big and heavy, but the Canon 5D mkII released around 2008 still takes beautiful pictures far beyond what most non-pros would ever need. It's tough when you are competing with your decade old products.
This is a really interesting point I hadn't considered until now. I know a few professional photographers and they all run hardware that's 10+ years old. Even if the initial investment to get high end gear can be high, it really serves you for a long time if you take care of it well. Compare that to for example corporate IT departments where laptops are regularly scheduled to be replaced every 4-5 years.
I'm a camera enthusiast and I collect some fancy/expensive old cameras and lenses. I'm the last person who you think would settle for a camera phone as a camera replacement. But they are just getting so good and they are so easy to use!
I'm finding it harder and harder to justify bringing along a camera unless I'm doing special like a specific photo shoot. Obviously phone cameras are no where near as good as a 40 megapixel full frame camera with a good prime lens shooting in raw. But 99% of the time I'm just going to post a photo of my kid in Instagram and it doesn't matter.
I remember one businessman telling me in the very early days of digital photography something like this: people do not really care about quality, they just want to recognize their own faces in photos. These times were when digital cameras barely made couple megapixel photos. Current smartphones can do even better making digital cameras obsolete. Cycle goes on.
high performance =/= high quality. There's a threshold that something is decently good enough, no point in maximising everything. The same can be said about music (320 kbps vs flac), operating systems (8gb vs 32gb), wifi (4g vs 5g). Like how greedy do you need to be, to not be content?
There are other driving forces, though. A typical person may not need to shoot photos at more than 2 megapixels, given a half-decent sensor underneath. But they like their 4k TV programs, and to shoot those, there need to be high-end cameras available. Then some people might want to go into business of shooting stuff that ends up viewed on 4k displays, and suddenly you have a market for semi-pro equipment. Regular people for which good enough is good enough are the ones not in a market for a camera - they use the one in their phone.
Similarly with RAM. 8 GB sounds fine until you change jobs and have to use Slack. I'd argue that web developers are the drivers for more powerful hardware now. And with 5G, more and more people like to watch Netflix in decent quality on the go, so now you have to push more data through the network.
Also, out of all things to pick on about the economy, this is one of the least problematic. Personally, I think companies can and should shoot for triple digit megapixels on phones, terabyte of RAM and streaming 8k videos to contact lenses. These technologies are enablers - the more power and performance you make available, the more previously impossible use cases will show up.
It's a proxy for a wider point about website obesity crisis. In the past 2 years, I upgraded from 8GB to 12GB and now 32GB, in big part driven by whatever it is my browsers (both Chrome and Firefox) are doing while running Slack, Messenger, GMail and HN.
(I honestly don't care much whether Slack has made performance improvements in the past few months, because I recently switched to the combination of not keeping it active in the browser, using the Android app, and using Ripcord client on desktop, which has sane system requirements.)
400MB for the standalone application last I checked, and that was after the newest upgrades that should make it better IIRC.
That is about 5% on a 8GB machine, and typically a much larger procent of the available RAM once you realize that a lot of those 8GBs are used by the OS and possibly other necessary processes.
> And with 5G, more and more people like to watch Netflix in decent quality on the go, so now you have to push more data through the network.
4G is fine for video, it’s really fast! Even 3G was quite fast with HSDPA and all that. What I lack is cheap data on my phone otherwise I would watch Netflix on it right now.
From what I understand, it's fine when it's just you doing it, but not when 20 other people standing next to you do it at the same time. 5G is supposed to improve on that.
> What I lack is cheap data on my phone otherwise I would watch Netflix on it right now.
That's, unfortunately, the problem with telco business shenanigans. Where I live, I managed to extend my contract from ~3GB to 22GB for something around $10-$15 monthly. I have plenty of LTE to burn on Netflix now.
I used to shoot wedding video as a side-gig, and I had a range of cameras from the T2i to the 6D. I also owned a few P&S just for fun. Since the 7 Plus I have sold all my P&S cameras. The only advantage they have now is the longer reach, but I rarely actually need a zoom lens for a random shot. If I am doing anything serious I bring a DSLR.
The main problem is I always have my phone on me, and carrying around something like an RX100 is a pain because of how thick the body is. It is not really pocketable, meaning it goes into a larger bag. Then if I have a larger bag, I might as well bring a better camera.
I have the opposite feeling, the RX100 is small enough that I can just stick it in my suitcase/bag and go. If I bring my 5D with I feel obligated to get all the lenses/flash and associated crap and then I'm stuck with a huge 10kg backpack.
A phone can't beat the picture quality off my d7100 with a 50mm prime (no need for a 40mp full frame), but typically I don't need that level of quality. Where phones really fall down though is anything requiring zoom. Now when I go on vacation I use my phone for most snapshot like pictures and keep my zoom/ultra wide lens on the dslr. That works but I do start to wonder why I am lugging all this extra weight around for very specific picture purposes.
I agree. I was just pointing out that my old d7100 + 50mm prime is better than a phone camera, but as you say it doesn't matter for most use cases.
Part of me wants to sell all my dslr gear and the other part wants to get a mirrorless z6. It's a weird spot to be in because I have plenty of pics that would have been very hard, if not impossible to capture with a phone. But, I want to lighten my load when traveling.
It sounds like a mirrorless setup might for you. I have basically the same use cases... I use my Olympus u4/3 gear on vacation or specific things, but for everyday carry, it's just my iPhone 7.
Of course, I now own so much u4/3 stuff that it probably weighs more than a single DSLR and a single nice zoom. Two bodies, a pro level zoom, a handful of 1.8 primes, and moderately priced super-wide and telephoto zooms. Deciding what to bring on any given trip is getting to be a "problem". lol.
It's a fantastic lens, even with its minor limitations. I also can't recommend enough trying a 28-30mm, as it replicates the FOV you'd get with a 50 on a full-frame.
I just carry an old Ricoh GRD III when I do carry a camera. It has great ergonomics and the image isn't deformed at the ends. Otherwise I just put up with my phone camera than nerver seems to do what I want. The GRD was perhaps my best investment into camera gear.
There are philosophies in many hobbies that are pretty close to what you were getting at. With firearms when asked what the best gun is the answer is "the one you shoot well". With astronomy they say it's better to have a small cheap telescope you use all the time rather than a big expensive telescope you barely use. And with cars/motorcycles you hear how it's more fun to drive a slow vehicle fast than a fast vehicle slow.
Everywhere there's a fixation on expensive equipment. People use it to try to replace skill. Also it serves as a way to elevate their status within their hobbies community. And man it happens in every hobby I've seen. But in the end all it really does it weigh them down. Their equipment is too bulky to use all the time. So much more gizmos to keep track of. Things are so much more expensive that you don't really take it out as much and enjoy it out of fear of breaking it. Even if there's some sort of insurance in place to cover the cost of damage, you still don't want to risk scratching your new baby.
Anyways there's this series on youtube called "Pro Photographer, Cheap Camera Challenge" that I adore. I'm not even a photography buff but it's super interesting to see these professional photographers take the cheapest cameras available, in some cases they're actually toys, and turn out some amazing pictures.
"And with cars/motorcycles you hear how it's more fun to drive a slow vehicle fast than a fast vehicle slow."
I know this is just your third comparator in your statement, but I never thought I'd see it pop up on HN. :)
It's one of those clichés you see all the time in Jalopnik comment sections...I always want to say "but have actually done that, driven the slow car fast and the fast car slow?" Because...I've got a slow car and a very very fast car. The fast car is fun to drive even when you're going 0 miles an hour at a stoplight. The slow car is fun to drive slow but awful to drive fast.
Maybe this statement works if the "slow" car is an E30/Miata/Fiat or similar but in my book, fast car going any speed is always way more fun. :)
I haven't heard it about cars but it applies to motorcycles. Generalizing, a maintained bike with good brakes and tires is probably more capable than most riders and faster than public roads so a 1990's or later 400-600cc motorcycle ("slow"?) is more fun whirring the engine and stirring the gearbox than loping along in second gear on a liter-class bike.
One of the most fun rides I ever had was after swapping my bike for a riding buddy's 250 Ninja for the Friday lunch ride. I flogged that thing like a rented mule trying to keep up with the bigger bikes. Riding that thing close to the 14K redline in every gear. Give the handlebars the slightest nudge, and that <400lb. bike just lays on its side, hammer the throttle at the apex because that tiny engine isn't going to spin the rear tire up.
Try that on a ZX-1X on public roads, and they'll be pulling dental records to identify your body.
I have a slower Mazda 3 (although its fairly peppy at low speeds, similar to a Prius) and a very fast Tesla -- the Mazda is most fun to drive around town under 45, while the Tesla is basically very fun to drive anywhere, anytime at any speed.
I don't even understand the original statement tbh..
That doesn't really make much sense. Are you really having a blast in stop and go traffic in your Tesla? It doesn't even make sound - so you can't say you're enjoying the sound of revving the engine.
I think the point of the saying is that if you're going the same speed in both cars, you're likely going to be at a different driving "x/10" effort in the slow car and "y/10" effort in the fast car. And the point is that x >> y. So, you'll be pushing yourself and the car much harder in the slow car than the fast car.
I've found that my enjoyment is somewhat correlated to how hard I am pushing myself and the car. The slower the car, the harder I have and it have to work to go the same speed. Thus, sometimes, the more enjoyment.
> For sure. For one thing, the car looks flashy and draws a decent amount of attention where I live, so it's fun just driving around town.
It doesn't really look like a flashy car to me unless you've wrapped it..? Where I live (SV) they're about as common as a toyota corolla. Maybe you've done something to it but I don't feel like it's flashy like a Viper ACR is flashy.
> For another, I accelerate pretty fast at lights, so that never really gets old.
I guess but that's, again, not really driving a fast car slow then is it?
> And in stop and go traffic on the freeway, it's fun because I just set autopilot on.
So, you're saying that not driving and watching someone/something else is.
For me, a camera with exchangeable lenses and controls for everything relevant, with buttons and dials that are mapped to functions 1:1 and can be committed to muscle memory and used blindly, and to a degree without thinking, while you look through the viewfinder or the screen, is to a smartphones what being a fish is to driving a giant boat where you have the steering wheel on one end, the engine controls on another, and the anchor controlled by a genie you have to beat in rock paper scissors three times every time you want to come to a halt.
> With astronomy they say it's better to have a small cheap telescope you use all the time rather than a big expensive telescope you barely use.
True, but a camera bag also holds a book and other things, to me it's like a purse but better.
> it's super interesting to see these professional photographers take the cheapest cameras available, in some cases they're actually toys, and turn out some amazing pictures.
Compare it to the quality and the rate at which they produce amazing photos with their preferred gear. You can make amazing photos with anything, especially if you only show the keepers, but that doesn't really tell us much.
It's mentioned explicitly on the graph so I don't think it's really misleading. That being said I suppose that Christmas means that you can't just double the number to extrapolate over the full year so I don't really know what to make of this datapoint.
I'd be interested to see the interchangeable-lens-camera stats broken down by price point. Are all the entry/mid/pro-level ranges seeing similar reductions in unit sales? I'd _imagine_ that the pro ranges wouldn't be as badly hit, whereas the average hobbyist that would have previously brought a 1000D would now just use her phone instead.
I'd also imagine that unit sales are (/were) disproportionately comprised of low-end camera purchases.
Regardless, a scary time to be a camera manufacturer.
>>Of course, by aggressively introducing newer and newer cameras with marginal improvements, companies like Fuji and Sony are finding that they might have created a headache.
Yep, Sony shoot themselves in the foot with the RX100 series. Fantastic cameras, but for some reason they make a point of releasing a new model every single year with marginal improvements, but a much higher price point - so even though we are at Mk 7(?) now, the general recommendation is to just find a Mk 2 or Mk 3 model and save yourself a tonne of money compared to the latest model.
The range from 24mm to 70mm can easily be covered by phone cameras these days with their telephoto lenses - and the sensor sizes are catching up. RX100 vi and vii go up to 200mm which phones don't have yet.
True but with the longer lens, the RX has also gotten a smaller maximum aperture size, f/2.8-4.5 vs f/1.8-2.8 (1). I'd go with a Mark V for that reason despite the shorter focal length.
Looking at that link, the Mark VI/VII has more stops of OIS, which is more important for point and clicks, especially when zoomed/shaky/low-light. The f-number isn't the aperture size, though it is affected by changing aperture. The values you quoted are related to the f-number at both the lowest and highest focal length.
Whether you value OIS is more a matter of personal opinion. I don’t need to shoot at lower shutter speeds generally, especially with these Sony sensors which are pretty great at higher ISO.
Point taken on f-number and aperture not being equivalent, but that’s getting pretty picky ... f-numbers are ratios of focal length to aperture diameter and so effectively do represent aperture size. The point is the smaller f-numbers will give a more shallow depth of field, and at this point, that property is one of the few advantages that a high-end p&s camera has over a nice phone camera (yes, I know some phones are faking shallow DoP in software).
Apparently camera manufacturers care mainly about the chinese market nowadays where it's expected to release new models regularly, so they add small improvements piece by piece instead of releasing completely new models that stay relevant for years.
My problem is the arbitrary differentiation of features between price points. Less expensive cameras seem limited by marketing decisions, not by the actual hardware you are purchasing.
There is no question that they beat the pants off a Toyota Corolla.[1] But most us us just want to drop our kids off at school and pick up groceries.
And you know what? A Corolla is actually a pretty good car. And nobody[2] really cares about their daily driver’s 0-60 time or whether it set a new record at Nürburgring.
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[1] Substitute your favourite boring daily driver.
[2] To paraphrase Joel Spolsky, by “nobody,” we mean “Fewer than 10,000,000 people.”
I’ll be one in those ten million soon as they liquidate the prices on their lenses. I’ve been eying a Sony alpha. I’m looking to move to mirrorless but don’t have a real need. My dslr is fine, but the mirrorless Sony’s are nice.
I agree with that. Eventually it’ll (35mm equiv) be like medium format cameras. Some people will want them (I like the perspective they bring, but I know I’d use it very little, so I won’t buy one). But for most people the modern point and shoot built in to phones are more than enough.
Still I’d like to see E-mount lenses get cheap for selfish reasons.
I personally don't think that the lens market will drop like that. While new purchases of cameras are slowing dramatically, there are still a lot of photographers out there and so good lenses will always be in high demand.
Those Sonys are really nice though. I just bought a new Fuji body and a 16mm f/1.4 macro. It's unreal what new mirrorless bodies + high-end lenses can do these days.
When I ditched my 5Dmk3/fast-zoom setup for weight/size reasons, Fuji was high on my list for the replacement system. But in the end I went Micro 4/3rds. I think Fuji made a misstep by choosing a 3:2 ratio for the X sensor. X lenses are still pretty big and heavy in order to project that big imaging circle over that elongated ~24x~16mm APS-C sensor. I think they'd have been better server by something like 20x16mm sensors.
But I gotta say, the Fuji X bodies are beautiful, both in handling and aesthetics. I played with a friend's X-T3. I don't think I've ever enjoyed using a camera more. My Panasonics are fantastic from compactness/features/quality/lightweight standpoints, but Panasonic ergonomics and handling is pretty, uh, "workmanlike".
Yes, exactly. The Fuji x-series cameras are wonderful, but the lenses are long and somewhat heavy, to the point that the cameras are just not small and light enough to be _easy_.
Yeah, all true. It’s nice to have the larger sensor for lower noise, but the trade-off is larger lenses.
I also love the Fuji body design. Hilariously, I got the Fuji system as a travel-friendly replacement to my bulky 5D3 setup, and while there are some smaller lenses that make it quite portable, I find that I most often grab the 16mm f/1.4. This lens makes the setup feel only slightly smaller than the dslr! I’ll probably sell one kit or the other and buy an rx100 V for travel. (I rented the rx100 IV for a trip to Peru a few years back and was really impressed).
What is a supercar, exactly? One that has a cape and can fly?
Every automobile on the road does almost exactly the same thing, with a few variations in details like cargo capacity and creature comforts.
But cameras vs. phones is a different situation. I've not heard of a phone that can do 100x optical zoom, nor remotely the kind of high quality, high resolution imaging that a modern digital camera is capable of.
If you hire an Uber, you don't care whether it's a '96 Corolla or a Hummer or anything else; it's going to crawl through traffic and get you from point A to point B in almost an identical fashion.
If you hire a photog for an event such as a wedding, you'd expect them to bring some pretty high end equipment and provide us with a hefty thumb drive or two with dozens if not hundreds of gigs of pictures that are far beyond what even the best phone can achieve.
Seems like you're just reinforcing the original point by failing to understand the distinction being made.
You make the point that all cars 'on the road' do the same thing. Then you take a photography example that's not equivelent to a standard 'road' journey.
A wedding would be far more like taking a normal car to an F1 race. In such a case an F1 car excels in that particular form of driving in a narrow set of circumstances, and yet you still could technically take it on a road if it were legal to do so.
In a similar vein, 'supercar' cameras are highly specialised tools requiring significant support to get the most of them - large lenses, powerful computers and skilled RAW conversion. Not entirely dissimilar to specialist needs an F1 car might have.
So you can certainly take a 'supercar' camera as your daily driver but you'll face a ton of hassles and extra work as a result.
I agree. A lot of people sent us photos of our wedding, and some we love for sentimental reasons, but the wedding photographer and her assistant sent us more than a thousand photos that each look far better technically than the best snapshot anyone sent us. We thought we'd include some of our guests' photos in our wedding album, but there's not a single one that can stand side-by-side with the professional photos on a 15" screen without looking out of place and kind of sad. We keep the personal photos separate from the professional photos to avoid the comparison, and that allows us to enjoy them a lot more.
Let’s see if it’s possible to say the same exact thing, except in the reverse direction...
“Every camera does almost exactly the same thing, with a few variations in details like optical vs. digital zoom capabilities and memory space.”
“When you’re going about you’re daily life and need to take a picture, you don’t care if it’s an iPhone camera, an Android camera, or a fancy DSLR; all of them will capture the photo nearly the same, aside from minor differences which often require a professional to discern.“
“If you show up to drive around a race track, you’ll be expected to bring a high end car with... [you get the point]”
But the vast majority of drivers don't drive on a race track; they use a car for general transportation. Mainly a tiny number of professionals require a very high end performance vehicle.
However, a sizable minority of photographers can use the extra features of a dedicated SLR camera with telephoto or microphoto lens. There's plenty of great photography that simply can't happen, or won't happen with nearly the quality, by using a smartphone.
That's not to say that smartphone cameras are bad; they're excellent today. I have always wanted to get a modern digital SLR, but now I'm thinking a high end phone is sufficient for 90% of what I would want to do, so should I really spend $1500 to $2000 to do that extra 10%? Since I'm neither a pro nor a passionate amateur, probably won't.
Agree. Also nothing can beat the pleasure of looking through a real optical viewfinder especially those of full frame cameras. For me half of the pleasure of taking pictures happens when pressing the shutter.
I don't think this is a great comparison. Supercars are prohibitively expensive and incredibly limited, focused entirely on their appearance and hypothetical performance. Completely affordable cameras go above and beyond smartphone photographic capabilities and over time an owner will likely explore the entirety of its features. Comparing a supercar to a $20,000 lens would be more accurate.
If a smartphone camera is a Toyota Corolla, a nice camera is a basic luxury sedan for Sunday drives. It does everything a little better, but it's a bit pricier for less use. That being said, it's really for people who just like to drive.
A nice camera is NOT a luxury sedan in the context of this metaphor. The reason being that the extra affordances of carrying the driver plus four or more passengers, having a trunk/boot that can carry a full load of groceries/luggage and so forth are all characteristics of a general-purpose vehicle.
As I see it, the phone is a general-purpose device that also takes pictures, just as a sedan is a general-purpose vehicle, whether luxurious or not. Whereas, a camera just does one thing (two if you count video separately.)
Thus, to me, a dedicated camera at any price is like a two-seater sports car with hardly any trunk room. You can buy cheaper sports cars, sure, but they still lack the affordances of a sedan.
To me, a “luxury sedan” corresponds to a high-end phone.
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That being said, all metaphors/similes are leaky, so you are probably “not wrong.”
Another way to look at it is the phone camera is like a folding scooter you carry on your backpack. It doesn't do much, but it's always there, and you can make it work for most things. If you need to buy groceries, you might buy a few days' worth when you'd rather get a week's worth, and if you want to go a long distance, it won't feel as nice, and sometimes it's a little embarrassing when you compare your experience to your friends', but you can get by. Beyond the scooter, there's an entire range of transportation options which are all better but are bigger and more expensive and require extra attention: where do I put it, should I take it with me or will I not need it, do I really want to bother with it today? If I buy something, will I always leave it at home and never have it when it would be useful?
95% of the time you're happy you just have your scooter with you, but the other five percent of the time, you may be disappointed or downright helpless compared to somebody with better equipment. Say you and your friends decide impromptu to go to a music show twenty miles away, the concert starts in two hours, and public transit will get you there at approximately noon tomorrow. Your scooter is useless, and you have to ask for a ride. This is analogous to when you see a coyote in your neighborhood (let's assume that's a rare and interesting occurrence in your neighborhood) and you're pointing to a blurry dog-shaped dot on your phone saying "Look! It's a coyote!" and your neighbor is ordering a 2' by 3' print showing the reflections in its eyes and the steamy breath coming out of its mouth. Situations like that are frustrating, but each person will feel differently about whether it's worth embracing the expense and daily hassle of traveling with a bigger piece of equipment.
Your analogy is probably better, yes, except that a luxury sedan is more than just 'a bit' pricier compared to a Corolla. I'm not a car expert, but it looks like BMW's entry level 3 series is about double the cost of a Corolla.
BMW 3er is not a sedan either; it is a "compact executive", a bit smaller. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice car, and bigger than subcompact, but if you wanted something sedan-sized, pick something else. 5er is sedan-sized (and entirely elsewhere price-wise).
IMO the comparison would be more apt between an all-in-one scanner /printer/fax with a big touch screen, and a single purpose laser printer.
The first doesn't take much room compared to what it does, it can do a lot of things decently, might cost more on the long run but is cheap to start with. I think someone needs to first feel limited by the all-in-one's printing capacity, performance or cost to fully understand what will the laser printer bring to the table.
And this works at any level. Photographs using zooms lens switch to single focus length lens when they hit a point they want more of X or Y. Otherwise there's no point in giving up the convenience of multi-purpose solutions.
I like your analogy too, and it is fun to think about how modern printers have become a "razors and blades" business, as have phones (ask anyone whose phone is subsidized by their their service provider).
0-60 actually matters a lot more for everyday drivers than top speed - a lot of utility in the agility provided by high acceleration at low speeds and much better feel while driving.
"Nonsense!" he thunders, then he remembers that he has 325 horsepower and a factory tune under the hood of his... Station Wagon.
And while we're on THAT subject, active safety in the form of a lighter vehicle that steers more competently and accelerates at will is criminally underrated by the "Big SUV makes me safe" crowd.
Lots of other people have pointed out the issues with this analogy.
My reasoning for thinking this is not a good analogy is the supercar is a device that cannot be used/exploited in normal operation. It is illegal to use the top speed or acceleration of a supercar. It cannot make traffic move out of the way for you. A Supercar will not get you to work any faster than a Toyota Corolla. The Corolla will go fast enough to send you to jail, just like the Supercar. You can't use the Supercar features without legal risk without going to a special place (the race track). People who own sports cars and supercars try to rationalize this away but it's true. They are really just driving them around to show off and can't realistically use the cars capabilities in the real world.
If a fancy DSLR or Mirrorless camera is like a supercar than it would mean everyone who had a DSLR or Mirrorless camera had to use the camera with one fixed prime lens that had bad quality and was locked at a small aperture. You had to use it in green "full auto" mode all the time. You had to set the camera up to run in it's slowest mode, and you had to set the camera up run at a very high ISO and to store photos in a high compression JPEG setting.
Only when you went to the special zone of photography would you be able to use the extra features. (Changing lenses & settings for maximum effect.)
Most people who carry DSLRs & Mirrorless cameras around can exploit their advantages ruthlessly in the real world whenever they want.. nothing at all like paying for a sports car or supercar and just using it as a show-off token.
I am not arguing against Om's point though. I'm in the same boat as him, I have a pretty expensive camera setup but have bought minimal camera gear since 2012 and use my Smartphone more and more.
I personally think you're reaching. You might as well point out that a Supercar doesn't take pictures.
I mean, really, are we going to get into discussing the people who buy a supercar and hold it as an investment/collectible and rarely drive it?
Or what about the people who track their McLaren and absolutely use it to its full potential? Those people 100% absolutely drive them for performance and use every bit of it.
And yes, there are camera owners who collect cameras. And camera owners who buy "Prosumer" models just because they want a nice camera, even if they don't use it to its full potential. Maybe not you, but we both know there are such people.
That doesn't really invalidate my analogy or validate it. If you feel around to the edges of any metaphor, it breaks. But the question is whether the basic idea is right. I think it's right enough, you don't.
I think those counterpoints to the example are being a bit literal. I too have a "fancy" DSLR and I definitely consider the sportscar analogy accurate. I think the heart of the analogy is different from what you're giving as examples though. To me it means that there are places where you do want to use the sportscar, and places you don't. I rarely use my DSLR - why? Because I'm usually "commuting" and it's just too bulky for a daily driver. My commuter car fits in my pocket, and is always with me.
Talking about how special places are designed for the sports cars and inferring that it can/should only be used there seems to me incorrect inference of the analogy. At that point we may as well talk about expensive tire repair and maintenance, but I don't think that was intended either haha.
You're being silly. All you have established is that cars and cameras are very different things governed by different laws.
The point others were making is much more simple: neither DSLRs or purpose-built sports cars are particularly convenient for casual utilitarian use. People who buy both of these things lean more towards the 'hobbyist' side of things.
You are absolutely right that there are many people who lug their DSLR everywhere. But I think you might be underestimating just how many people actually do go to racetracks.
Of course, some people own fancy things as status symbols. But also, hobbyists don't have to continually "exploit the capabilities" of their hobby to be legitimate hobbyists either.
I don't see how the supercar analogy is any different than the standard use case of a phone camera vs a standalone.
Sure, a standalone gets you higher resolution, optical zoom, etc, but consider where those photos are most likely to be viewed - you can't get the most from them without going to a special place (printer). You can't make people view them on a PC. Realistically, most people are going to be viewing their photos on their phone, whether they originated there or not, after they've been mushed through facebook or insta's compression anyway. People who own cameras try to rationalize this away but it's true.
Photography is a popular hobby, and it isn't surprising that people are willing to spend money on gear for their hobby. Road bicyclists might save up for a carbon fiber road bike, anglers might splurge on a Crowder rod, golfers might buy some high-end clubs, etc. None of those things are essential for the hobby, and most are are overkill for beginners, but they offer incrementally better performance and make the hobby a bit more enjoyable.
In that sense, supercars are actually a decent analogy. If supercars were around the same cost as mirrorless cameras and SLRs (<$5k, with minimal ongoing cost), then I'd expect supercars to be incredibly popular - lots of people would love to have one for weekend drives.
I bought a Canon M100 mirrorless in that price range and I have to disagree. Maybe a $1000 phone can come close, but you can't change lenses on a phone so I don't see how a phone camera can match what you can do with a $500 camera.
The 1080p 60fps is not quite as good as what you get in a 3 year old iPhone. It's fine I guess. It's fine. I'm going to guess the video has some arbitrary limit to record only 10 minutes at a time.
Still this is kind of what I was looking for. Thank you for the advice.
If you drop "pocketable", I think the super-super-zooms are really amazing (canon sx60hs/sx70hs and nikon p900/p1000). They exceed what phone cameras and DSLRs can do.
More like a truck. When you actually need truck a Corolla won't do, and on the other hand there are a lot of people who could get by with a Corolla that own trucks.
If you mean a pickup like an F-150, not to me. A pickup has a lot of utility for everyday use. I may personally hate the idea of ferrying my kids to school in a pickup, but plenty of my fellow parents do it.
To me, the extra utility of the Corolla is like the extra utility of email, text messages, phone calls, web browsing, exploring the limits of analogies on HN, and so forth.
I can do those on a phone, but not on a camera. (Actually, I'm sure that somebody has a camera that lets you send and receive mail, that's Lett's and Zawinski's Lwas...)
But if you were to talk about a cube van... We'd have something. A cube van won't fit in my garage, just as a camera won't fit in my pocket (Yes, I used to own a Casio that did, but still...)
A cube van is extraordinarily inconvenient for anything except moving my entire house. For all smaller jobs, my station wagon rules. But when I wanted to move house, I hired a proper cube van.
And if I ever need to take an amazing picture, I would probably use a proper camera.
--
But all that being said, Steve Jobs did compare pickup trucks to desktop computers at an earlier time. If he were here today, he might suggest a laptop is a pickup and an iPad is a sedan.
I feel like it's a fallacy to assume objects (cars, cameras, speakers, coffeemakers, whiskey, etc) fall only into Corollas and supercars. There's usually something in between, priced way towards the Corolla side, that makes daily driving so much more fun, like a Honda Civic Si or Olympus OM-D.
2019 holiday shopping season is just coming up - that's when a lot of camera sales and discounts happen. For Interchangeable Lens Cameras (ILC), new models get announced round about this time and I assume many people would wait for updated models.
While I wouldn't be worried about ILC sales yet, compacts are an entirely different story. Phone cameras now have wide angle and telephoto lenses, PDAF sensors, depth sensing, better AI, and have powerful CPUs easily capable of high-fps 4K. Sensor sizes are approaching parity to high-end 1"-sensor compacts like RX100 and LX100 with Samsung Isocell GW1 (1/1.7" sensor) and Isocell Bright HMX (1/1.33" sensor). There will be fewer reasons to buy these in a couple of years.
Low/mid-tier compacts have long been surpassed by phones. In fact, mid-tier compacts from 2010-2012 fare better than those of today. Back then, these compacts (Canon G12, Nikon P7x00, Olympus Stylus-1, Pansonic LX5 etc) used to have 1/1.7" sensors (with a sensible 10-12MP resolution) and now we have tiny 1/2.3" sensors with 20MP due to the megapixel wars. This market is really dead now.
Super-zoom, small-sensor cameras like Sony RX10 and Nikon P1000 will not be challenged by Smartphones soon. But they are also kinda niche.
I have a mobile computer aka phone with a ToF sensor built in - the Samsung S10 5G. The Live Focus mode is a bit hit and miss, but like with any piece of equipment you learn to work with it - and the results can be astounding. The quality compared to the S10+ (I got a free upgrade to the 5G from that) which doesn't have the LIDAR like sensor is quite remarkable. I believe it's the same setup as the Note 10+.
I've had a world class pro photographer comment with some disbelief on the quality of shots that are attainable from this.
The upgrade in live focus on Samsung phone from one generation to the next is scary good. I did s7 edge, s9+ And now s10+ and it moved from cool toy needing a lot of work to “almost there”.
The original on s7 had only one lens to work with so you had to wait during your shot while it took several at different focus.
YouTubers is a niche market thought. They represent a extremely small fraction of the whole market. And a lot of them don't need a DLSR camera and are just contempt with a good webcam (typically the gaming youtubers/twitch and all).
I think the comparison with the server market isn't completely accurate. When companies decided to go with Intel+Linux over Sun's mainframes, they actually did go through a decision process. They weighted the pros and the cons of each solution.
With cameras it's arguably much worse. Most people these days (especially those with enough disposable income to consider buying a dedicated camera) already own a smartphone. Camera makers see smartphones as competition but probably not so much the other way around. Apple and Samsung try to get better and better cameras because they compete with each other, they don't really care about Fuji or Canon. Camera makers are in the tough situation of having to sell a camera to people who already have one "for free". And they have to convince a crowd that now mostly consume images in low-res on a small screen. Good luck.
With smartphone cameras becoming so good and the software letting anybody take good-looking (if heavily post-processed) pictures, I don't see how they could ever recover. Sun might have been able to win the fight on the server side by competing on price and features, I don't see how camera makers can ever hope to regain the lost market share. It's a completely one-sided competition.
My girlfriend is a professional photographer. She owns a bunch of high-end cameras. They vastly outperform our smartphones' cameras, especially in low-light scenarios or while photographing fast-moving or far-away objects for instance (with the right optics of course). But if you just want to make low-res, mundane pictures for Instagram the difference is really not significant. My cheap-o Nokia 6.1 does the job just fine and it's much easier to operate than most pro cameras.
I have a Nikon D850 (in addition to a number of vintage film cameras). It's a pretty nice camera. Even when I bought it, I thought that it would do everything I wanted out of a digital camera, and as long as it continued to work, I'd never really have a compelling reason to upgrade.
I use a non-phone compact camera — I shot with it all day Monday. Why? Well for much less than a phone I can buy something shockproof and waterproof (I was rafting) that can be operated with gloves on and has a multi day battery life (great for long trips in the back country). I replaced the strap with a paracord leash so I can tie it to myself or my equipment.
But that’s a niche application and a camera like that lasts for years. I don’t see a future for those manufacturers either, which will be a problem for me(GoPro-style cameras haven’t caught up).
And frankly though the sensor and lens are better than a phone, I’d still rather shoot on the phone.
I have a 10 year old webcam, a oneplus 5t, and a nice cannon eos with a few good lenses.
Aside from the phone camera, they are all useless to me.
I mountain bike, so none of those are good for capturing that, nor are they convenient or rugged enough to use as a camera midway through a run on some beautiful peak.
Just bought a flagship gopro. It essentially fills all the gaps. I can use it as a webcam, I can use it for mountain biking, I can bring it everywhere and record 4k60fps, take photos, etc.
Phone + gopro seems to be the best way to go for anyone not looking to do niche photography, like extreme macro, long exposure sky stuff, professional large prints.
Ruggedized mini cameras like gopros are a pretty big factor in killing off dslrs. There are countless professionals on youtube making high quality stuff with nothing but phones and gopros.
Even with nicer glass in dedicated cameras, they will likely never have the software features that phone cameras do. Like "night shot" on Android for example. I'd love to see something like Android auto for cameras, because camera companies traditionally suck at software. Let me buy a box of glass and a sensor from Sony or Nikon, but it interconnect with my phone for any brains it needs.
Sony actually did this with the PlayMemories stuff - the Alpha cameras run on Linux with an Android subsystem that allows for "apps". However they completely and utterly botched the implementation - no way for third parties to write apps on their own, and their own apps were all pay-only. So they took it out in the latest Alpha 7 series - and with it, unfortunately, also the jailbreak ability which means one cannot unlock the video recording length any more.
New sensors have amazing iso ranges, with a sony A7s you don't need magic AI/ML shenanigans to make it look good. Android night mode is amazing but it won't produce images you'll share outside of instagram, and even then the image quality takes a hit, it's more like a good security camera than a proper camera.
Standalone cameras lack the killer feature of availability.
"The best camera is the one you have with you."
Every potential camera owner already has a smartphone. This means the standalone camera purchase has to compete with the existing smartphone ("free"/marginal cost zero) and an upgraded smartphone with a better camera (already desired future purchase, so nearly "free"), and for the existing photography hobbyist - the previously purchased DSLR (also "free").
For me it's when images are printed at A4, A3 upwards that the benefit of a good lens+decent-sized sensor combo becomes obvious. But how many people do that?
My wife and I rented a full-frame mirrorless from the local camera store some months ago because she wanted nice pictures of our first puppy. As it turns out, this experience went much like a take-home test drive for a luxury car. After a few days, we returned the camera to the rental desk then walked ten feet and bought an identical unit.
We paid $3500 for the privilege with no regrets (so far). I forgot pictures can look so good: high resolution, pleasing background blur, and most important it's just a camera. It doesn't have reddit, or HN, or email, or pinterest. It sits about the house where we can grab it quickly. It goes in the day pack on hikes. It blows every other webcam out of the water.
And it has smarts to compete with our current-gen iPhones, which we increasingly tuck away to combat distraction. Fast autofocus and face-recognition are lifesavers and often outperform the phones. It's like photography on easy mode. Which it should be considering the sticker price.
I get that the best camera is the one you have with you. But we carry our phones less and our camera more. It's silly and sad that we can't exercise more self-control. But from our privileged perspective, a dedicated camera was a great investment in our quality of life.
Congrats on your purchase, I wish I went with mirrorless when we bought our DSLR camera back around the birth of our first child! I thought I would want access to all the available lenses and accessories for an established product.
But my photographer friend was right - mirrorless are better for amateurs and have one huge benefit: they can record video much more easily since they can focus and record at the same time.
If you're going from mirror-based to mirrorless and stay with the manufacturer, there's always adapters meaning you can continue to use your existing lens collection without losing functionality such as auto-focus or stabilizers.
Switching manufacturers is a different beast however and you'll likely be limited to manual focus and a gimbal/in-sensor for stabilization.
Some Canon cameras (80D, 90D, 7D), have on dual pixel CMOS focus points that work in video mode. It is clear things are moving to mirrorless, but I feel we are still in the transition period for lens and focus technology. For certain type of photography either manual or traditional cross type focus points work best still. I think the biggest benefit of mirrorless cameras for amateurs is size and weight, the best camera is the one you have on you.
I'm a huge fan of the Olympus u4/3 range. The size is, for me, just right. Small enough to toss in a backpack with other things during travel and camping. Light enough to wear on a sling most of the day without discomfort. And still really nice photos.
About once a year, I consider moving to Fuji. Or to some other larger format mirrorless. But, the size and weight penalty just isn't worth it.
All that said, my wife's old Canon S90 compact is near the end of life. I thought about buying her a replacement, but I may just splurge on an iPhone XS instead.
I don't think micro 4/3ds gets enough credit for how convenient the smaller lenses are. I know full frame mirrorless is all the rage now, but even my dad's and brother's (respectively) APS-C gear is much larger and heavier when it comes to lenses.
And the best thing: these lenses are sharp wide open. On other systems you get 2.8 lens, but need to stop it down to 4.0 be useful. On u4/3 you get 45/1.2 and you can use it at 1.2.
Glad to see some Olympus and micro four thirds fans in this thread. I also sold my Nikon D7100 and pro lenses (24-70/2.8, 70-200/2.8) after realizing that I rarely take them out because of the bulk and weight. Got E-M1mII and E-M10mII and some nice lenses instead (12-40/2.8, 7-14/2.8, 45/1.8, 75/1.8, Panasonic 20/1.7). Love, love it.
So glad I trusted this rather spontaneous decision. Initially I was thinking about getting the FF Nikon D850.
Now I cannot imagine buying a DSLR.
My wife is a part-time pro photographer in her 40's. She's looking to go mirrorless because, on long shoots, the weight of traditional cameras takes a toll on her neck and shoulders.
The great news is that there are some awesome full-frame mirrorless bodies out there.
Of course, because they're full-frame cameras, the glass is still big, so you don't get the hyper-compact size of a micro-4/3 body+lens, but it's still waaay smaller than, say, a 5D + a lens.
Yeah, that's a hard stop for some folks -- me included. I'm sure the AF material is a big contributor.
The glass for my Sony A7ii is significantly larger than (most) lenses I had for my Olympus m4/3 body. The exception is the main prime on both systems -- I have the Sony 50mm/1.8, which is about the same size as the Panasonic/Leica 25mm/1.4 that filled the same role on my Olympus.
Most of Sony's fe zooms are around the same weight (with some small benefits at wider angles) as an equivalent canikon lens, but it's the wide angle primes that you'll get a big size and weight benefit over full frame glass. The comparisons are complex, and lining up equivalent lenses only works sometimes, because many DSLR wide angle lenses are just zooms, since the primes are large anyways. Mirrorless lens designers have also doubled down on wide primes (like laowa's 15mm f2, or voigtlanders FE ultrawide primes) some of which don't exist for DSLR because they wouldn't be a good value/weight.
But the mirrorbox in a DSLR means that the lens can't get super close to the sensor. So a 24mm DSLR lens will actually be a 40mm or so, with reducers put over the front. This means you get a larger lens overall, with more elements.
So if you are going to go 16-35, 24-70, 70-200, then you won't see much size benefit. But if you shoot wider/standard primes, there are a lot of compact options for full frame mirrorless.
Sort of. Full-frame mirrorless bodies are most definitely smaller and lighter than their DSLR counterparts. The problem is the lenses, and those are a problem for two reasons.
One is that many manufacturers haven't taken advantage of how mirrorless changes lens design yet (the shorter flange distance enables a lot of design space), so you're still carrying a lens designed for a DSLR, but with a lot of hollow space between the back element and the mount. This is especially obvious with third-party lenses; e.g. it's well understood that a lot of Sigma lenses for Sony FE are functionally just their DSLR lenses with a built-in adapter.
The other reason why you don't see a big weight advantage with mirrorless lenses is that, where they are designed for mirrorless specifically, they tend to aim for "better" rather than "lighter. Lenses like the Canon 85mm f/1.2, the 50mm f/1.2, and the 28-70 f/2.0 are perfect examples of this.
However, lenses designed to take advantage of mirrorless can be smaller and lighter, when they have the same design goals — e.g. the latest (DSRL) Canon EF 24-105L f/4 weighs 795g vs the (Mirrorless) RF 24-105L f/4's 694g.
The problem that I have with mirrorless is the inherent delay between what you see on the screen and the photo taken. I don't know if they have improved from the time I tried them.
The advantage of a mirror is that capturing the right instant is much easier when you're photographing subjects that aren't posing, such as children. You want to get that facial expression just right! Not a few hundreths of a second later.
I still have a Canon 5D Miii and a lot of lenses for it. (I shot with EOS cameras pre-digital as well.) I do still use the 5D for certain types of shooting--mostly sports and anything that benefits from very wide or very long lenses.
However, assuming I'm taking photos with anything besides my smartphone (which I probably use a greater and greater percentage of the time), it's going to be my Fujifilm mirrorless camera. I think if I were starting over, I'd just go with mirrorless and just forgo the specialized cases that the DSLR and its lenses are better for.
I accepted the "phones are so good that you don't need a separate camera" conventional wisdom by default. Then I tried a mirrorless aps-c. I'm shocked at how much better its photos are. Yes, the phone is adequate for Instagram but if you view similar photos on a 4k monitor there is a much bigger difference than I expected, even for photos that aren't challenging for the phone (landscapes with plenty of light).
Also, the selfie camera on your phone is probably MUCH lower quality than the main one on the back. Have someone else take your picture instead if you have the option.
Cell phones are just great for having with you everywhere. You're out and about and kids are doing something cute at the playground you want to remember? You don't need a $5,000 camera back at home, you need something with you now.
But almost any dedicated camera that isn't down in the complete crap price range will blow a cell phone out of the water, for two major reasons. First, optical zoom, the number one thing I miss with my cell phone. Second, it is at least somewhat more likely that your "12MP camera" really is 12 MP with your real camera, whereas it's fairly likely you "12MP" cell phone is a lie [1].
This is even in the $150/200 range, long before we get to the ability to change lenses or all those other pro features. My ~$200 camera from 10+ years ago still takes better pictures than my cell phone, because even though my cell phone nominally beats it on megapixels, my camera actually uses all of its pixels to obtain real information from the scene, instead of being a bullet-point feature on a device that isn't even primarily a camera.
So, to anyone reading this, if this sounds interesting, you don't even have to go to the big, expensive stuff; my kid literally bought a camera at a garage sale for $5 that also takes better pictures than my cell because it had like 8x optical zoom. It cost me more to find a functional battery than the camera itself did. It's not hard or expensive.
[1]: Test: Take a picture in broad daylight, the best possible lighting conditions. Move the picture to your computer. Zoom in until you can see all the pixels clearly. Can you see sharp edges, or do you see a whole bunch of multi-pixel blobs of the sameish color, even around sharp edges? If the latter, your "pixel count" is a lie; it doesn't actually have that much resolving power.
The blobs appear to come from aggressive noise reduction on iOS. I think they’re better if you shoot RAW, which is an option with a third party camera app.
It's not just that. The lens itself doesn't have enough resolving power. When light passes through a tiny aperture, it becomes irreversibly blurred, enough to be detected by the micron-scale pixels in the camera sensor.
Camera phones will try to re-sharpen the image, but some information is always lost. It's especially obvious looking at things with fine detail and sharp edges, like tree leaves against a bright sky.
"The lens is sufficiently prone to diffraction that you won't get the full value out of the sensor's resolution" is a very different statement from "the sensor's resolution is not really 12MP". Saying "The camera isn't true 12MP" suggests the latter, not the former.
I deliberately stayed away from claiming a cause in my post, because I don't know the cause. I only know the result of the system as a whole; every cell phone camera I've had in the last 10 years does not actually take pictures at its claimed resolution, even in broad daylight. (I can also say it can't solely be over-aggressive JPG-ification, because the result doesn't match that; the 'blobs' I refer to cross the JPEG DCT boundaries freely. I can't say bad JPEG-ification isn't part of the problem, though.)
I tend to buy last year's midgrade phone because I don't really need the latest and greatest. Maybe the top end really does take the full photos they claim, but that still leaves a lot of cell phones that are lying.
Most of the recent cell phones take perfectly adequate pictures, considering the amazing disadvantages they are laboring under. It's just that if you downsample the pictures to 2 or 4MP, you're basically losing no information.
(There are similar effects with video. The aforementioned 10+ year-old camera I had suffers from this as well. It has a "720P" and a "1080P" video mode, but based on my experimentation, both modes get real video out at about 400-500 "real" lines of vertical quality. I can squeeze either video's source down to that size and when I compare the full screen result to the original, I can find no difference whatsoever. I imagine more modern real cameras probably do a better job here; this thing is pretty old now, obviously.)
Raw will help with color and exposure, up to a point. But it can't fix focus. You are still reliant on photons hitting a sensor. The more of them you have the more information you can work with. A 8MP camera with 1/2" CCD is going to look a hell of a lot better than a 20MP camera with 1/4" CCD.
>But almost any dedicated camera that isn't down in the complete crap price range will blow a cell phone out of the water, for two major reasons.
I suspect this is probably why you're seeing the sales numbers drop too. The big camera makers have been relying on the cheap units to bring in the money. They're transitioning now to relying on expensive, high end units instead. It's a much smaller addressable market though.
At some point I think it will be largely a professional thing. Eventually the computational photography will look good enough to make up for the space constraints of a phones' lens. But the downside will be that any photo taken with your phone will look kind of samey and be poor at getting fine detail. And having your own camera with manual control options will let people feel more in control of what they're doing.
I disagree. My iPhone 7 usually takes better shots than my Canon 800D unless I actually put my photography knowledge to work. I'm scared. It's just better at calculating exposure, aperture and ISO sensitivity than the DSLR. And does great job at post-processing to hide its optical and sensor limitations.
Do iPhone photos look better when zoomed in? Of course not, but they do look better at "normal" scale, which is what counts IMO. And of course this only applies when you shoot "standard" scenes, the DSLR (with lenses) gives you ability to shoot things that the iPhone just can't.
Am I ditching my DSLR? Of course not, but that's only because I'm willing to invest effort in actually taking great photos, which isn't trivial (to me) and is much harder with the iPhone.
Maybe true, but I pretty much only post photos on instagram (using a 5 year old mirrorless camera I found for less than a new good smartphone), and non-experts consistently ask me how I am able to get such high picture quality. So non-photographers can detect the difference between modern smartphones and 5 year old mirrorless tech.
my wife focused on her instagram for her jewelry business for a while. it took about 1 day for her to realize that phone photos were totally inadequate for the quality she wanted to deliver. I'd be surprised if any pro instagrammers really used phone photos for the majority of their work.
Ex-photoj here, I just bought a 2012 Fuji mirrorless for £110 with WiFi to instagram with. Even this area is becoming cheaper to get into. This camera spanks my iPhone XS for photo quality. Now. But give it a couple more generations...
I don't really believe this. One of the major advantages of real cameras is the sensor size. More sensor size gives you more SNR / dynamic range.
All of the tricks used in a smartphone could be used in a real camera. If they were, then real cameras will always have many stops of dynamic range advantage.
All technology has constraints, and pictures are made within them. Dynamic range may or may not be an advantage, because there are only so many levels that can be reproduced for the viewer. RGB, for example, only gives you 256 shades of grey. It might mean more options for the photographer, in that you end up with more information in the highlights and shadows, but ultimately the decision to compress one or the other needs to be made if making a black-and-white print (for example) and you end up with the same picture.
if you have more stops of light available you can get a picture closer to what the eye actually sees. You can see the difference between a crop camera and medium format camera right now if you take a landscape with the sun in the frame, and that is only a few extra stops of light (recall that EVs are logarithmic so each stop is 2x the light). Most cellphone cameras have a native dynamic range that is just over 1/2 that of a crop sensor camera. If the crop sensor cameras used the same tricks as your cellphone, they would be able to do very impressive HDR in-camera.
It’s all true, but the point I was making is that photography isn’t just a technical pursuit nor are those tricks and abilities the things that everyone looks for. There’s more to photos than simply reproduction. None of these things has really shifted the overall quality of photography in the last 100 years as much as it has shifted the way photos are made. And that second shift is pretty much done.
I really disagree! The shift from film to digital allowed photographers to remove the price per photo aspect of photography from the equation, but only recently has the dynamic range, resolution, etc of digital matched properly developed film. Now, digital actually surpasses it. People are generally able to practice photography without going broke, which is an amazing development.
The Revenant would have been impossible to shoot even 10 years ago, the demands on the sensor or film would have been too great. This means the story couldn't be told at all! So the technology actually enables people to take photos that would have been otherwise impossible.
I'm also suspicious that the second shift is "done". I suspect the technology will always be pushed further at the high end of the camera technology market which will trickle down. Similarly, I suspect the software innovations used by Google / Apple will trickle down into the software of dedicated cameras, which will further widen the quality gap between the formats.
Quality isn't all about reproduction, it is also about creative possibilities. Right now, none of the smartphones can take a photo of a moving subject in low light. They depend on averaging frames which leads to subject blur. This isn't a minor detail, it's the difference between a photo and no photo.
I have an 8 or so year old APS-C and I honestly prefer my (new) phone’s pictures most of the time. It is just so much better at calculating exposure. With my camera I feel like I am constantly battling with blown out highlights and usually end up underexposing every picture and hoping I can fix exposure later. The dynamic range of a picture by default from my phone is just so much better. Of course when you zoom in or view on a large monitor the phone is going to lose out in other ways. I am sure newer cameras are better in this regard but it still goes to show how much phones have improved. Or maybe I just don’t know how to use my camera...
Dynamic range has been increasing with each generation, as well as better metering. I bought a micro 4/3rds Olympus E-M10 3 years ago and it blew my APS-C Sony A330 that I had been using for years out of the water in every aspect.
I love my phone camera (Pixel 1) but if I want to take professional quality pictures I pull out my E-M10.
> It's like photography on easy mode. Which it should be considering the sticker price.
I got a $500 Nikon DSLR about 4 years ago and came to the same conclusion. I usually set it to auto, and I'm astounded by the photo quality that comes out. Occasionally, I'll adjust exposure or focus manually, but for outdoors, auto "just works".
Sometimes I think I should have bought a mirrorless instead, but so long as my Nikon works and I'm satisfied with its quality, I'll keep using it.
I have an oldy Nikon D5000, and I really like it. The biggest bump in terms of photo quality was when I changed from auto-mode to manual mode and learned more about how the camera works and how to shoot what. It is so easy once you get a hang of it and your photos will get a lot better.
No doubt, there is a huge difference between a real cameras and smartphones in terms photo quality. I still sold my digital fullframe recently, even though I tried to keep the setup physically as small as possible it always felt like extra luggage. I'm now using an old but very good compact film camera for those special moments, which is easy to use, super compact and makes great photos.
It's the Sony A7III body with the new 24mm 1.4 GM lens. I upgraded its firmware to get the auto-focus features that debuted on the A9.
The lens is wide like a smartphone so the subject always fits in the frame. And it has enough resolution to crop later. But it's not so wide that it warps the image. Straight lines look straight. I take 15-20 pics/day and charge it once a month. It's light and small so I can shoot one-handed (very useful with pets and children).
One day I'll buy a telephoto lens with better reach. But the 24m is such a great "around-the-home" package. It will be my default for the foreseeable future.
Try before you buy, if you can. The A7III's auto focus is slower on adapted lenses than on the EF lenses. It's still impressive, but the Alpha + EF combination is compelling.
It looks better than you think it will. Nothing like the tack sharp backgrounds in a smartphone portrait. But not as melty as a longer lens. Ken Rockwell's [0] sample pictures are representative. His site doesn't allow hot links though. So to see a cropped portrait scroll to the fourth sample.
I have the same camera but with the 55mm lens. I'm really happy with it. I still have an old Canon Rebel that I bring to places I'm not comfortable bringing the Sony to (mainly the beach), and it's excruciating to go back to a DSLR, even though it still takes nice photos.
It’s not exceedingly surprising that a 3500 camera performs better than a phone. Camera sales are falling because phones are getting better, but they aren’t at the level of high end prosumer gear. $3500 is a massive amount of money to spend on any personal electronic device!
OM is saying our relationship with photographs has changed, but it has actually just grown to include the phone. Taking photos with dedicated equipment is still important to many people. I suspect all those sales previously were not going to people serious about photos.
I purchased a Canon 5D MarkII many years back and still own it. The main issue is the size of the body and whatever lens is on it and having to worry about it when you take it somewhere. That is where phone cameras shine. But every time I break out I'm reminded how bloody amazing the pictures are.
I had my Nikon D40 paired with 35mm since 2008 and its shutter failed late last year. It served me well at ~60k shutter count for more than 10years, taking beautiful photos of travel, my kids growing up and many important events; even at a measly 6mp at max 1600 iso, it performed superb.
For almost a year without my DSLR, most of my photos were shot using my LG G6 phone. It was okay and I insisted feeling it was good enough.
It was last Christmas when I was able to borrow a Canon 6Dmk1 paired with a good lens. Boy, I was in for a treat again; the sensor, fast focus, bokeh and low light performance all reminded me how far I've forgotten the joy of getting better pictures using a better camera. Got myself a 77d+24mm soon after to satisfy the cravings.
A pro tip for the LG G6, download the Google Camera from the stock pixel phone, it adds all the nice HDR+, and other features. It's made my G6 a completely new photo taking device.
Yes as I also have several GCam versions on my phone and I'm also a fan of HDR+ and the portrait mode. But we have to admit it has its limits compared against a far bigger sensor with better glass.
According to that chart, interchangeable-lens cameras are holding steady. The 2019 entry is only for the first half of the year, so we can't draw any conclusions there (most camera sales come in the second half). Other than that it looks like interchangeable-lens cameras had a peak around 2012, but are still up a bit from a decade ago.
Probably smartphones are eating in to a certain kind of enthusiast market, but big glass and big sensors can give you things that are just optically impossible in the form-factor of a phone. If only camera manufacturers can do good smartphone integration, I think they have a bright future.
Point-and-shoots are toast for sure though and I doubt anyone is surprised.
I read earlier this year that one of the "super camera" phones (can't remember which one) was using a 1/1.7" sensor sitting at the bottom of the phone (instead of the back), perpendicular to the motherboard. That sensor is the same size that my old canon g12 had back in the day some 8 years ago. So yeah, phone cameras are replacing compact cameras because they're hiding one inside them!
However, it has now become a question of physics, and large lenses getting in lots of light into focus over the sensor, and it being large enough that can catch all of those "scarce" photons, specially for low light photography. And the 1/1.7" sensor is about as large as you can fit inside a phone, which is why they're all moving to having multi-lens cameras and computational photography (with AI, DSP, etc).
I now own an olympus mirrorless, and it's a fantastic piece of equipment with a superb sensor (both in size and technology), interchangeable lenses, and the image stabilization system on body gives it the ability to stabilize _any_ lens I use with it (here's a mean look to Nikon and Canon that place IS inside the lenses instead of the body, to charge premium for the feature). Can't see a phone fitting all those features, because they require physical size and or mechanisms taht wouldn't fit in our pockets.
I actually fell down a small film camera hole recently. I almost never dig out my old DSLR anymore, but I'd always admired Kodak Kodachrome photos[1]. While reading something about the film I saw a reference to fujifilm velvia[2]. Not the same, but also a color reversal film and nice for nature/landscape photography which I enjoy. This led me to purchasing a Canon EOS 3. You can find one for only a couple hundred bucks, they work with EF lenses, are pretty solid in design/construction, and have quite a few features I didn't expect from a film camera that first started production at the tail end of the 90s.
Now I take the EOS 3 out specifically and only with a prime 35mm lens. The more methodical way I think about taking pictures is a nice contrast to taking a whole bunch of shots with smartphone or DSLR and then heavily curating afterwards. I just wanted a different feeling from taking photos and it's been quite fulfilling in that respect. Although breaking the habit of looking down at the back of the camera has been quite difficult.
Those photos from The Atlantic are phenomenal; thank you for the link!
I would love to know how he got #14 [0]. Slide film (as you're no doubt aware) has relatively little exposure latitude compared to print film, meaning it's a hell of a trick to get both the inside of the tower and the trains in the yard outside exposed properly.
You can see the issue pretty often in real-estate photos. Photos featuring the inside of the house with a window usually have the window way blown out because there's so much more light outside than inside.
Glad you liked them! They're in the Library of Congress, so you can get high quality digital copies from their website for free[0]. Yeah, the shots are really great and well beyond my personal ability for sure, particularly given the less advanced metering options he would have been working working with. Great learning examples though.
Well I think the title means to say point and shoot (built In lens) cameras falling sharply. Interchangeable camera sales are on the rise, which of course makes perfect sense.
I remember reading about how google searches reflected mood. One example they gave was people search for cameras when they are happy with their life. I wonder if in 2012 people were in a happier place.
I think 2012 was around the time when smartphone cameras got really, really good. There was a tipping point where people stopped needing point and shoots and it looks like further down the line that might even have impacted DSLR sales, maybe.
For LOTS of people who only care about casual snapshots, yeah, the current crop of iPhone and nicer Android cameras are sufficient.
But the gap between those cameras and, say, my full-frame Sony is still enormous. If you care about photography, you buy a real camera. It's just that most people don't care about photography.
The best camera is ALWAYS going to be the one you have on you, which is why the camera phone will always win hands down for convenience. However, no amount of magic is going to change physics when it comes to comparing one to a full frame camera. Particularly in low light performance, and anything further than a few feet away from you. I absolutely could not do my job without my D850 or equivalent, in the lighting conditions I'm often in.
> Particularly in low light performance, and anything further than a few feet away from you.
I am not a professional photographer, but for urbex, I find that my Pixel 2XL has basically replaced my LUMIX DMC-FZ300. Sure, the LUMIX could produce higher-quality low-light images, but shooting on a tripod for a long exposure shot is often impractical or impossible. The Pixel's Night Sight [1] mode is really good.
I desperately wish I had a full frame camera with the computational chops of my smartphone!
I've always had DSLRs. My most recent vacation I barely used it and took 99% of all photos with my phone, so much more convenient and the quality is great.
The main thing I'd like to work on is getting more video. Videos of people especially are much deeper emotional response, I just wish I took more of my children when they were smaller, and relatives when they were still alive. Hearing someone speak adds something that photo's really dont capture.
The main problem with video (apart from getting people to talk on camera) is storing and managing all the data. Its probably too hard for most people, even worse than keeping all the many thousands of photos.
Does anyone know of a good dedicated full-frame camera, which also has smartphone-camera features, like WiFi (to instantly transfer photos), backup photos (even if not in original quality) to google photos, remotely empty sd-card, instant sharing of photos with friends, etc.
I am looking for the above, to not have to "manage" yet another device, and dedicated cameras do need some management, especially when back from a trip, so transfer photos, share photos, empty memory, etc.
I can't think of any serious camera that automatically archives to Google Photos or even sends them to people, but cameras like the Panasonic Lumix series (G9, GH4, GH5) have wifi for both transferring photos and for remote control. I assume their full-frame S1 does as well, though I've never looked at it.
(My sideline is video, and three S1's would give me pause.)
I love my Panasonic M43 cameras, but the wifi experience with them is miserable. The android app looks like something from 2010, and performs worse. I've tried it with every permutation of four android phones and three Panasonic bodies (GX85, G85, G95) and every combination performs miserably.
Dunno about the G/GX series, but I use it regularly with my GH4 (my primary camera) and it's just fine for me. My only real complaint is that I can't use it and an HDMI out to a recorder, for some reason.
Depends if a flip ("selfie") screen is important to you or not and whether you favour compactness or price.
Sony A7 Series (Mirrorless Full Frame) has everything you need/want and much more. Even the first generation body will not let you down. If you have the spare cash, get the 3rd Gen body as it has more advanced autofocus and low-light capabilities.
Depending on which program you use on your computer, you can configure it to automatically download the photos from the camera and wipe the SD card when connected via USB cable (wifi is usually quite slow to transfer large files especially video).
It has features that let it set up as a wifi hot spot a phone app that previews. It works but its really user unfriendly and a pain to use. Hopefully they've gotten better.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] threadMeanwhile I have a camera body that was introduced at the end of 2012 and it's working just fine for photos and Full HD videos. I'm in no rush to upgrade, my guess is i'll keep using it until 4K60P video capable interchangeable lens camera bodies become more affordable, perhaps in 2021 or so.
I'm finding it harder and harder to justify bringing along a camera unless I'm doing special like a specific photo shoot. Obviously phone cameras are no where near as good as a 40 megapixel full frame camera with a good prime lens shooting in raw. But 99% of the time I'm just going to post a photo of my kid in Instagram and it doesn't matter.
It is a tough time to be a camera maker.
Similarly with RAM. 8 GB sounds fine until you change jobs and have to use Slack. I'd argue that web developers are the drivers for more powerful hardware now. And with 5G, more and more people like to watch Netflix in decent quality on the go, so now you have to push more data through the network.
Also, out of all things to pick on about the economy, this is one of the least problematic. Personally, I think companies can and should shoot for triple digit megapixels on phones, terabyte of RAM and streaming 8k videos to contact lenses. These technologies are enablers - the more power and performance you make available, the more previously impossible use cases will show up.
That comparison is getting old these days. Slack takes ~60MB in my FF now. That's a rounding error even under 8GB.
(I honestly don't care much whether Slack has made performance improvements in the past few months, because I recently switched to the combination of not keeping it active in the browser, using the Android app, and using Ripcord client on desktop, which has sane system requirements.)
400MB for the standalone application last I checked, and that was after the newest upgrades that should make it better IIRC.
That is about 5% on a 8GB machine, and typically a much larger procent of the available RAM once you realize that a lot of those 8GBs are used by the OS and possibly other necessary processes.
EDIT: Thanks for the data points. It's better than I expected.
You obviously know this but for youngest people on HN: Back in the 90ies we could run Autocad on PCs with 512 MB.
It was slow but it was possible.
4G is fine for video, it’s really fast! Even 3G was quite fast with HSDPA and all that. What I lack is cheap data on my phone otherwise I would watch Netflix on it right now.
From what I understand, it's fine when it's just you doing it, but not when 20 other people standing next to you do it at the same time. 5G is supposed to improve on that.
> What I lack is cheap data on my phone otherwise I would watch Netflix on it right now.
That's, unfortunately, the problem with telco business shenanigans. Where I live, I managed to extend my contract from ~3GB to 22GB for something around $10-$15 monthly. I have plenty of LTE to burn on Netflix now.
Other than instant film, which ironically feels more magical than ever, I exclusively use the smartphone.
The main problem is I always have my phone on me, and carrying around something like an RX100 is a pain because of how thick the body is. It is not really pocketable, meaning it goes into a larger bag. Then if I have a larger bag, I might as well bring a better camera.
Part of me wants to sell all my dslr gear and the other part wants to get a mirrorless z6. It's a weird spot to be in because I have plenty of pics that would have been very hard, if not impossible to capture with a phone. But, I want to lighten my load when traveling.
Of course, I now own so much u4/3 stuff that it probably weighs more than a single DSLR and a single nice zoom. Two bodies, a pro level zoom, a handful of 1.8 primes, and moderately priced super-wide and telephoto zooms. Deciding what to bring on any given trip is getting to be a "problem". lol.
Everywhere there's a fixation on expensive equipment. People use it to try to replace skill. Also it serves as a way to elevate their status within their hobbies community. And man it happens in every hobby I've seen. But in the end all it really does it weigh them down. Their equipment is too bulky to use all the time. So much more gizmos to keep track of. Things are so much more expensive that you don't really take it out as much and enjoy it out of fear of breaking it. Even if there's some sort of insurance in place to cover the cost of damage, you still don't want to risk scratching your new baby.
Anyways there's this series on youtube called "Pro Photographer, Cheap Camera Challenge" that I adore. I'm not even a photography buff but it's super interesting to see these professional photographers take the cheapest cameras available, in some cases they're actually toys, and turn out some amazing pictures.
"And with cars/motorcycles you hear how it's more fun to drive a slow vehicle fast than a fast vehicle slow."
I know this is just your third comparator in your statement, but I never thought I'd see it pop up on HN. :)
It's one of those clichés you see all the time in Jalopnik comment sections...I always want to say "but have actually done that, driven the slow car fast and the fast car slow?" Because...I've got a slow car and a very very fast car. The fast car is fun to drive even when you're going 0 miles an hour at a stoplight. The slow car is fun to drive slow but awful to drive fast.
Maybe this statement works if the "slow" car is an E30/Miata/Fiat or similar but in my book, fast car going any speed is always way more fun. :)
Try that on a ZX-1X on public roads, and they'll be pulling dental records to identify your body.
I have a slower Mazda 3 (although its fairly peppy at low speeds, similar to a Prius) and a very fast Tesla -- the Mazda is most fun to drive around town under 45, while the Tesla is basically very fun to drive anywhere, anytime at any speed.
I don't even understand the original statement tbh..
I think the point of the saying is that if you're going the same speed in both cars, you're likely going to be at a different driving "x/10" effort in the slow car and "y/10" effort in the fast car. And the point is that x >> y. So, you'll be pushing yourself and the car much harder in the slow car than the fast car.
I've found that my enjoyment is somewhat correlated to how hard I am pushing myself and the car. The slower the car, the harder I have and it have to work to go the same speed. Thus, sometimes, the more enjoyment.
For sure. For one thing, the car looks flashy and draws a decent amount of attention where I live, so it's fun just driving around town.
For another, I accelerate pretty fast at lights, so that never really gets old.
And in stop and go traffic on the freeway, it's fun because I just set autopilot on.
It doesn't really look like a flashy car to me unless you've wrapped it..? Where I live (SV) they're about as common as a toyota corolla. Maybe you've done something to it but I don't feel like it's flashy like a Viper ACR is flashy.
> For another, I accelerate pretty fast at lights, so that never really gets old.
I guess but that's, again, not really driving a fast car slow then is it?
> And in stop and go traffic on the freeway, it's fun because I just set autopilot on.
So, you're saying that not driving and watching someone/something else is.
> With astronomy they say it's better to have a small cheap telescope you use all the time rather than a big expensive telescope you barely use.
True, but a camera bag also holds a book and other things, to me it's like a purse but better.
> it's super interesting to see these professional photographers take the cheapest cameras available, in some cases they're actually toys, and turn out some amazing pictures.
Compare it to the quality and the rate at which they produce amazing photos with their preferred gear. You can make amazing photos with anything, especially if you only show the keepers, but that doesn't really tell us much.
Make camera bodies as small as possible so that that they can be brought everywhere without much hassle.
The big problem are lenses. So I think they should make cameras that make lens swapping as easy as possible.
https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/notcamera.htm
I'd also imagine that unit sales are (/were) disproportionately comprised of low-end camera purchases.
Regardless, a scary time to be a camera manufacturer.
Source: https://www.techradar.com/in/news/xiaomi-readying-four-smart...
Yep, Sony shoot themselves in the foot with the RX100 series. Fantastic cameras, but for some reason they make a point of releasing a new model every single year with marginal improvements, but a much higher price point - so even though we are at Mk 7(?) now, the general recommendation is to just find a Mk 2 or Mk 3 model and save yourself a tonne of money compared to the latest model.
1. https://photographylife.com/sony-rx100-series-comparison
Point taken on f-number and aperture not being equivalent, but that’s getting pretty picky ... f-numbers are ratios of focal length to aperture diameter and so effectively do represent aperture size. The point is the smaller f-numbers will give a more shallow depth of field, and at this point, that property is one of the few advantages that a high-end p&s camera has over a nice phone camera (yes, I know some phones are faking shallow DoP in software).
There is no question that they beat the pants off a Toyota Corolla.[1] But most us us just want to drop our kids off at school and pick up groceries.
And you know what? A Corolla is actually a pretty good car. And nobody[2] really cares about their daily driver’s 0-60 time or whether it set a new record at Nürburgring.
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[1] Substitute your favourite boring daily driver.
[2] To paraphrase Joel Spolsky, by “nobody,” we mean “Fewer than 10,000,000 people.”
Still I’d like to see E-mount lenses get cheap for selfish reasons.
Those Sonys are really nice though. I just bought a new Fuji body and a 16mm f/1.4 macro. It's unreal what new mirrorless bodies + high-end lenses can do these days.
But I gotta say, the Fuji X bodies are beautiful, both in handling and aesthetics. I played with a friend's X-T3. I don't think I've ever enjoyed using a camera more. My Panasonics are fantastic from compactness/features/quality/lightweight standpoints, but Panasonic ergonomics and handling is pretty, uh, "workmanlike".
I also love the Fuji body design. Hilariously, I got the Fuji system as a travel-friendly replacement to my bulky 5D3 setup, and while there are some smaller lenses that make it quite portable, I find that I most often grab the 16mm f/1.4. This lens makes the setup feel only slightly smaller than the dslr! I’ll probably sell one kit or the other and buy an rx100 V for travel. (I rented the rx100 IV for a trip to Peru a few years back and was really impressed).
Every automobile on the road does almost exactly the same thing, with a few variations in details like cargo capacity and creature comforts.
But cameras vs. phones is a different situation. I've not heard of a phone that can do 100x optical zoom, nor remotely the kind of high quality, high resolution imaging that a modern digital camera is capable of.
If you hire an Uber, you don't care whether it's a '96 Corolla or a Hummer or anything else; it's going to crawl through traffic and get you from point A to point B in almost an identical fashion.
If you hire a photog for an event such as a wedding, you'd expect them to bring some pretty high end equipment and provide us with a hefty thumb drive or two with dozens if not hundreds of gigs of pictures that are far beyond what even the best phone can achieve.
You make the point that all cars 'on the road' do the same thing. Then you take a photography example that's not equivelent to a standard 'road' journey.
A wedding would be far more like taking a normal car to an F1 race. In such a case an F1 car excels in that particular form of driving in a narrow set of circumstances, and yet you still could technically take it on a road if it were legal to do so.
In a similar vein, 'supercar' cameras are highly specialised tools requiring significant support to get the most of them - large lenses, powerful computers and skilled RAW conversion. Not entirely dissimilar to specialist needs an F1 car might have.
So you can certainly take a 'supercar' camera as your daily driver but you'll face a ton of hassles and extra work as a result.
“Every camera does almost exactly the same thing, with a few variations in details like optical vs. digital zoom capabilities and memory space.”
“When you’re going about you’re daily life and need to take a picture, you don’t care if it’s an iPhone camera, an Android camera, or a fancy DSLR; all of them will capture the photo nearly the same, aside from minor differences which often require a professional to discern.“
“If you show up to drive around a race track, you’ll be expected to bring a high end car with... [you get the point]”
However, a sizable minority of photographers can use the extra features of a dedicated SLR camera with telephoto or microphoto lens. There's plenty of great photography that simply can't happen, or won't happen with nearly the quality, by using a smartphone.
That's not to say that smartphone cameras are bad; they're excellent today. I have always wanted to get a modern digital SLR, but now I'm thinking a high end phone is sufficient for 90% of what I would want to do, so should I really spend $1500 to $2000 to do that extra 10%? Since I'm neither a pro nor a passionate amateur, probably won't.
The idea that cameras are more diverse than cars is honestly laughable. Do you realize the level of technology that is in cars?
>If you hire an Uber
Not everyone lives in a major city and hires Uber to get around. I've been in one Uber in my life.
If a smartphone camera is a Toyota Corolla, a nice camera is a basic luxury sedan for Sunday drives. It does everything a little better, but it's a bit pricier for less use. That being said, it's really for people who just like to drive.
As I see it, the phone is a general-purpose device that also takes pictures, just as a sedan is a general-purpose vehicle, whether luxurious or not. Whereas, a camera just does one thing (two if you count video separately.)
Thus, to me, a dedicated camera at any price is like a two-seater sports car with hardly any trunk room. You can buy cheaper sports cars, sure, but they still lack the affordances of a sedan.
To me, a “luxury sedan” corresponds to a high-end phone.
—
That being said, all metaphors/similes are leaky, so you are probably “not wrong.”
Your point makes sense when the full functionality of the phone is taken into account. I was viewing the argument as phone camera vs dedicated camera.
There's a whole other rabbit hole when you get into the discussion of whether the camera or the lens is the primary driver of good photography.
95% of the time you're happy you just have your scooter with you, but the other five percent of the time, you may be disappointed or downright helpless compared to somebody with better equipment. Say you and your friends decide impromptu to go to a music show twenty miles away, the concert starts in two hours, and public transit will get you there at approximately noon tomorrow. Your scooter is useless, and you have to ask for a ride. This is analogous to when you see a coyote in your neighborhood (let's assume that's a rare and interesting occurrence in your neighborhood) and you're pointing to a blurry dog-shaped dot on your phone saying "Look! It's a coyote!" and your neighbor is ordering a 2' by 3' print showing the reflections in its eyes and the steamy breath coming out of its mouth. Situations like that are frustrating, but each person will feel differently about whether it's worth embracing the expense and daily hassle of traveling with a bigger piece of equipment.
Anyway it's irrelevant since I was just picking something similarly sized to the Corolla that had been brought up.
It's about that everything that 99% of people need the Corolla does. So, there's no motivator to spend money on the better car for most people.
The first doesn't take much room compared to what it does, it can do a lot of things decently, might cost more on the long run but is cheap to start with. I think someone needs to first feel limited by the all-in-one's printing capacity, performance or cost to fully understand what will the laser printer bring to the table.
And this works at any level. Photographs using zooms lens switch to single focus length lens when they hit a point they want more of X or Y. Otherwise there's no point in giving up the convenience of multi-purpose solutions.
And while we're on THAT subject, active safety in the form of a lighter vehicle that steers more competently and accelerates at will is criminally underrated by the "Big SUV makes me safe" crowd.
My reasoning for thinking this is not a good analogy is the supercar is a device that cannot be used/exploited in normal operation. It is illegal to use the top speed or acceleration of a supercar. It cannot make traffic move out of the way for you. A Supercar will not get you to work any faster than a Toyota Corolla. The Corolla will go fast enough to send you to jail, just like the Supercar. You can't use the Supercar features without legal risk without going to a special place (the race track). People who own sports cars and supercars try to rationalize this away but it's true. They are really just driving them around to show off and can't realistically use the cars capabilities in the real world.
If a fancy DSLR or Mirrorless camera is like a supercar than it would mean everyone who had a DSLR or Mirrorless camera had to use the camera with one fixed prime lens that had bad quality and was locked at a small aperture. You had to use it in green "full auto" mode all the time. You had to set the camera up to run in it's slowest mode, and you had to set the camera up run at a very high ISO and to store photos in a high compression JPEG setting.
Only when you went to the special zone of photography would you be able to use the extra features. (Changing lenses & settings for maximum effect.)
Most people who carry DSLRs & Mirrorless cameras around can exploit their advantages ruthlessly in the real world whenever they want.. nothing at all like paying for a sports car or supercar and just using it as a show-off token.
I am not arguing against Om's point though. I'm in the same boat as him, I have a pretty expensive camera setup but have bought minimal camera gear since 2012 and use my Smartphone more and more.
I mean, really, are we going to get into discussing the people who buy a supercar and hold it as an investment/collectible and rarely drive it?
Or what about the people who track their McLaren and absolutely use it to its full potential? Those people 100% absolutely drive them for performance and use every bit of it.
And yes, there are camera owners who collect cameras. And camera owners who buy "Prosumer" models just because they want a nice camera, even if they don't use it to its full potential. Maybe not you, but we both know there are such people.
That doesn't really invalidate my analogy or validate it. If you feel around to the edges of any metaphor, it breaks. But the question is whether the basic idea is right. I think it's right enough, you don't.
Ok.
Talking about how special places are designed for the sports cars and inferring that it can/should only be used there seems to me incorrect inference of the analogy. At that point we may as well talk about expensive tire repair and maintenance, but I don't think that was intended either haha.
The point others were making is much more simple: neither DSLRs or purpose-built sports cars are particularly convenient for casual utilitarian use. People who buy both of these things lean more towards the 'hobbyist' side of things.
You are absolutely right that there are many people who lug their DSLR everywhere. But I think you might be underestimating just how many people actually do go to racetracks.
Of course, some people own fancy things as status symbols. But also, hobbyists don't have to continually "exploit the capabilities" of their hobby to be legitimate hobbyists either.
Sure, a standalone gets you higher resolution, optical zoom, etc, but consider where those photos are most likely to be viewed - you can't get the most from them without going to a special place (printer). You can't make people view them on a PC. Realistically, most people are going to be viewing their photos on their phone, whether they originated there or not, after they've been mushed through facebook or insta's compression anyway. People who own cameras try to rationalize this away but it's true.
In that sense, supercars are actually a decent analogy. If supercars were around the same cost as mirrorless cameras and SLRs (<$5k, with minimal ongoing cost), then I'd expect supercars to be incredibly popular - lots of people would love to have one for weekend drives.
Still this is kind of what I was looking for. Thank you for the advice.
To me, the extra utility of the Corolla is like the extra utility of email, text messages, phone calls, web browsing, exploring the limits of analogies on HN, and so forth.
I can do those on a phone, but not on a camera. (Actually, I'm sure that somebody has a camera that lets you send and receive mail, that's Lett's and Zawinski's Lwas...)
But if you were to talk about a cube van... We'd have something. A cube van won't fit in my garage, just as a camera won't fit in my pocket (Yes, I used to own a Casio that did, but still...)
A cube van is extraordinarily inconvenient for anything except moving my entire house. For all smaller jobs, my station wagon rules. But when I wanted to move house, I hired a proper cube van.
And if I ever need to take an amazing picture, I would probably use a proper camera.
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But all that being said, Steve Jobs did compare pickup trucks to desktop computers at an earlier time. If he were here today, he might suggest a laptop is a pickup and an iPad is a sedan.
So you might have something.
https://mobile.twitter.com/classicretro/status/1169344101973...
You’re welcome.
While I wouldn't be worried about ILC sales yet, compacts are an entirely different story. Phone cameras now have wide angle and telephoto lenses, PDAF sensors, depth sensing, better AI, and have powerful CPUs easily capable of high-fps 4K. Sensor sizes are approaching parity to high-end 1"-sensor compacts like RX100 and LX100 with Samsung Isocell GW1 (1/1.7" sensor) and Isocell Bright HMX (1/1.33" sensor). There will be fewer reasons to buy these in a couple of years.
Low/mid-tier compacts have long been surpassed by phones. In fact, mid-tier compacts from 2010-2012 fare better than those of today. Back then, these compacts (Canon G12, Nikon P7x00, Olympus Stylus-1, Pansonic LX5 etc) used to have 1/1.7" sensors (with a sensible 10-12MP resolution) and now we have tiny 1/2.3" sensors with 20MP due to the megapixel wars. This market is really dead now.
Super-zoom, small-sensor cameras like Sony RX10 and Nikon P1000 will not be challenged by Smartphones soon. But they are also kinda niche.
I've had a world class pro photographer comment with some disbelief on the quality of shots that are attainable from this.
The original on s7 had only one lens to work with so you had to wait during your shot while it took several at different focus.
The UI is a little clunky, but the zoom exceeds all phone cameras and DSLRs.
With cameras it's arguably much worse. Most people these days (especially those with enough disposable income to consider buying a dedicated camera) already own a smartphone. Camera makers see smartphones as competition but probably not so much the other way around. Apple and Samsung try to get better and better cameras because they compete with each other, they don't really care about Fuji or Canon. Camera makers are in the tough situation of having to sell a camera to people who already have one "for free". And they have to convince a crowd that now mostly consume images in low-res on a small screen. Good luck.
With smartphone cameras becoming so good and the software letting anybody take good-looking (if heavily post-processed) pictures, I don't see how they could ever recover. Sun might have been able to win the fight on the server side by competing on price and features, I don't see how camera makers can ever hope to regain the lost market share. It's a completely one-sided competition.
My girlfriend is a professional photographer. She owns a bunch of high-end cameras. They vastly outperform our smartphones' cameras, especially in low-light scenarios or while photographing fast-moving or far-away objects for instance (with the right optics of course). But if you just want to make low-res, mundane pictures for Instagram the difference is really not significant. My cheap-o Nokia 6.1 does the job just fine and it's much easier to operate than most pro cameras.
But that’s a niche application and a camera like that lasts for years. I don’t see a future for those manufacturers either, which will be a problem for me(GoPro-style cameras haven’t caught up).
And frankly though the sensor and lens are better than a phone, I’d still rather shoot on the phone.
Aside from the phone camera, they are all useless to me.
I mountain bike, so none of those are good for capturing that, nor are they convenient or rugged enough to use as a camera midway through a run on some beautiful peak.
Just bought a flagship gopro. It essentially fills all the gaps. I can use it as a webcam, I can use it for mountain biking, I can bring it everywhere and record 4k60fps, take photos, etc.
Phone + gopro seems to be the best way to go for anyone not looking to do niche photography, like extreme macro, long exposure sky stuff, professional large prints.
Ruggedized mini cameras like gopros are a pretty big factor in killing off dslrs. There are countless professionals on youtube making high quality stuff with nothing but phones and gopros.
New sensors have amazing iso ranges, with a sony A7s you don't need magic AI/ML shenanigans to make it look good. Android night mode is amazing but it won't produce images you'll share outside of instagram, and even then the image quality takes a hit, it's more like a good security camera than a proper camera.
https://gizmodo.com/night-shooting-with-the-a7s-mark-ii-damn...
"The best camera is the one you have with you."
Every potential camera owner already has a smartphone. This means the standalone camera purchase has to compete with the existing smartphone ("free"/marginal cost zero) and an upgraded smartphone with a better camera (already desired future purchase, so nearly "free"), and for the existing photography hobbyist - the previously purchased DSLR (also "free").
We paid $3500 for the privilege with no regrets (so far). I forgot pictures can look so good: high resolution, pleasing background blur, and most important it's just a camera. It doesn't have reddit, or HN, or email, or pinterest. It sits about the house where we can grab it quickly. It goes in the day pack on hikes. It blows every other webcam out of the water.
And it has smarts to compete with our current-gen iPhones, which we increasingly tuck away to combat distraction. Fast autofocus and face-recognition are lifesavers and often outperform the phones. It's like photography on easy mode. Which it should be considering the sticker price.
I get that the best camera is the one you have with you. But we carry our phones less and our camera more. It's silly and sad that we can't exercise more self-control. But from our privileged perspective, a dedicated camera was a great investment in our quality of life.
But my photographer friend was right - mirrorless are better for amateurs and have one huge benefit: they can record video much more easily since they can focus and record at the same time.
Switching manufacturers is a different beast however and you'll likely be limited to manual focus and a gimbal/in-sensor for stabilization.
About once a year, I consider moving to Fuji. Or to some other larger format mirrorless. But, the size and weight penalty just isn't worth it.
All that said, my wife's old Canon S90 compact is near the end of life. I thought about buying her a replacement, but I may just splurge on an iPhone XS instead.
On my last trip I think the weight/size of my dlsr equipment was cut in 1/3 with the same focal range.
(the picture in this article is comparison of camera/lens size..)
https://www.wildernessshots.com/why-you-dont-need-full-frame...
Heck, even the "large" 12-40mm F2.8 Pro lens on my primary body is about the same size as a mediocre kit lens on a full-frame SLR.
Of course, because they're full-frame cameras, the glass is still big, so you don't get the hyper-compact size of a micro-4/3 body+lens, but it's still waaay smaller than, say, a 5D + a lens.
I believe the equivalent APS-C Fuji 23mm f/2 is around 200g/0.45lbs.
Of course, with the Summicron you give up such new-fangled innovations as, say, autofocus.
The glass for my Sony A7ii is significantly larger than (most) lenses I had for my Olympus m4/3 body. The exception is the main prime on both systems -- I have the Sony 50mm/1.8, which is about the same size as the Panasonic/Leica 25mm/1.4 that filled the same role on my Olympus.
One is that many manufacturers haven't taken advantage of how mirrorless changes lens design yet (the shorter flange distance enables a lot of design space), so you're still carrying a lens designed for a DSLR, but with a lot of hollow space between the back element and the mount. This is especially obvious with third-party lenses; e.g. it's well understood that a lot of Sigma lenses for Sony FE are functionally just their DSLR lenses with a built-in adapter.
The other reason why you don't see a big weight advantage with mirrorless lenses is that, where they are designed for mirrorless specifically, they tend to aim for "better" rather than "lighter. Lenses like the Canon 85mm f/1.2, the 50mm f/1.2, and the 28-70 f/2.0 are perfect examples of this.
However, lenses designed to take advantage of mirrorless can be smaller and lighter, when they have the same design goals — e.g. the latest (DSRL) Canon EF 24-105L f/4 weighs 795g vs the (Mirrorless) RF 24-105L f/4's 694g.
The advantage of a mirror is that capturing the right instant is much easier when you're photographing subjects that aren't posing, such as children. You want to get that facial expression just right! Not a few hundreths of a second later.
However, assuming I'm taking photos with anything besides my smartphone (which I probably use a greater and greater percentage of the time), it's going to be my Fujifilm mirrorless camera. I think if I were starting over, I'd just go with mirrorless and just forgo the specialized cases that the DSLR and its lenses are better for.
Also, the selfie camera on your phone is probably MUCH lower quality than the main one on the back. Have someone else take your picture instead if you have the option.
But almost any dedicated camera that isn't down in the complete crap price range will blow a cell phone out of the water, for two major reasons. First, optical zoom, the number one thing I miss with my cell phone. Second, it is at least somewhat more likely that your "12MP camera" really is 12 MP with your real camera, whereas it's fairly likely you "12MP" cell phone is a lie [1].
This is even in the $150/200 range, long before we get to the ability to change lenses or all those other pro features. My ~$200 camera from 10+ years ago still takes better pictures than my cell phone, because even though my cell phone nominally beats it on megapixels, my camera actually uses all of its pixels to obtain real information from the scene, instead of being a bullet-point feature on a device that isn't even primarily a camera.
So, to anyone reading this, if this sounds interesting, you don't even have to go to the big, expensive stuff; my kid literally bought a camera at a garage sale for $5 that also takes better pictures than my cell because it had like 8x optical zoom. It cost me more to find a functional battery than the camera itself did. It's not hard or expensive.
[1]: Test: Take a picture in broad daylight, the best possible lighting conditions. Move the picture to your computer. Zoom in until you can see all the pixels clearly. Can you see sharp edges, or do you see a whole bunch of multi-pixel blobs of the sameish color, even around sharp edges? If the latter, your "pixel count" is a lie; it doesn't actually have that much resolving power.
Camera phones will try to re-sharpen the image, but some information is always lost. It's especially obvious looking at things with fine detail and sharp edges, like tree leaves against a bright sky.
I tend to buy last year's midgrade phone because I don't really need the latest and greatest. Maybe the top end really does take the full photos they claim, but that still leaves a lot of cell phones that are lying.
Most of the recent cell phones take perfectly adequate pictures, considering the amazing disadvantages they are laboring under. It's just that if you downsample the pictures to 2 or 4MP, you're basically losing no information.
(There are similar effects with video. The aforementioned 10+ year-old camera I had suffers from this as well. It has a "720P" and a "1080P" video mode, but based on my experimentation, both modes get real video out at about 400-500 "real" lines of vertical quality. I can squeeze either video's source down to that size and when I compare the full screen result to the original, I can find no difference whatsoever. I imagine more modern real cameras probably do a better job here; this thing is pretty old now, obviously.)
I suspect this is probably why you're seeing the sales numbers drop too. The big camera makers have been relying on the cheap units to bring in the money. They're transitioning now to relying on expensive, high end units instead. It's a much smaller addressable market though.
At some point I think it will be largely a professional thing. Eventually the computational photography will look good enough to make up for the space constraints of a phones' lens. But the downside will be that any photo taken with your phone will look kind of samey and be poor at getting fine detail. And having your own camera with manual control options will let people feel more in control of what they're doing.
Do iPhone photos look better when zoomed in? Of course not, but they do look better at "normal" scale, which is what counts IMO. And of course this only applies when you shoot "standard" scenes, the DSLR (with lenses) gives you ability to shoot things that the iPhone just can't.
Am I ditching my DSLR? Of course not, but that's only because I'm willing to invest effort in actually taking great photos, which isn't trivial (to me) and is much harder with the iPhone.
Maybe true, but I pretty much only post photos on instagram (using a 5 year old mirrorless camera I found for less than a new good smartphone), and non-experts consistently ask me how I am able to get such high picture quality. So non-photographers can detect the difference between modern smartphones and 5 year old mirrorless tech.
All of the tricks used in a smartphone could be used in a real camera. If they were, then real cameras will always have many stops of dynamic range advantage.
The Revenant would have been impossible to shoot even 10 years ago, the demands on the sensor or film would have been too great. This means the story couldn't be told at all! So the technology actually enables people to take photos that would have been otherwise impossible.
I'm also suspicious that the second shift is "done". I suspect the technology will always be pushed further at the high end of the camera technology market which will trickle down. Similarly, I suspect the software innovations used by Google / Apple will trickle down into the software of dedicated cameras, which will further widen the quality gap between the formats.
Quality isn't all about reproduction, it is also about creative possibilities. Right now, none of the smartphones can take a photo of a moving subject in low light. They depend on averaging frames which leads to subject blur. This isn't a minor detail, it's the difference between a photo and no photo.
I love my phone camera (Pixel 1) but if I want to take professional quality pictures I pull out my E-M10.
I got a $500 Nikon DSLR about 4 years ago and came to the same conclusion. I usually set it to auto, and I'm astounded by the photo quality that comes out. Occasionally, I'll adjust exposure or focus manually, but for outdoors, auto "just works".
Sometimes I think I should have bought a mirrorless instead, but so long as my Nikon works and I'm satisfied with its quality, I'll keep using it.
The lens is wide like a smartphone so the subject always fits in the frame. And it has enough resolution to crop later. But it's not so wide that it warps the image. Straight lines look straight. I take 15-20 pics/day and charge it once a month. It's light and small so I can shoot one-handed (very useful with pets and children).
One day I'll buy a telephoto lens with better reach. But the 24m is such a great "around-the-home" package. It will be my default for the foreseeable future.
*EF lenses, can't comment on Canon EF-S personally.
[0]: https://kenrockwell.com/sony/lenses/24mm-f14.htm
For almost a year without my DSLR, most of my photos were shot using my LG G6 phone. It was okay and I insisted feeling it was good enough.
It was last Christmas when I was able to borrow a Canon 6Dmk1 paired with a good lens. Boy, I was in for a treat again; the sensor, fast focus, bokeh and low light performance all reminded me how far I've forgotten the joy of getting better pictures using a better camera. Got myself a 77d+24mm soon after to satisfy the cravings.
Probably smartphones are eating in to a certain kind of enthusiast market, but big glass and big sensors can give you things that are just optically impossible in the form-factor of a phone. If only camera manufacturers can do good smartphone integration, I think they have a bright future.
Point-and-shoots are toast for sure though and I doubt anyone is surprised.
However, it has now become a question of physics, and large lenses getting in lots of light into focus over the sensor, and it being large enough that can catch all of those "scarce" photons, specially for low light photography. And the 1/1.7" sensor is about as large as you can fit inside a phone, which is why they're all moving to having multi-lens cameras and computational photography (with AI, DSP, etc).
I now own an olympus mirrorless, and it's a fantastic piece of equipment with a superb sensor (both in size and technology), interchangeable lenses, and the image stabilization system on body gives it the ability to stabilize _any_ lens I use with it (here's a mean look to Nikon and Canon that place IS inside the lenses instead of the body, to charge premium for the feature). Can't see a phone fitting all those features, because they require physical size and or mechanisms taht wouldn't fit in our pockets.
Once everyone has a camera in their phone buying an extra camera feel unnecessary like the past.
A good way for companies like Canon to not fall apart will be by creating complementary products for smartphones to improve the image qualities.
Now I take the EOS 3 out specifically and only with a prime 35mm lens. The more methodical way I think about taking pictures is a nice contrast to taking a whole bunch of shots with smartphone or DSLR and then heavily curating afterwards. I just wanted a different feeling from taking photos and it's been quite fulfilling in that respect. Although breaking the habit of looking down at the back of the camera has been quite difficult.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/10/color-photos-chica...
[2] https://www.flickr.com/groups/29949065@N00
I would love to know how he got #14 [0]. Slide film (as you're no doubt aware) has relatively little exposure latitude compared to print film, meaning it's a hell of a trick to get both the inside of the tower and the trains in the yard outside exposed properly.
You can see the issue pretty often in real-estate photos. Photos featuring the inside of the house with a window usually have the window way blown out because there's so much more light outside than inside.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/10/color-photos-chica...
[0] https://www.loc.gov/photos/?fa=contributor:delano,+jack%7Clo...
2011: 16
2012: 20 <--- peak
2013: 17
2014: 14
2015: 13
2016: 12
2017: 12
2018: 4 (annualized rate of 8)
The camera isn't dead, it's just not being purchased by people who don't want to learn how to use them.
But the gap between those cameras and, say, my full-frame Sony is still enormous. If you care about photography, you buy a real camera. It's just that most people don't care about photography.
I am not a professional photographer, but for urbex, I find that my Pixel 2XL has basically replaced my LUMIX DMC-FZ300. Sure, the LUMIX could produce higher-quality low-light images, but shooting on a tripod for a long exposure shot is often impractical or impossible. The Pixel's Night Sight [1] mode is really good.
I desperately wish I had a full frame camera with the computational chops of my smartphone!
[1] https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/11/night-sight-seeing-in-dark...
The main thing I'd like to work on is getting more video. Videos of people especially are much deeper emotional response, I just wish I took more of my children when they were smaller, and relatives when they were still alive. Hearing someone speak adds something that photo's really dont capture.
The main problem with video (apart from getting people to talk on camera) is storing and managing all the data. Its probably too hard for most people, even worse than keeping all the many thousands of photos.
I am looking for the above, to not have to "manage" yet another device, and dedicated cameras do need some management, especially when back from a trip, so transfer photos, share photos, empty memory, etc.
(My sideline is video, and three S1's would give me pause.)
Sony A7 Series (Mirrorless Full Frame) has everything you need/want and much more. Even the first generation body will not let you down. If you have the spare cash, get the 3rd Gen body as it has more advanced autofocus and low-light capabilities.
Depending on which program you use on your computer, you can configure it to automatically download the photos from the camera and wipe the SD card when connected via USB cable (wifi is usually quite slow to transfer large files especially video).
It has features that let it set up as a wifi hot spot a phone app that previews. It works but its really user unfriendly and a pain to use. Hopefully they've gotten better.
https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canon-eos-70d/8
I had a friend that used to use (maybe still does) a sd card with wifi to remotely access the pictures from a phone. That seemed to work pretty well.