I had a Konika-Minolta 5D, which was a great camera for its time. After taking 55,000 photos the shutter mechanism broke, so a couple of years ago I thought about buying a Sony camera that could take my old lenses.
Then I realised that actually all my old lenses were really bad quality, and an A7-III would need an adapter for them anyway. The only one that was vaguely decent was an old 400mm prime lens, but even that one I picked up for a pittance on Ebay a decade ago.
So, I bought a Nikon. The modern lenses I have bought for that are miles better than the old lenses I had on my old camera.
The first SLR I had growing up was a used Minolta with that mount. You can probably buy great lenses for cheap right now. (Yes, you'll have to turn a ring on the lens to focus them. It's not the worst thing in the world.)
Just keep in mind that those older Minolta lenses were designed for 35mm film. They'll be tend to be soft when coupled with a 36 megapixel full frame sensor, at least compared to modern lenses designed for high resolution sensors.
I was actually surprised they were still selling them. Have barely heard a thing since the (amazing) α99 II - that must be six years ago at least. Aeons in camera years.
That’s arguably not an SLR. Sort of. It’s an SLT. Used that neat semi-transparent non-moving mirror to simultaneously directs light to the imaging sensor and the phase-detect sensor.
I'm not a pro photographer but I do enjoy amateur stuff. In terms of the newest cameras the DSLRs have essentially no advantages and many disadvantages. The one major thing you could cite as an advantage is the quality of the picture you see when looking in the viewfinder. But for most folks that isn't enough to make up for the drawbacks of reflex cameras.
Quality isn’t overly important through the viewfinder. You’re just using it for composition.
Whereas an EVF can fairly accurately show you composition, exposure at current settings, any sort of raster graphic they want on the screen (eg the head silhouette to frame passport shots), etc.
My biggest gripe with the EVF is that it kinda sucks for astrophotography. I have to crank the ISO way up, take a test shot, and then turn it down before a long exposure. Our eyes are just much better at focusing on dim points in the sky.
Not sure what camera you use, but in Canon's terminology you can turn off exposure simulation which will make the image through the EVF look like a correctly exposed image with ISO cranked way up but you can set your shot ISO as low as you want.
Most professional photographers who used DSLRs ten years ago are still using them. Electronic viewfinders are fundamentally inferior in terms of the viewing experience and battery life, but have other pluses like light weight, low cost and configurability (all of which amateurs prioritize more than professionals).
It is not a huge loss though, because pros almost exclusively buy their DSLRs from Canon and Nikon.
Yeah. Even Canon is switching over to mirrorless at this point although I assume they'll keep one or two pro reflex models in their line for the foreseeable future.
I'm a pretty enthusiastic hobby photographer, and I jumped on mirrorless systems + EVFs several years back. On the Olympus OM-D E-M10 (and what IS it with Japanese electronics companies and ridiculous nomenclature?), the EVF was absolutely never a problem EXCEPT in that it impacted battery life a bit (solution: a second battery in your pocket).
I upgraded last year to a Sony A7ii, and this one's even better.
The tl;dr is that, at this point, optical viewfinders are overrated. The best EVFs are just as good.
Pros aren't married to glass or to viewfinders, though. They're married to lens mounts. Glass investment dwarfs camera body cost. That's the sticking point.
Pros buy new cameras about once a decade. And they don’t like drastic changes in UI. The reluctance to change and infrequent purchase cadence makes supporting the professional market a real bear. I understand that they typically sell their flagship models at a loss, but write the loss off as R&D.
I have to disagree about viewfinders and batteries being inferior. The viewfinder is an acquired taste. If you look at cinematography and movie production, you’d need to search for a long time before you found an optical viewfinder. And I just shot a 12hr production on a single battery, using the highest resolution DSLR on the market. No pro photographer will ever need more than a day of battery life.
> Electronic viewfinders are fundamentally inferior in terms of the viewing experience [...]
I respectfully disagree with that. Current generation viewfinders have excellent resolution and very little lag, and while that will never be as perfect as an optical viewfinder, they do have the great benefit of being able to show you the image as it would be after exposure (so you can see which parts would be over or underexposed for example), and can overlay much more useful information.
> that will never be as perfect as an optical viewfinder,
Don't forget that EVF can surpass OVF in image quality because they can apply lens correction to the viewed image which brings the image closer to the final product. (although AFAIK it's not done currently)
EVFs have gotten much better since the early days of mirrorless. I prefer them immensely now, especially when it comes to manual focus or low light shooting. I would honestly reach for my mirrorless for my professional concert shooting over my SLRs.
Canon and Nikon are also shifting en masse to mirrorless. So the tides have clearly changes across the board.
Sony's SLRs didn't have a optical viewfinder anyway and haven't done for models released in the last 10 years (a580 was the last one with a optical viewfinder).
Arguably an optical finder is still better in certain ways, such as optical quality and the fact that they're always "on." But electronic viewfinders have gotten quite good and this is clearly the future for most uses.
It's not so much that "mirrorless tech. has basically whooped moving-mirror tech. 's behind in a major way." But that mirrorless tech has gotten good enough that the inherent advantages of eliminating the mirror aren't overshadowed by the need to use an electronic viewfinder instead.
Personally I find resting the camera against my face and looking through the viewfinder to be more much comfortable than holding it out from my face and looking at the LCD. I can hold that position against my face basically indefinitely.
Absolutely. I'm talking about electric viewfinders that you look through just like you would an optical finder. Not using a back screen (although that can be useful too in certain circumstances).
Huh? EVF and OVF have their own advantages but it is not correct to say optical quality of one is better than the other.
EVF can do things such as boost the exposure which makes things like the 800mm f/11 possible. This would be much too dark otherwise on an OVF.
EVF can also electronically correct the image for certain types of abberations that the lens introduce.
EVFs also don't introduce their own abberations that OVFs do because there isn't as much glass or mirrors to move the image from the lens to the viewer.
OVF certainly have advantage from being a "live" image for tracking purposes but EVFs have mostly caught up enough to make that difference negligible.
I'd still almost certainly take a DSLR OVF if other things were equal (which of course they're not).
But modern EVF is good for most purposes. And I'm sure the newest Canon digital bodies have even better ones than my Fujifilm X-E3. (Which itself is at least "good enough," while the X-E1 was more like "mostly sufficient.")
I haven't tried the latest generation, but the display-based viewfinders just aren't quite a match for a good optical viewfinder in some ways (but have benefits in others). Running the sensor and a display at all times also is energy-intensive, pushing down battery life. It's a tradeoff, and while it clearly falls strongly towards mirrorless for most people, it doesn't for all.
addendum: someone pointed out that Sony already had digital view finders and only used the mirror for the autofocus sensors. That's a lot more relevant then, and somewhere as far as I know really technical progress makes the design obsolete.
I own what some consider one of the best APS-C DSLRs ever made, as well as a last-gen full-frame mirrorless camera.
They are very different. Even though that DSLR is eight years old, it gets battery life that any mirrorless camera can only dream of (>1000 shots without a battery grip). Even though the mirrorless has one of the better EVFs among it's peers, the resolution is not quite as good as the OVF, and it does have visible lag and smear that the OVF simply doesn't have (the EVF is a 85 Hz OLED with 1280x1024 pixels or something like that, iirc).
The DSLR has a faster AF if you are wildly out of focus, though the AF is overall much worse - the mirrorless has like 10x as many AF points, and they are all over the frame, and it has flawless video autofocus, as well as almost perfectly accurate autofocus.
The full-frame mirrorless is about the same size and weight as the APS-C DSLR. A full-frame DSLR would be quite a bit bigger and heavier.
The real difference is that you get a lot of stuff just like that in a mirrorless which are somewhat of a pain in a DSLR. Viewfinder magnification, good video AF, silent shooting with the viewfinder, customizable finder display, nightvision, histograms, distortion correction in the finder (critical for precise framing with ultra-wide lenses), focus peaking etc.
There are some differences which are pretty much purely hype. Things like eye AF for example pretty much only matter for people who mostly do "ultra-blurry background" portraits which have such a thin depth of field that when the iris of the eye is in focus, the eyelashes are already blurry. It's a very specific thing to do, but gets around 90 % of the air-time in "totally independent reviews I swear I'm not sponsored".
At the current top-end, DSLRs like the Nikon D6 are said (not that I would have any idea about that) to still have somewhat faster AF than comparably expensive mirrorless cameras.
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As for Sony, they inherited the A-mount when they bought Konica-Minolta. The A-mount was at that point in time already a legacy mostly-mechanical-with-some-electrical-bits-kind of mount (e.g. mechanical aperture control, mechanical autofocus through a coupling in the mount). The E-mount is a modern, fully electronic mount, though designed for APS-C (full-frame just barely fits into it). I think when the E-mount was introduced it should have been clear that anything A-mount is on the way out. Also, A-mount SLRs where never particularly high-end, so in terms of performance I'd expect them to be significantly below what Nikon and Canon offer, especially because it does not seem like there was much development on these after the E-mount was introduced.
Just like Nikon F is clearly on the way out with Nikon Z being around, an Canon EF being on the way out with Canon RF around, the same is true for the A-mount.
Even though that DSLR is eight years old, it gets battery life that any mirrorless camera can only dream of
I swear that my 2008 Nikon D700 had functionally unlimited battery life. My mirrorless camera would be hard-pressed to get through a day of shooting on vacation on one battery, but that tank seemingly had a Mr. Fusion inside of it.
As noted below: battery life and tracking autofocus is still superior if you get a really high-end DSLR; a Nikon D850 has just insane battery life if you use it like an old-school film camera with minimal screen usage, and the ability to track, say, birds in flight, is still superior.
But these particular SLRs? Nah. They were nice and all, but not particularly differentiated in any way.
Does anyone have the inside scoop on why Sony seemingly abandoned the NEX platform? I bought the NEX6 in 2013, it was released at the end of 2012 and the last firmware update is v1.03 released ~15 months later. Based on my experience, they didn't run out of bugs to fix.
The alpha 6000 was released in 2014 and the last firmware update is 3.21 released in 2019.
(Honestly, Canon and Nikon don’t exactly tell a coherent story there either…)
It’s really unclear if they ever want to fully flesh out the lens line for that sensor size, and they don’t seem to have much enthusiasm for the line. Honestly, they seem to just want to sell full-frame.
They abandoned the NEX branding a long time ago, but they released a couple of APS-C Alphas at the end of 2019. I bet there are more to come, unless they're going to drop the <$1000 consumer market.
I’m just wondering why I spent 1200 bucks on a camera that got three firmware updates and then nothing nothing else from the manufacturer. The software stack on these things is just getting bigger and it doesn’t give me any confidence to buy another Sony in the future.
Like with most products, you bought for what it was at the moment of sale. Buying a buggy product and hoping that it will get fixed afterwards is just a fools errand in general.
I'm not asking for a refund. I'm just saying that I will preferentially purchase products from vendors that continue to invest in their product line.
Besides this looks like a product team that got fired or didn't get renewed or something. There are contemporary Alpha cameras that are still getting updates, but the NEX was just a flash in the pan.
As a mere amateur, how important is firmware to a camera?
I have two Sony cameras - an Mk1 RX100 and a A7R III, both acquired shortly after their initial releases. I don't think I've ever updated the firmware on the RX100, and just once on the A7R III (I believe it was to get the uncompressed RAW capability), mainly due to laziness. But for my amateur level use, I don't think I've ever had any problems.
For some manufacturers it matters more than others. Sony doesn't support their cameras much after launch. They could theoretically update some color science (something that does matter) or add some minor features, but I've never updated my A6100 and I don't think there's any updates available anyway. To contrast, part of Fujifilm's market value is in their "film simulations" which are effectively more advanced LUTs that (mostly) attempt to mimic different film stocks, and Fujifilm has been known to have good long-term support for bringing new features (including film simulations) to older cameras through firmware updates. For example, the Fujifilm X-Pro2, released in 2016, received a firmware update in September of 2020. It only optimized performance for a newer lens and fixed some bugs, but the fact it got anything at all 4 years after launch does not appear to be the norm.
It can be very important. For example, Fujifilm released a firmware update for the X-T3 (2018) that provided some huge gains in autofocus performance, bringing the autofocus in line with the newly released X-T4.
There have also been some updates that e.g. allow better use of the camera as a webcam.
The problem though (unless I'm incorrect) is that without firmware updates, newer lenses may not perform proper in camera correction for the lens design; you'd be forced to post-process everything on a computer.
> Sony appears to have quietly stopped selling its A-mount DSLR cameras
I just hate that Sony can't be bothered to give an explicit send-off to the A-mount line. Coupled with their abysmal customer service reputation, this really makes Sony my textbook example of a faceless, uncaring $BIGCORP. (Oh should I call them $ONY now?) It's really such a shame since I like their products, otherwise.
I've owned an SLT-A35 since 2011. Being the first interchangeable lens camera I bought, this purchase was a declaration of investment in Sony's ecosystem. Four or five years later, the A-mount line grew stale in favor of the mirrorless line. 2015-2016 was confusing because Sony won't just admit their roadmap for the A-mount. I remember they did release a few more A-mounts but it was either at the very high end or was Japan-only.
FWIW, at least I scored one great deal because camera shops started to practically give away their A-mount inventory. And I got a mount adapter that I now use with an a6K. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yes, but even Canon is putting most (or all) of it's R&D into mirrorless (bodies and lenses for the new full-frame, mirrorless RF mount system).
I expect they'll slowly stop releasing new DSLRs over the coming years.
And FWIW, a good friend of mine is a pro photographer and said he'll likely not buy any new DSLR bodies. But, he's still a few years away from needing a new body. Not to mention has north of $30k in glass, so would still run an RF with adapter for quite some time.
This is unsurprising. Mirrorless bodies are less complicated overall, ergo cheaper to produce, leading to better profit margins. Camera makers are after all in the business of making money.
Yes, but also Sony was an early mover into mirrorless (APS-C and FF) where they've had considerably more success.
Most Sony users knew the Axx series (SLR/SLT) were dead when the A7 (mirrorless) released. Sony basically abandoned everything else to focus on their mirrorless platform and it gave them a huge market presence.
As a camera industry meta-commentary, it sure seems like the Big 3 really only want to sell full-frame cameras.
Sony, Canon, Nikon, they seem to have roadmaps for a full range of lenses for full-frame, from wide-angle to super-telephoto.
But APS-C? Meh. It’s a little confusing as to what works with what (hi, Canon, with your EF-M mount), and given that they never fully fleshed out a set of compact-but-performant sports lenses for that sensor size…it all seems perfunctory.
They seem to want to only sell full-frame, as that’s where the sweet meat of the margins can still be found in camera sales. All their APS-C cameras feel like “get the value buyer in the door”, but, that seemingly hampers growing into the rest of the system, as they only have a middling set of crop sensor lenses.
They want to differentiate themselves as much as possible from smartphones to survive.
As smartphones have continued to get better (first via optics, then via software/computational processing) it has been the physics that has kept full frame (and medium format) relevant.
Personally I was a huge fan of m4/3 for the lower weight/smaller/open format interchangeable lens system but one cannot deny the cross-over between it and smartphones is perhaps too close to survive (Olympus is already out).
APS-C isn't as bad as m4/3, but why invest tons of resources/time into a format that can also get swallowed by the megafauna that is smartphones (via e.g. periscope lenses)? Instead, they can offer consumer grade/entry level FF cameras, with no lens system dilution or headaches trying to implement an inter-compatible
flange focal distance (between APS-C/FF).
APS-C was a compromise format. It aided in making both bodies and lenses smaller and lighter, thereby enabling a cheaper product that could be marketed at the consumer level (amateur and family photogs). Pros who came from the film world almost entirely migrated to the full-frame format, noting that full-frame is actually smaller than 35 mm film, and 35 mm film was on the lower end of film size itself (compared to medium and large formats).
APS-C is compatible with super 35 format (approximately 24mm x 18mm). It appears in digital consumer cameras because APS-C size sensors make sense for film-making...because super 35 made sense for film making. It made sense for movie film because wide-screen images could be made on 35mm film using spherical lenses which are simpler and hence cheaper than anamorphic lenses.
Digitally, APS-C sensors made even more sense as television (and video) moved away from 4:3 ratio. APS-C stills cameras introduced by Kodak in the days before digital became common is another story...or the same story of Kodak trying to lock in a proprietary system (that story goes back to the first Kodak cameras).
Afaik all major full-frame lenses work with also their corresponding crop mounts. Canon EF lenses work on EF-S, Sony FE lenses work on E mount, Nikon FX lenses work on DX bodies. This explains why there is somewhat limited interest for crop lenses.
Size of tele lenses is also mostly determined by the size of the entrance pupil so there is little point in offering dedicated DX telephotos beyond 200mm/f5.6 or so where it still makes a difference.
But you end up paying for and carrying around a lot more glass (literally) than your sensor needs, right? Fortunately there's third party manufacturers like Sigma that fleshed out the E-mount market.
Can you blame them? The lower performance camera market got absolutely obliterated by smartphones. There is almost no market left for them in that area.
I recently bought a Sony A6000 to see if I would enjoy having a dedicated camera over my smartphone. Overall I like it, but I'm really shocked at well my smartphone does in comparison for 90% of photos.
There are certainly some major benefits to a dedicated camera such as low light performance, depth of field, better focusing, etc. But, honestly, for 99.9% of photos people are going to take (portrait photos of friends/family and etc), a decent smartphone does a better job.
Sony seems pretty committed to a variety of sensor sizes. The RX series of 1" sensor cameras and the 6000 series of APS-C cameras don't seem to be going anywhere. In part because there are strong reasons to use smaller sensors for video -- particularly greater depth of field at wider apertures being useful in low light.
There is a great deal of "super 35" cinema glass that commands non-consumer prices due to the quality of the optics. For stills, "full frame" lenses make more sense since they serve APS-C as well.
For those that don’t know. DSLR or Digital Single Lens Reflex.
When you look through the viewfinder your looking through the lens due to a mirror and a prism that sits on top of the camera. When you take a picture the mirror flips out of the way and the image goes straight onto the film/sensor (after the shutter opens for a precise amount of time). There was some interesting tricks with light path to the the autofocus sensor. The prism is great because it un reverses the image.
Typical SLR cameras use a pentaprism which reverses both top and bottom and left and right optical paths to orient the image in the viewfinder to match the orientation we experience without it.
However, single lens reflex cameras without a pentaprism are not unknown. [1] They typically correct top-bottom orientation leaving left-right reversed. They are simpler, needing only a single mirrored surface. Most twin-lens reflex cameras also operate this way.
Though SLR designs became popular, rangefinder cameras avoid a great deal of the complexity and bulk of SLR designs at the potential expense of parallax issues. On the positive side, a rangefinder camera will typically allow seeing elements outside of the film area and tend to be more compact. One reason for Lecia cameras popularity.
In the early 2000s, digital cameras were a wonder for me, and given the cost, it wasn't hard to look upmarket just a bit and get a DSLR and go down the rabbit hole looking for lenses. But I think DSLR manufacturers were buoyed by consumer digital camera sales, which evaporated once smartphone cameras got good enough. Now DSLR usage is either professional or niche (more so).
I know I only reach for my Pentax K3-II for special occasions or special uses, like trying to capture wildlife (which is too far away and too fast for most smartphone captures.) But Pentax seems to be a (nearly) dead brand in this space. If I wanted to keep doodling in the hobby, I'd probably eventually have to switch to mirrorless or switch to the Canon/Nikon duopoly. I would greatly miss the rugged feel, durability and weather resistance in my Pentax body and lenses.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadThen I realised that actually all my old lenses were really bad quality, and an A7-III would need an adapter for them anyway. The only one that was vaguely decent was an old 400mm prime lens, but even that one I picked up for a pittance on Ebay a decade ago.
So, I bought a Nikon. The modern lenses I have bought for that are miles better than the old lenses I had on my old camera.
That’s arguably not an SLR. Sort of. It’s an SLT. Used that neat semi-transparent non-moving mirror to simultaneously directs light to the imaging sensor and the phase-detect sensor.
https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sony-alpha-slt-a99
My (limited) understanding being that mirrorless tech. has basically whooped moving-mirror tech. 's behind in a major way.
Any photographer care to comment on why that might not be the case?
Whereas an EVF can fairly accurately show you composition, exposure at current settings, any sort of raster graphic they want on the screen (eg the head silhouette to frame passport shots), etc.
My biggest gripe with the EVF is that it kinda sucks for astrophotography. I have to crank the ISO way up, take a test shot, and then turn it down before a long exposure. Our eyes are just much better at focusing on dim points in the sky.
It is not a huge loss though, because pros almost exclusively buy their DSLRs from Canon and Nikon.
I upgraded last year to a Sony A7ii, and this one's even better.
The tl;dr is that, at this point, optical viewfinders are overrated. The best EVFs are just as good.
Pros aren't married to glass or to viewfinders, though. They're married to lens mounts. Glass investment dwarfs camera body cost. That's the sticking point.
The worst part of the A72 was the battery and the buffer. The A73 made both of those concerns a non-issue.
I have to disagree about viewfinders and batteries being inferior. The viewfinder is an acquired taste. If you look at cinematography and movie production, you’d need to search for a long time before you found an optical viewfinder. And I just shot a 12hr production on a single battery, using the highest resolution DSLR on the market. No pro photographer will ever need more than a day of battery life.
I respectfully disagree with that. Current generation viewfinders have excellent resolution and very little lag, and while that will never be as perfect as an optical viewfinder, they do have the great benefit of being able to show you the image as it would be after exposure (so you can see which parts would be over or underexposed for example), and can overlay much more useful information.
Don't forget that EVF can surpass OVF in image quality because they can apply lens correction to the viewed image which brings the image closer to the final product. (although AFAIK it's not done currently)
Canon and Nikon are also shifting en masse to mirrorless. So the tides have clearly changes across the board.
It's not so much that "mirrorless tech. has basically whooped moving-mirror tech. 's behind in a major way." But that mirrorless tech has gotten good enough that the inherent advantages of eliminating the mirror aren't overshadowed by the need to use an electronic viewfinder instead.
Huh? EVF and OVF have their own advantages but it is not correct to say optical quality of one is better than the other.
EVF can do things such as boost the exposure which makes things like the 800mm f/11 possible. This would be much too dark otherwise on an OVF.
EVF can also electronically correct the image for certain types of abberations that the lens introduce.
EVFs also don't introduce their own abberations that OVFs do because there isn't as much glass or mirrors to move the image from the lens to the viewer.
OVF certainly have advantage from being a "live" image for tracking purposes but EVFs have mostly caught up enough to make that difference negligible.
But modern EVF is good for most purposes. And I'm sure the newest Canon digital bodies have even better ones than my Fujifilm X-E3. (Which itself is at least "good enough," while the X-E1 was more like "mostly sufficient.")
They are very different. Even though that DSLR is eight years old, it gets battery life that any mirrorless camera can only dream of (>1000 shots without a battery grip). Even though the mirrorless has one of the better EVFs among it's peers, the resolution is not quite as good as the OVF, and it does have visible lag and smear that the OVF simply doesn't have (the EVF is a 85 Hz OLED with 1280x1024 pixels or something like that, iirc).
The DSLR has a faster AF if you are wildly out of focus, though the AF is overall much worse - the mirrorless has like 10x as many AF points, and they are all over the frame, and it has flawless video autofocus, as well as almost perfectly accurate autofocus.
The full-frame mirrorless is about the same size and weight as the APS-C DSLR. A full-frame DSLR would be quite a bit bigger and heavier.
The real difference is that you get a lot of stuff just like that in a mirrorless which are somewhat of a pain in a DSLR. Viewfinder magnification, good video AF, silent shooting with the viewfinder, customizable finder display, nightvision, histograms, distortion correction in the finder (critical for precise framing with ultra-wide lenses), focus peaking etc.
There are some differences which are pretty much purely hype. Things like eye AF for example pretty much only matter for people who mostly do "ultra-blurry background" portraits which have such a thin depth of field that when the iris of the eye is in focus, the eyelashes are already blurry. It's a very specific thing to do, but gets around 90 % of the air-time in "totally independent reviews I swear I'm not sponsored".
At the current top-end, DSLRs like the Nikon D6 are said (not that I would have any idea about that) to still have somewhat faster AF than comparably expensive mirrorless cameras.
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As for Sony, they inherited the A-mount when they bought Konica-Minolta. The A-mount was at that point in time already a legacy mostly-mechanical-with-some-electrical-bits-kind of mount (e.g. mechanical aperture control, mechanical autofocus through a coupling in the mount). The E-mount is a modern, fully electronic mount, though designed for APS-C (full-frame just barely fits into it). I think when the E-mount was introduced it should have been clear that anything A-mount is on the way out. Also, A-mount SLRs where never particularly high-end, so in terms of performance I'd expect them to be significantly below what Nikon and Canon offer, especially because it does not seem like there was much development on these after the E-mount was introduced.
Just like Nikon F is clearly on the way out with Nikon Z being around, an Canon EF being on the way out with Canon RF around, the same is true for the A-mount.
I swear that my 2008 Nikon D700 had functionally unlimited battery life. My mirrorless camera would be hard-pressed to get through a day of shooting on vacation on one battery, but that tank seemingly had a Mr. Fusion inside of it.
But these particular SLRs? Nah. They were nice and all, but not particularly differentiated in any way.
(And the battery life is the real killer.)
The alpha 6000 was released in 2014 and the last firmware update is 3.21 released in 2019.
(Honestly, Canon and Nikon don’t exactly tell a coherent story there either…)
It’s really unclear if they ever want to fully flesh out the lens line for that sensor size, and they don’t seem to have much enthusiasm for the line. Honestly, they seem to just want to sell full-frame.
Besides this looks like a product team that got fired or didn't get renewed or something. There are contemporary Alpha cameras that are still getting updates, but the NEX was just a flash in the pan.
I have two Sony cameras - an Mk1 RX100 and a A7R III, both acquired shortly after their initial releases. I don't think I've ever updated the firmware on the RX100, and just once on the A7R III (I believe it was to get the uncompressed RAW capability), mainly due to laziness. But for my amateur level use, I don't think I've ever had any problems.
There have also been some updates that e.g. allow better use of the camera as a webcam.
I just hate that Sony can't be bothered to give an explicit send-off to the A-mount line. Coupled with their abysmal customer service reputation, this really makes Sony my textbook example of a faceless, uncaring $BIGCORP. (Oh should I call them $ONY now?) It's really such a shame since I like their products, otherwise.
I've owned an SLT-A35 since 2011. Being the first interchangeable lens camera I bought, this purchase was a declaration of investment in Sony's ecosystem. Four or five years later, the A-mount line grew stale in favor of the mirrorless line. 2015-2016 was confusing because Sony won't just admit their roadmap for the A-mount. I remember they did release a few more A-mounts but it was either at the very high end or was Japan-only.
FWIW, at least I scored one great deal because camera shops started to practically give away their A-mount inventory. And I got a mount adapter that I now use with an a6K. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I expect they'll slowly stop releasing new DSLRs over the coming years.
And FWIW, a good friend of mine is a pro photographer and said he'll likely not buy any new DSLR bodies. But, he's still a few years away from needing a new body. Not to mention has north of $30k in glass, so would still run an RF with adapter for quite some time.
Most Sony users knew the Axx series (SLR/SLT) were dead when the A7 (mirrorless) released. Sony basically abandoned everything else to focus on their mirrorless platform and it gave them a huge market presence.
Sony, Canon, Nikon, they seem to have roadmaps for a full range of lenses for full-frame, from wide-angle to super-telephoto.
But APS-C? Meh. It’s a little confusing as to what works with what (hi, Canon, with your EF-M mount), and given that they never fully fleshed out a set of compact-but-performant sports lenses for that sensor size…it all seems perfunctory.
They seem to want to only sell full-frame, as that’s where the sweet meat of the margins can still be found in camera sales. All their APS-C cameras feel like “get the value buyer in the door”, but, that seemingly hampers growing into the rest of the system, as they only have a middling set of crop sensor lenses.
As smartphones have continued to get better (first via optics, then via software/computational processing) it has been the physics that has kept full frame (and medium format) relevant.
Personally I was a huge fan of m4/3 for the lower weight/smaller/open format interchangeable lens system but one cannot deny the cross-over between it and smartphones is perhaps too close to survive (Olympus is already out).
APS-C isn't as bad as m4/3, but why invest tons of resources/time into a format that can also get swallowed by the megafauna that is smartphones (via e.g. periscope lenses)? Instead, they can offer consumer grade/entry level FF cameras, with no lens system dilution or headaches trying to implement an inter-compatible flange focal distance (between APS-C/FF).
Digitally, APS-C sensors made even more sense as television (and video) moved away from 4:3 ratio. APS-C stills cameras introduced by Kodak in the days before digital became common is another story...or the same story of Kodak trying to lock in a proprietary system (that story goes back to the first Kodak cameras).
I recently bought a Sony A6000 to see if I would enjoy having a dedicated camera over my smartphone. Overall I like it, but I'm really shocked at well my smartphone does in comparison for 90% of photos.
There are certainly some major benefits to a dedicated camera such as low light performance, depth of field, better focusing, etc. But, honestly, for 99.9% of photos people are going to take (portrait photos of friends/family and etc), a decent smartphone does a better job.
There is a great deal of "super 35" cinema glass that commands non-consumer prices due to the quality of the optics. For stills, "full frame" lenses make more sense since they serve APS-C as well.
When you look through the viewfinder your looking through the lens due to a mirror and a prism that sits on top of the camera. When you take a picture the mirror flips out of the way and the image goes straight onto the film/sensor (after the shutter opens for a precise amount of time). There was some interesting tricks with light path to the the autofocus sensor. The prism is great because it un reverses the image.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_single-lens_reflex_c...
Because of digital you can read the sensor and now show the image in a small screen in the viewfinder instead.
However, single lens reflex cameras without a pentaprism are not unknown. [1] They typically correct top-bottom orientation leaving left-right reversed. They are simpler, needing only a single mirrored surface. Most twin-lens reflex cameras also operate this way.
Though SLR designs became popular, rangefinder cameras avoid a great deal of the complexity and bulk of SLR designs at the potential expense of parallax issues. On the positive side, a rangefinder camera will typically allow seeing elements outside of the film area and tend to be more compact. One reason for Lecia cameras popularity.
[1]: The Graflex reflex cameras are an example, http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Graflex_reflex_models
I know I only reach for my Pentax K3-II for special occasions or special uses, like trying to capture wildlife (which is too far away and too fast for most smartphone captures.) But Pentax seems to be a (nearly) dead brand in this space. If I wanted to keep doodling in the hobby, I'd probably eventually have to switch to mirrorless or switch to the Canon/Nikon duopoly. I would greatly miss the rugged feel, durability and weather resistance in my Pentax body and lenses.