in my opinion, the Zmount is a worthy successor. They fixed all the flaws of the f-mount and really thought about how it would be used over the next 100 years. its bigger so you don't need as much optics for low fstop lenses, it uses 4 armatures for added stability and they added an additional control wire for faster autofocus. Plus it feels justs as solid when connecting your lens
this site has a TON of information on lenses and cameras. If you cant get answers here, i'd bet there's links to where you can find them. He probably would reply to a request for more info...
I hardly comment on any Hackernews post, but I had to come here to say if you have any respect for photography and optics in general, you will stay away from that man’s site and remove the link. It’s a joke for a site and well-known as a poor-content, money-grabbing venue in the photographic community.
As a professional photographer who has been linked to Ken many times over the years, I would have to agree with the sentiment that you should STAY FAR AWAY from his blog.
Ken passed his technical prime and photographic abilities many years ago. That website is mostly bad information and should be wiped from the internet archive.
Ken is very controversial in the photographing community. He has the audacity to shoot JPEG only (which is a sacrilege for all the RAW shooters). And his writing style is very ... well ... over the top.
I think his site is a great resource if you want to look up older Nikon glass. About the new stuff (mirrorless, etc) ... I don't know ... take it with a grain of salt.
With reviewers, I now first look at the style of shots they take. For example, with Jared Polin, I trust his opinion on sports / action photography, but not landscape, street, or architectural photography. Or for portraits, my go-to is Pye Jirsa.
About Ken Rockwell, I've heard him described as a "black and white photographer shooting in color" - he likes contrast & texture, and generally shoots stuff that would look better in b&w.
Interesting. It seems Ken is sold on just getting the latest iPhone Pro for photos and videos these days. Convenient, but was hoping there’d be merit in going down the rabbit hole of old fixed lense film photography…
It really is incredible, the short flange distance rivals APS-C lens mounts, while the throat and inner diameter is by far the largest of the current mirrorless mounts. In practice, lenses are extremely well-balanced relative to the body, even the zooms like the new 24-120.
The Z mount is what made my switch from Canon DSLR to Nikon Mirrorless. Yes, Nikon's current AF implementation is no match to Canon's but the technical specifications and the resulting possibilities of the Z-mount are just something I couldn't ignore.
Unsurprisingly, there is a whole community collecting old lenses, I just narrowly escaped this not so cheap hobby. But I am more and more fascinated by using the different bouquets ("style of blurred backgrounds") as case for teaching. There is so much in there: optics, physics, math and a very nice application of machine learning, maybe.
It's a way cheaper than collecting new lenses anyway :) Not sure about F-mounts, but I kept an eye on M42 old lens market. You could (and probably still can now) get a very fast (f/2 and below) lens 5-10x cheaper than their modern counterparts. Yes you loose automatic focus but this is probably no big issue with modern viewfinders.
So, IDK how true this really is but I recall reading that the optimal angle for light to hit a sensor is different than for light hitting film. So that's a factor in the image output.
Never heard about angle difference but I'm no pro by any stretch. Maybe this is related to some nuances in optics for mirror vs mirrorless rather than film vs digital.
it's kind of the reverse problem of LCD viewing angles. film had no structure, but each pixel on a sensor is at the bottom of a tiny little well looking out. the effect is exacerbated on mirrorless with a shorter flange distance.
the modern Nikon sensors are currently the best here, being designed with adaptation in mind. but it doesn't matter so much, the worst you might see is a fractional stop of additional vignetting. it matters even less if you're adapting an SLR lens with a deeper flange.
In practice prints look good either way. I have noticed that the main drawback to the older lenses is the coma, not resolution. I routinely shoot manual focus Nikkors on digital bodies without significant artifacts from resolution...but astro work is far more challenging.
in the portrait and video range, high end older lenses can still compete. digital sensors have only recently surpassed 35mm film in resolution, and professional 20th century photographers had similar demands for detail across the frame.
and it only really matters if you're doing significant enlargement and cropping towards the edge in post, which most consumers simply won't.
professionals will always want the best, but i've got a few vintage primes that still give me more resolution than i know what to do with, and that whole collection would be outpriced by a single modern lens.
Who cares. I'm not copying documents or doing astrophotography. I have still yet to find a modern lens that replicates the look rendered by my old C/Y Zeiss Planar and Rolleiflex Tessar lenses.
Completely agree, I am not saying its a bad thing.
I do care for resolution in landscape photography, where I need to crop, and a modern high end lens+sensor lends itself to this usage pattern well.
For portraits, I think less resolution is usually better. I do most of my potrait shots with two decade old lenses despite having nearly all the modern Nikkors in my bag.
I did landscape photography as well but nothing beats the Mamiya 7 lenses except maybe some of the new full frame mirrorless primes? Super sharp, no visible distorsion. The Tessar is very sharp in the center though, which is great for 6x6, works well for portraits and documentary photos.
I have most of the meaningful AI era Nikkors but then almost completely gave up on 35 mm after getting the Mamiya and two Rolleis. I still used the 35mm Planar though, love it. Sold all the AF Nikkor stuff I used on the dSLR and got a Panasonic m43 with two primes. I will get the 15mm Leica DG next, to replace the unremarkable 14 mm Panasonic. Not going to lug around dSLRs any more.
That sounds like a great setup. I switched to a Nikon with a 40mpx sensor and their new mirrorless lenses are crazy sharp, even the cheap ones. I have all they have released and it seems even the kit lenses are sensor limited. Incidentally, i really dont like any of those lenses for potraits of ordinary people, with no makeup and fancy lighting and postprocessing. Every skin por, every small imperfection shows. For this I default to the old lenses and the subjects are happy.
As someone who's also into cars as a hobby I find photography to be refreshing inexpensive for a hobby. I mean even a top notch Leica Lens will cost only the fraction of a Skyline GT-R ;)
By contrast, Canon broke compatibility twice, moving from FL to FD (1971) to EF (1987). But since the start of EF, compatibility has been excellent. New EF lenses with features like IS, USM, STM work perfectly even on the oldest Canon EOS 650 film camera body. And the earliest EF lenses work on modern bodies.
I don't know if it's a travesty, but the website is generally looked down upon by most photographers. The goal seems to be volume of content rather than anything useful, or in many cases, even accurate.
> Will you elaborate on why it’s a travesty? Genuinely curious as a newer photographer still discovering the best online resources.
Rockwell is rather opinionated, and that rubs some people (including me) the wrong way. As a nascent photographer, I found his page and he convinced me to get a Nikon D40 with a rather breathless review compared to the outmoded D50.
In retrospect, the D50 would've served me better since the existing AF-D lenses were less expensive than AF-S counterparts and a better deal for someone who didn't know what he was doing...and they could, you know, auto-focus if you had a screw drive. But AF-S lenses were the future and you shouldn't get AF-Ds for your DX camera because that's dumb, just get the 35mm f/1.8 DX instead...
But I owe him a bit of a debt of gratitude, too. When I was gifted the 50mm AF-D and it didn't autofocus on the D40, I learned the joy of manual focus photography. I picked up a 24mm f/2.8 non-AI for a song a year or so later and have really enjoyed them ever since. (In fact, I upgraded to the D7000 so as to meter with AI/AI-S lenses.)
I do not take any pictures anyone else couldn't take, but there is something that I enjoy about sensing the process differently: zooming with my feet, the robust engineering of the all-metal lenses, the occasionally dreamy quality of being out of focus. It doesn't come with the chemistry of film or the tactile feel of working with negatives, but it's better for me than an all-auto process.
"I never shoot raw. Why would I? Raw is a waste of time and space, and doesn't look any better than JPG even when you can open the files. [...] Image quality is the same in JPG and raw." [0]
"I know no pros who own a tripod. Why would they want one? Who wants to carry it around, much less have his compositional options encumbered by having to move this big rig from spot to spot?" [1]
I used to own an EOS 650. I found it pretty amazing that it was compatible with literally every Canon EF lens ever produced (although it didn't completely support some features, such as image stabilisation).
Unfortunately, my EOS 650 was stolen, but I replaced it with an EOS 55, which is even better (it also supports E-TTL speedlites). It's incredible how good the autofocus is for a camera built in the 90s. In my opinion, it wasn't until ~5 years ago that mirrorless cameras reached parity for autofocus performance.
The Canon EOS film cameras really blew Nikon out of the water. The loss of compatibility with the old FD mount lenses was more than compensated for by the massive gain in functionality they achieved by building a new lens mount designed specifically for autofocus.
EF and EF-S are 'compatible' but only in one direction.
EF-S Cameras can take both EF and EF-S lenses. You can't go the other way; on EF Cameras, an EF-S lens will probably not fit and even if it does may damage the camera (i.e. mirror might hit the back of the lens due to clearance differences.)
There's a pretty simple reason for this: ef-s lenses are designed for a smaller sensor, so they only need to be sharp for a much smaller area. So you can make lighter and cheaper lenses. Canon doesn't want people putting ef-s lenses on full frame cameras and complaining that the image edges look like crap - because, well, they're not meant for that.
Don't EF-S lenses need to produce a smaller image in general? I always thought that if you somehow put an EF-S on a full frame sensor you would get a circle image similar to a fish eye.
There are a wild set of possible Nikkor/Nikon lens/camera interactions, and on some level Nikon must have been glad to go to the Z-mount just so they could keep track of what’s what.
Nikon were caught napping by mirrorless and have made bold moves to obsolete a ton of stuff...which is seen by some industry people as the last chance to get in the modern market.
If I may sub-divert the thread to ask the experts in the field:
Do you think Nikon/Canon will have to start going down the computational photography route to make themselves more appealing to camera buyers? Or as soon as someone in the DSLR world does, they will have to quickly go along?
I.e. either downsize their cameras to be more attractive to carry hour by hour of your day, or make their features much better to compensate for the trouble of carrying a DSLR?
Or is part of the appeal of the traditional camera that effects, manipulation, etc. of the photo is not done and you're in total control of the exposure?
I have been a DSLR person at times, but honestly I am amazed at how good iPhone photos look sometimes... until I zoom in of course.
Mirrorless cameras are already a thing that makes DSLR obsolete. But I assume that's not what you're asking.
I constantly get asked if I took a specific photo on my phone and the answer is always "no". People notice the details and the amazing color reproduction even without zooming in.
Same, I recently took my Nikon to my son's crawling group (a meeting where babies are allowed to meet other babies and crawl around). I took a ton of photos of the kids there and shared them with the moms (who were usually shooting cell phone).
They were amazed at the quality of the photos (Nikon Z6ii with a Z 50mm f1.8) and some even wanted to book me for paid shootings. I'm not a great photographer by any stretch (I myself think I'm terrible - I just like taking photos of my kid) but the difference of a full frame sensor with a modern top lens really blew away people who are used to cell phone cams.
I have a Nikon Z6ii. It's pretty compact. With a Z 28mm f2.8 it's no problem carrying it around wherever you go.
Computational: I have no idea. But as an """"advanced""" amateur photographer I don't really want computational photography in my gear. That's for the quick snapshot with your mobile phone imho.
Cameras are already downsizing, DSLRs are long dead and mirrorless are not just the future, they're now the present. I don't think size is the issue any longer.
The purpose of using a "real" camera is quality and control. If you go on IG and look as all the top photography centric accounts they're using either film or mirrorless cameras, not iPhones. The ability to manipulate RAW photos, the outright quality of better sensors and lenses, and the ease of use of "real" cameras still makes them the top choice.
When you then throw in professional use into the mix the choice becomes more obvious. Just the ergonomics alone make traditional cameras the obvious choice. I'm not going to be mounting expensive shotgun mics, matte boxes, and filters to an iPhone.
As far as computational photography goes, it's the future and all manufacturers will need to start using it to get an edge on the competition. The thing with computational photography however is that it's a data driven process, just like anything else AI; data in is data out, so the better quality of dedicated cameras simply means better data for computational methods, thus better results in the end. There's no real substitution for better lenses and sensors, because any computational method applied to a phone can also be applied to a camera.
I think there's something to be said for the lack of control with computational methods too. my iPhone for example applies a lot of processing that makes skin to me look plasticy, but it's baked into the ISP. My Fujifilm when shooting in RAW or F-Log for example doesn't have this issue. So any computational methods applied to traditional cameras need to not impede on creative control; noise reduction is an area where it would be pretty universally helpful.
I definitely could be absolutely wrong about this, but I don't think computational photography will be a huge way forward for these kinds of cameras.
Smartphones have fully taken over the light/compact segment, they're better at it, you always have it with you and they've gotten good enough that for anything 'happy snap', a smartphone will do the job fine.
The professional/high end hobbyist segment is still going strong, and I think is growing steadily. The appeal, for me at least, is a lot about the creative control. I'm the one creating the image, not the device I'm using. There are computational tools I can use, but I'd want to do anything like that after the fact, and Photoshop has added some tools pushing this forward, but I do think there's a lot of room for a more ML focused editing experience.
There is a certain amount of push for computational features that help with taking a photo, like fast autofocus that can see a face and focus on the eyes.
When it comes to actually generating or modifying the image, I think this is a line that most photographers don't want to cross.
Sort of in the industry...but not an expert in cameras, more the commercials
DSLR is dead. Nikon and Canon were caught sleeping by Sony who stole their lunch with mirrorless. Now the pro camera brands are racing to add the kind of features your smartphone camera had a year ago. Smartphones have destroyed the camera market and now only pros and enthusiasts will suffer the "CCD glued into a 90's film camera" format.
That sort of nailed it from my understanding as well.
Also, and apologies for the cynicism, a lot of the current DSLR following is another rich person's hobby which never produces anything other than 4TB of stuff in a Lightroom DB that no one ever sees or is interested in because it's basically crap.
The one actual professional (as in paid as main income) photographer I know doesn't talk about the technology or the brand of camera they use at all because it's mostly moot: it's the picture and getting paid that matters. They don't carry their camera anywhere either; just an iPhone 12 mini.
I attended their photography course at a local college and about 90% of the attendees turned up with their £3k+ DSLR set up and were disappointed that it was mostly theoretical and composition related rather than how to use their toy. I had an entry level Nikon D3100 at the time and was sneered at by the rest of the folk. I now use an iPhone only. Subject matter is more interesting than the technology for me.
>The one actual professional (as in paid as main income) photographer I know doesn't talk about the technology or the brand of camera they use at all because it's mostly moot: it's the picture and getting paid that matters. They don't carry their camera anywhere either; just an iPhone 12 mini.
>Subject matter is more interesting than the technology for me.
This has always been the case though. Amateurs and people who suffer from GAS place far too much reliance on the tool. They want to purchase the ability to create good works and become defeated when they learn they can't and quit. This has been true ever since the introduction of mass market film cameras. Many pros back in the film days carried around point and shoots or fixed lens cameras for personal use and left their F3s and 80-200mms at home.
This is just a reality of the consumer society we live in; people are advertised to incessantly and are conditioned to expect purchasing things to make them better. Thankfully art is a cathartic form of protest to this in many ways; you can't buy and compute photographic skill.
I'm semi-pro and my main gear stays at home unless I'm working on a project, personal or professional, and I carry my iPhone and a Fuji X100 for daily/personal stuff.
I'm an amateur bird photographer. My camera + lens setup is far too big and heavy to carry around when not birding.
But it makes a huge difference in image quality compared to digiscoping with a smartphone (or even the same camera with an adapter). See these images[1] taken with a smartphone + telescope, camera + telescope, and camera + telephoto lens. The telescope has more reach, but substantially worse image quality and requires a tripod. The last shot handheld is the first day I got the lens, I've gotten much better with practice.
Even when I have my camera, I've got a 200-600mm lens on it for the vast majority of the time. My phone has a 14mm equivalent focal length, so if there's a pretty landscape I'm just going to use my phone. The widest lens for the camera I even own only goes out to 28mm, so even swapping lenses doesn't get me as wide an angle as my phone can get. As a bird photographer I have no intention of ever getting dedicated landscape lenses.
Birding is one of those rare use-cases though where gear is pretty essential. Astrophotography is another area where better gear often does lead to better pictures. That being said, it still doesn't make up for the skill of knowing your subjects, being patient, and spending all that time setting up the perfect shot; the gear just gets you in the front door. A bird shot in bad light at a bad angle with a phone is still a bird with bad lighting and a bad angle with a 200-600mm, just in higher resolution.
My point originally was that amateurs generally spend far too much time focusing on the best gear, when they should be focusing on their subject and skillset.
Agreed with both comments above. The genuine pros I come across (quite a lot btw, not that I truly understand them) seem to value consistency and reliability more than they do 'features'. They like gear that does what they expect. I was watching a portrait photographer work with flash in a studio recently. He spent 0 time tinkering with his camera, and most of the rest arranging lighting, reflectors, backgrounds, shooting charts for colour profiling, viewing things on his tethered screen and moving his model.
They're already downsizing cameras with technology that allows removing the mirror component [1] on new models. I don't know if downsizing was the main intent or if removing the mirror was.
I think the appeal is that photographers need quality equipment. Phones can achieve good photography but they're stuck with one lens setup, for example. There's different types of photography and it's great how one can have the same camera body as another photographer and use completely different lenses and viceversa. So I think it comes to what photographers want improved.
Digital improved on film photography, phones improved on Point-and-shoot cameras [2], and so on. What comes next for photographers?
I think computational photography can be used on entry-level cameras to improve the experience of a certain market segment while still allowing an "authentic" photography experience. Size in technology is important and it will definitely keep going down throughout most fields; the main focus on the next technological advancement is probably placed elsewhere.
There’s no substitute for physics. A bigger lens in front of a bigger sensor, made to at least the same tolerances as a smartphone camera, is going to provide much better information as the base for a digital photo. So there will always be a role for bigger, dedicated systems when quality is paramount. Just like most professional movies are still shot on dedicated cameras with cine lenses.
Some of what you might call computational techniques are already available for DSLR/mirrorless cameras. You just apply them in a post processing step on a computer, some time after the initial capture.
Others are being built into some cameras. For example some mirrorless cameras can use their image-stabilization motors to shift the sensor during capture; the shifted images are then combined in-body to produce an image with more pixels than the raw photosites on the sensor.
They're both already shifting from DSLR to Mirrorless (though Nikon hasn't been as quick as Cannon).
Raw mode with manual aperture/iso/shutter speed is certainly an appeal, but even some smartphones have that.
The big appeal of interchangeable lens cameras is the interchangeable lenses. Camera lenses are still vastly superior for many uses. Not all, but for things like sports and nature photography there's just no way to get equivalent image quality out of a smartphone. Likewise for macro photography.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadEdit: it appears that the thread is still current! Eleven years running.
So the new Nikon Z-series mirrorless cameras have a 'Z' mount and the FTZ mount adaptor lets you use F-mount lenses on a Z-mount camera.
> I get that pros want to re-use old lenses
I haven't yet had to buy a new lens to use my Z-series mirrorless, and probably wont while I'm still using it in conjunction with my F-mount D850
I'm curious how they spec out / tolerance and achieve things like angularity (sag) and position (centeredness).
https://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/fe2.htm
What do you mean? The site is free to browse and what little ads there are, are unobtrusive.
Content-wise, I personally find his take of not spending time pixel-peeping refreshing, but to each their own, I guess.
Ken passed his technical prime and photographic abilities many years ago. That website is mostly bad information and should be wiped from the internet archive.
I think his site is a great resource if you want to look up older Nikon glass. About the new stuff (mirrorless, etc) ... I don't know ... take it with a grain of salt.
About Ken Rockwell, I've heard him described as a "black and white photographer shooting in color" - he likes contrast & texture, and generally shoots stuff that would look better in b&w.
In the old days prior to live-view, some even added the mirror back!
https://www.l-camera-forum.com/leica-wiki.en/index.php/Visof...
https://imaging.nikon.com/history/story/
This wonderful old site is a wealth of info on Nikkors and other systems
http://www.mir.com.my/rb/photography/companies/nikon/nikkore...
It's a way cheaper than collecting new lenses anyway :) Not sure about F-mounts, but I kept an eye on M42 old lens market. You could (and probably still can now) get a very fast (f/2 and below) lens 5-10x cheaper than their modern counterparts. Yes you loose automatic focus but this is probably no big issue with modern viewfinders.
the modern Nikon sensors are currently the best here, being designed with adaptation in mind. but it doesn't matter so much, the worst you might see is a fractional stop of additional vignetting. it matters even less if you're adapting an SLR lens with a deeper flange.
and it only really matters if you're doing significant enlargement and cropping towards the edge in post, which most consumers simply won't.
professionals will always want the best, but i've got a few vintage primes that still give me more resolution than i know what to do with, and that whole collection would be outpriced by a single modern lens.
I do care for resolution in landscape photography, where I need to crop, and a modern high end lens+sensor lends itself to this usage pattern well.
For portraits, I think less resolution is usually better. I do most of my potrait shots with two decade old lenses despite having nearly all the modern Nikkors in my bag.
I have most of the meaningful AI era Nikkors but then almost completely gave up on 35 mm after getting the Mamiya and two Rolleis. I still used the 35mm Planar though, love it. Sold all the AF Nikkor stuff I used on the dSLR and got a Panasonic m43 with two primes. I will get the 15mm Leica DG next, to replace the unremarkable 14 mm Panasonic. Not going to lug around dSLRs any more.
The primary difference is the emphasis on the “oh” in bokeh vs. the emphasis on “kay” in bouquet.
As someone who's also into cars as a hobby I find photography to be refreshing inexpensive for a hobby. I mean even a top notch Leica Lens will cost only the fraction of a Skyline GT-R ;)
As a Canon and Fuji owner: I foresee a lifetime of incompatibilities and crappy adaptors ahead of me.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leica_M_mount
By contrast, Canon broke compatibility twice, moving from FL to FD (1971) to EF (1987). But since the start of EF, compatibility has been excellent. New EF lenses with features like IS, USM, STM work perfectly even on the oldest Canon EOS 650 film camera body. And the earliest EF lenses work on modern bodies.
Rockwell is rather opinionated, and that rubs some people (including me) the wrong way. As a nascent photographer, I found his page and he convinced me to get a Nikon D40 with a rather breathless review compared to the outmoded D50.
In retrospect, the D50 would've served me better since the existing AF-D lenses were less expensive than AF-S counterparts and a better deal for someone who didn't know what he was doing...and they could, you know, auto-focus if you had a screw drive. But AF-S lenses were the future and you shouldn't get AF-Ds for your DX camera because that's dumb, just get the 35mm f/1.8 DX instead...
But I owe him a bit of a debt of gratitude, too. When I was gifted the 50mm AF-D and it didn't autofocus on the D40, I learned the joy of manual focus photography. I picked up a 24mm f/2.8 non-AI for a song a year or so later and have really enjoyed them ever since. (In fact, I upgraded to the D7000 so as to meter with AI/AI-S lenses.)
I do not take any pictures anyone else couldn't take, but there is something that I enjoy about sensing the process differently: zooming with my feet, the robust engineering of the all-metal lenses, the occasionally dreamy quality of being out of focus. It doesn't come with the chemistry of film or the tactile feel of working with negatives, but it's better for me than an all-auto process.
"I know no pros who own a tripod. Why would they want one? Who wants to carry it around, much less have his compositional options encumbered by having to move this big rig from spot to spot?" [1]
[0] https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/raw.htm
[1] https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/carry-less.htm
His Nikon F-mount compatibility chart is absolutely fine though.
Unfortunately, my EOS 650 was stolen, but I replaced it with an EOS 55, which is even better (it also supports E-TTL speedlites). It's incredible how good the autofocus is for a camera built in the 90s. In my opinion, it wasn't until ~5 years ago that mirrorless cameras reached parity for autofocus performance.
The Canon EOS film cameras really blew Nikon out of the water. The loss of compatibility with the old FD mount lenses was more than compensated for by the massive gain in functionality they achieved by building a new lens mount designed specifically for autofocus.
* https://www.nikonusa.com/en/learn-and-explore/a/products-and...
With Canon there were two systems and there was no compatibility between the two (IIRC).
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_EF-S_lens_mount
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_EF_lens_mount
(There were/are less expensive DX-only lenses as well.)
EF-S Cameras can take both EF and EF-S lenses. You can't go the other way; on EF Cameras, an EF-S lens will probably not fit and even if it does may damage the camera (i.e. mirror might hit the back of the lens due to clearance differences.)
https://www.dslrbodies.com/lenses/lens-articles/general-niko...
There are a wild set of possible Nikkor/Nikon lens/camera interactions, and on some level Nikon must have been glad to go to the Z-mount just so they could keep track of what’s what.
Do you think Nikon/Canon will have to start going down the computational photography route to make themselves more appealing to camera buyers? Or as soon as someone in the DSLR world does, they will have to quickly go along?
I.e. either downsize their cameras to be more attractive to carry hour by hour of your day, or make their features much better to compensate for the trouble of carrying a DSLR?
Or is part of the appeal of the traditional camera that effects, manipulation, etc. of the photo is not done and you're in total control of the exposure?
I have been a DSLR person at times, but honestly I am amazed at how good iPhone photos look sometimes... until I zoom in of course.
I constantly get asked if I took a specific photo on my phone and the answer is always "no". People notice the details and the amazing color reproduction even without zooming in.
They were amazed at the quality of the photos (Nikon Z6ii with a Z 50mm f1.8) and some even wanted to book me for paid shootings. I'm not a great photographer by any stretch (I myself think I'm terrible - I just like taking photos of my kid) but the difference of a full frame sensor with a modern top lens really blew away people who are used to cell phone cams.
I have a Nikon Z6ii. It's pretty compact. With a Z 28mm f2.8 it's no problem carrying it around wherever you go.
Computational: I have no idea. But as an """"advanced""" amateur photographer I don't really want computational photography in my gear. That's for the quick snapshot with your mobile phone imho.
Cameras are already downsizing, DSLRs are long dead and mirrorless are not just the future, they're now the present. I don't think size is the issue any longer.
The purpose of using a "real" camera is quality and control. If you go on IG and look as all the top photography centric accounts they're using either film or mirrorless cameras, not iPhones. The ability to manipulate RAW photos, the outright quality of better sensors and lenses, and the ease of use of "real" cameras still makes them the top choice.
When you then throw in professional use into the mix the choice becomes more obvious. Just the ergonomics alone make traditional cameras the obvious choice. I'm not going to be mounting expensive shotgun mics, matte boxes, and filters to an iPhone.
As far as computational photography goes, it's the future and all manufacturers will need to start using it to get an edge on the competition. The thing with computational photography however is that it's a data driven process, just like anything else AI; data in is data out, so the better quality of dedicated cameras simply means better data for computational methods, thus better results in the end. There's no real substitution for better lenses and sensors, because any computational method applied to a phone can also be applied to a camera.
I think there's something to be said for the lack of control with computational methods too. my iPhone for example applies a lot of processing that makes skin to me look plasticy, but it's baked into the ISP. My Fujifilm when shooting in RAW or F-Log for example doesn't have this issue. So any computational methods applied to traditional cameras need to not impede on creative control; noise reduction is an area where it would be pretty universally helpful.
Smartphones have fully taken over the light/compact segment, they're better at it, you always have it with you and they've gotten good enough that for anything 'happy snap', a smartphone will do the job fine.
The professional/high end hobbyist segment is still going strong, and I think is growing steadily. The appeal, for me at least, is a lot about the creative control. I'm the one creating the image, not the device I'm using. There are computational tools I can use, but I'd want to do anything like that after the fact, and Photoshop has added some tools pushing this forward, but I do think there's a lot of room for a more ML focused editing experience.
There is a certain amount of push for computational features that help with taking a photo, like fast autofocus that can see a face and focus on the eyes.
When it comes to actually generating or modifying the image, I think this is a line that most photographers don't want to cross.
DSLR is dead. Nikon and Canon were caught sleeping by Sony who stole their lunch with mirrorless. Now the pro camera brands are racing to add the kind of features your smartphone camera had a year ago. Smartphones have destroyed the camera market and now only pros and enthusiasts will suffer the "CCD glued into a 90's film camera" format.
Also, and apologies for the cynicism, a lot of the current DSLR following is another rich person's hobby which never produces anything other than 4TB of stuff in a Lightroom DB that no one ever sees or is interested in because it's basically crap.
The one actual professional (as in paid as main income) photographer I know doesn't talk about the technology or the brand of camera they use at all because it's mostly moot: it's the picture and getting paid that matters. They don't carry their camera anywhere either; just an iPhone 12 mini.
I attended their photography course at a local college and about 90% of the attendees turned up with their £3k+ DSLR set up and were disappointed that it was mostly theoretical and composition related rather than how to use their toy. I had an entry level Nikon D3100 at the time and was sneered at by the rest of the folk. I now use an iPhone only. Subject matter is more interesting than the technology for me.
>Subject matter is more interesting than the technology for me.
This has always been the case though. Amateurs and people who suffer from GAS place far too much reliance on the tool. They want to purchase the ability to create good works and become defeated when they learn they can't and quit. This has been true ever since the introduction of mass market film cameras. Many pros back in the film days carried around point and shoots or fixed lens cameras for personal use and left their F3s and 80-200mms at home.
This is just a reality of the consumer society we live in; people are advertised to incessantly and are conditioned to expect purchasing things to make them better. Thankfully art is a cathartic form of protest to this in many ways; you can't buy and compute photographic skill.
I'm semi-pro and my main gear stays at home unless I'm working on a project, personal or professional, and I carry my iPhone and a Fuji X100 for daily/personal stuff.
But it makes a huge difference in image quality compared to digiscoping with a smartphone (or even the same camera with an adapter). See these images[1] taken with a smartphone + telescope, camera + telescope, and camera + telephoto lens. The telescope has more reach, but substantially worse image quality and requires a tripod. The last shot handheld is the first day I got the lens, I've gotten much better with practice.
Even when I have my camera, I've got a 200-600mm lens on it for the vast majority of the time. My phone has a 14mm equivalent focal length, so if there's a pretty landscape I'm just going to use my phone. The widest lens for the camera I even own only goes out to 28mm, so even swapping lenses doesn't get me as wide an angle as my phone can get. As a bird photographer I have no intention of ever getting dedicated landscape lenses.
[1] https://imgur.com/a/VE4kYtI
My point originally was that amateurs generally spend far too much time focusing on the best gear, when they should be focusing on their subject and skillset.
They're already downsizing cameras with technology that allows removing the mirror component [1] on new models. I don't know if downsizing was the main intent or if removing the mirror was.
I think the appeal is that photographers need quality equipment. Phones can achieve good photography but they're stuck with one lens setup, for example. There's different types of photography and it's great how one can have the same camera body as another photographer and use completely different lenses and viceversa. So I think it comes to what photographers want improved.
Digital improved on film photography, phones improved on Point-and-shoot cameras [2], and so on. What comes next for photographers?
I think computational photography can be used on entry-level cameras to improve the experience of a certain market segment while still allowing an "authentic" photography experience. Size in technology is important and it will definitely keep going down throughout most fields; the main focus on the next technological advancement is probably placed elsewhere.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirrorless_camera
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point-and-shoot_camera
Some of what you might call computational techniques are already available for DSLR/mirrorless cameras. You just apply them in a post processing step on a computer, some time after the initial capture.
Others are being built into some cameras. For example some mirrorless cameras can use their image-stabilization motors to shift the sensor during capture; the shifted images are then combined in-body to produce an image with more pixels than the raw photosites on the sensor.
Raw mode with manual aperture/iso/shutter speed is certainly an appeal, but even some smartphones have that.
The big appeal of interchangeable lens cameras is the interchangeable lenses. Camera lenses are still vastly superior for many uses. Not all, but for things like sports and nature photography there's just no way to get equivalent image quality out of a smartphone. Likewise for macro photography.