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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

DSLRs with mirror mechanisms are now officially a technological dead-end.

This new camera does things that are not possible with DSLR bodies, including SILENT 20FPS shooting, WITHOUT BLACKOUT, WITHOUT DISTORTION FROM ROLLING SHUTTER, and with SHUTTER SPEED UP TO 1/32000 -- very impressive. Sports and other pro photographers that need high-end performance will take notice.

Mirrorless cameras are now clearly the future of pro photography. Canon and Nikon should be very worried.

EDIT: Here's a good first look explaining the importance of all new features: http://briansmith.com/sony-a9-camera-fe-100-400mm-gm-lens-re...

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>This new camera does things that are not possible with DSLR bodies, including SILENT 20FPS shooting, WITHOUT BLACKOUT, WITHOUT DISTORTION FROM ROLLING SHUTTER, and with SHUTTER SPEED UP TO 1/32000 -- very impressive

It's impressive, but it's irrelevant to 99% of photography.

I'd personally rather have an optical viewfinder than all of those features, impressive as they are.

Unless you, personally, account for the other 99% of the photography market I wouldn't hand wave this camera that fast.

It's a very specialized piece of equipment for a very specific user, sure, but Sony has other bodies suited for different jobs. What the A9 shows is that there are advantages unattainable to mirror systems. As technology matures and cost of entry lowers, the more limited and cumbersome mirror systems will be cast away.

Optical viewfinder, albeit nice, won't sustain the whole market for DSLR. The advantage of no having vibration or rolling shutter or silent operation, will eventually drive people to mirrorless systems.

I was commenting on the suggestion that DSLRs are now obsolete. For sure this is a highly capable camera and there are some advantages to going mirrorless.

>The advantage of no having vibration or rolling shutter or silent operation, will eventually drive people to mirrorless systems.

Vibration is a red herring. Mirror damping for small format DSLRs has been a solved problem for decades. In any case, all of these advantages can be obtained with a DSLR too when it's in mirror lock-up mode.

> The advantage of no having vibration or rolling shutter or silent operation, will eventually drive people to mirrorless systems.

Those are mostly advantages of shutterless systems (which DSLRs can be and some have been, though sensor quality issues made them niche and actually mitigated some of the advantages; shutterless cameras historically have still had rolling shutter effects, especially at "shutter speeds" higher than those current DSLR mechanical shutters operate at, which is why those shutter speeds are used), except the vibration one is affected by both mirror and shutter (though DSLRs already have mirror lock-in to address the mirror impact.) Also, mirrorless has battery impacts compared to DSLR.

So what this says to me is that, if the sensor is really qualitatively good enough to allow this without the problems shutterless cameras have faced before, Sony has a sensor technology lead that will give them a better market position. But assuming everyone else catches up on sensors, DSLRs aren't what is in trouble, its mechanical shutters that are doomed.

> I'd personally rather have an optical viewfinder than all of those features, impressive as they are.

Why? OVF doesn't show you what your picture is going to look like. You have to move from the viewfinder to look at the LCD to check exposure then go back to the viewfinder, repeatedly.

EVF shows you exactly what your picture going to look like.

>Why?

Uses less battery and works much better in low light.

>You have to move from the viewfinder to look at the LCD to check exposure then go back to the viewfinder, repeatedly.

If I want to check the histogram then I shoot with the mirror locked up, but modern DSLRs have very reliable autoexposure systems, in my experience at least.

>EVF shows you exactly what your picture going to look like.

It shows you what it will look like on a small screen with low dynamic range. You have to look at the histogram to see if you're losing shadow/highlight information.

> It shows you what it will look like on a small screen with low dynamic range. You have to look at the histogram to see if you're losing shadow/highlight information.

EVF shows me the histogram (can toggle it on and off without moving my eye).

That's cool. However, there's no fundamental reason why a DSLR viewfinder couldn't show a histogram too. It's not an important feature for me personally, but YMMV.

> However, there's no fundamental reason why a DSLR viewfinder couldn't show a histogram too.

You'd need to have to reduce the optical image size to make room for an LCD display, have a HUD to overlay a digital image over the OVF optical image, or have another moving mirror and toggle between EVF and OVF to do that on a DSLR.

Which is to stay that an in-viewfinder histogram is possible but not easy for a DSLR.

Yeah, I was assuming it would be accomplished via a HUD. The technology is already used in other consumer products:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See-through_display

"Small scale see-though LCDs have been commercially available for some time."

And available in which cameras? Not even sure what you are arguing here...

Just that this feature could be added to DSLRs, so it's not inherently an advantage of mirrorless cameras. Of course if you already have an EVF there is no additional cost associated with providing the histogram overlay. But if everyone starts demanding in-viewfinder histograms, DSLR manufacturers could add that feature.

>You have to look at the histogram to see if you're losing shadow/highlight information.

Sure...which you only get on an LCD. IMO the only dealbreakers with EVFs are refresh rate, battery consumption and color gamut. If I were a camera maker, I would not be banking on any of those not being solved problems in the next five years.

I think it's pretty optimistic to think that the battery life issues will be solved in the next five years. It doesn't look like we're going to be getting significantly more energy dense batteries or lower energy display technologies in that timeframe. (Not in consumer products, anyway.)

On the launch live stream, one of the commentators said that he used the a9 all day, took 2,200 pictures with autofocus, and still had 40% battery life remaining -- This is approaching 'solved' for the majority of camera users. I've got an older mirrorless with a subpar battery so I'm definitely sympathetic to the issues but anything over a few thousand pictures is good enough.

I don't think battery use is a real important issue simply because the cost of batteries is so low. I was able to buy two extras for my a6000 for about $19.

> OVF doesn't show you what your picture is going to look like.

It's more accurate in many respects, and lower latency, than current EVFs.

> EVF shows you exactly what your picture going to look like.

An idealized EVF with perfect quality and a resolution equal to that of the sensor would do that, sure.

But real EVFs don't.

Name one aspect in which OVFs are more accurate. Many of them are not even exactly 100% of the sensor image, and they do not give any preview of what the actual image is going to be. EVFs give a pretty good perception of the image. They especially give you a good preview of the exposure. With the latest generation of EVFs, as this Sony camera has, their lag is actually lower than the one of an optical viewfinder. The OVF by itself has of course no lag, but when you press the shutter, the mirror has to swing away before you can take a picture. A mirrorless camera can instantly capture a picture, effectively having the smaller time differential between the VF and the picture taken.

This camera, priced at $4500 _and_ too large to fit in a trouser pocket, is irrelevant for >>99% of photography, but I think that's irrelevant. I doubt Sony plans to sell millions of them each month.

OP was claiming that mirrored cameras were now obsolete.

I read OPs comment as "100% certain on the way out", not as "now obsolete".

That mechanical mirror is fairly expensive to build and imposes some restrictions on lens design (the back of the lens can't move too close to the sensor), and both will go up over time (the mirror hardware will get more expensive because fewer and fewer mirrored cameras are sold, and larger sensors require larger mirrors)

As far as I can tell (corrections welcome), the main advantages of a mirror are battery life and behavior in low light conditions (it isn't easy to rapidly update a LCD viewfinder in low light conditions, and that viewfinder may be too bright). Battery life becomes less of an issue with better battery technology. That leaves low light photography. I don't think that, over time, will be sufficient to keep a market for such cameras.

>That mechanical mirror is fairly expensive to build

Hmm, is it though? I don't have any data on that, but I wouldn't necessarily assume that a relatively simple mechanism of that sort is expensive to manufacture when cheap labour is available. I suspect that the cost of the mirror mechanism is a tiny fraction of the overall cost of making a high end DSLR.

>imposes some restrictions on lens design

For sure, but the de facto biggest lens systems are for DSLRs. Given the usability of old lenses (on Nikons at least), that's not going to change for a very long time. The restrictions on lens design have not proven to be a problem in practice.

Also, there are reasons to use retrofocus designs other than the presence of the mirror. Ultrawides with non-retrofocus designs have serious vignetting issues. I have a 75mm Schneider Super-Angulon that I use with an old 4x5, for example, and the corners can be around 1.5 stop darker than the center. The problem is bad enough that they make dedicated filters to compensate: https://www.schneideroptics.com/ecommerce/CatalogSubCategory...

Also an interesting quote from https://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/photography/hands-revie...

>If there’s a downside to non-retrofocus lenses, it would have to be vignetting, which depending on the lens, can be 1 to 2 stops of light falloff toward the corners of the frame. When coupled to digital cameras, these issues can become exaggerated because, ideally, light shouldn’t strike the sensor at angles greater than 90° [sic], which is the case when it comes to non-retrofocus lenses.

So you might find that mirrorless cameras end up with similar wide angle lens designs to DSLRs.

While physical look and feel and a "nice" interaction experience in general may be important for 80% of camera buyers: The cameras that shoot 80% of the photos you see every day are built to different criteria.

Their DSLRs can all function in mirror lock up mode. It's straightforward to delete the viewfinder and have a comparable product.

Or keep the viewfinder and have a strictly superior product.

Also more complex and with more things that can go wrong due to mechanical failure

And heavier, larger and more expensive to manufacture.

Sure, it's more expensive in both initial and operational cost and provides a strict superset of the functionality. This is a fairly common description of what distinguishes higher-end professional products from lower-level and consumer products.

Until digital viewfinders on camera are indistinguishable in quality (both accuracy and latency), there will be a qualitative advantage to having a through-the-lens optical viewfinders available (even if there are circumstances where it remains advantageous to disable it), which means SLR with lockup mode is going to beat mirrorless when that matters.

Eventually, sure, the viewfinder gap will narrow.

The latest generation EVFs are superior in most aspects. For example the new Sony does not have a viewfinder blackout like DSLRs have.

Sony uses a mirrorless specific format with the lens mount closer to the focal plane than would be possible with a DSLR. This has some nice benefits for the optical design; you're removing a constraint that happens to be particularly painful for image quality.

For many decades this was the big advantage of rangefinders such as the Leica M.

For Canon or Nikon to do the same it would mean re-releasing their entire line (or duplicating it). Canon kind of doing this with their EOS-M series but they only have a few low-end lenses available. Lenses product cycles are measured in decades, so this is a massive undertaking.

Sony was never successful in the DSLR business and they have a much smaller library of lenses so it makes sense that they are abandoning it completely.

I don't know, - I mean the mirror is bulky and a moving part that can break, but the OVF will be better than EVF in many scenarios.

Cameras with a mirror can shoot with an electronic shutter when needed, but will usually need to do so in "live view" on the rear display - i.e. there is no EVF. Cameras without mirror on the other hand can't use an optical viewfinder, but has an EVF.

Obviously the shutter and fps features of this particular camera are impressive and beats most DSLrs, but there is nothing inherent about DSLr's vs mirrorless that prevents all cameras of both kinds to pull this off soon.

I think the size of mirrorless cameras is a cool feature when you slap on a 35/2.8 on it or similar, so you benefit from the reduced size. Throw on a normal 24-70 zoom lens or similar, and the size difference between a DSLr and a mirrorless is gone.

> WITHOUT DISTORTION FROM ROLLING SHUTTER

Where do you read this? I see no mention of a global shutter.

Rolling shutter is a misleading name. It is an attribute of the sensor, not of any mechanical shutter in front of it. It maybe should have been called rolling read-out. The CMOS image sensor is read out, and reset, line by line --- instead of an image being taken by the whole sensor at once (as in a global-shutter sensor). Therefore the image taken by line 2 is a moment later than the image taken by line 1, and so forth.

Global shutter sensors are rare. They don't really cost a lot more, but historically they lose two or more f-stops of exposure latitude and light sensitivity. This is because each photodiode in the sensor is crammed with a bit more circuitry, to store the charge until it is read out, so that a consistent image can be frozen all at once.

Now all Sony has to do is design a real ruggerized body to go with it.

A Canon 5D mk3 or mk4 can withstand a 6 feet fall (I've been through this several times). A Canon 1DX can be thrown in sand, dust and kicked like a soccer ball and still work. A Sony mirrorless camera won't work after mild rain or slight fall.

I wish cell phone cameras would pick up on-sensor phase detection autofocus. It's the one thing that really holds them back. Contrast detection is just too slow!

They do. iPhones have used them since iPhone 6 and I think its common among other manufacturers as well in the high-end range of smartphones. But number of AF points it's still small and there are limitations due to the sizes of the sensors.

That has been available for several years. iPhones 6 and above (for example) include "focus pixels", which is Apple-speak for PDAF.

http://www.dailytech.com/iPhone+6s+Focus+Pixels+Are+Already+...

When I bought my Sony in 2012, it felt obvious to me that cameras with mirrors are a dead end.

Don't Canon and Nikon make pretty good mirrorless cameras too?

Not really. Canon mirrorless is ok, I suppose, but very much a "also-ran" and "too little, too late" in the very competitive market. Nikon mirrorless are just not very good (too small sensor for a start..)

Canon's EF-m lenses are a fraction of the cost of Sony's. Sony have been pushing price points for a while to make sure they are at the top of the range, just slightly below boutique manufacturers. Meanwhile canon has a lot of experience building to a price point ... Interesting to see they chose to go down that route with their mirrorless system.

I have a Nikon 1 and I'm pretty satisfied with it. Key features for me were small package size, low weight and fast shooting (10/20fps with phase-detection autofocus). My use-case is being able to take some decent bike-action pictures with a camera that easily fits in a backpack. For other usecases the offerings from the other brands might be a better fit.

Canon have four mirrorless cameras with APS-C sensors (the M10, M6, M5, and M3). Canon don't have a full-frame mirrorless camera.

Nikon's mirrorless range is the Nikon 1, with 3 cameras which all have sensors well below APS-C spec.

So yes, they both make mirrorless, but neither makes a full-frame mirrorless.

[Edit: corrected the reference for the M6, which I initially referred to as having a sub-APS-C sensor. HT to ianburrell for the correction).

The EOS M6 has an APS-C sensor. In fact, it has the same sensor as M5.

My apologies, you're quite correct. I must have misread the specs - I'll edit the post to reflect that. Thanks for the correction!

They came out with pretty gimped and disappointing products (sorry if someone's feeling offended) because they are too afraid of having their DSLR market segment disrupted by a decent mirrorless.

It really feels like a half-hearted effort, more to tick the "Mirrorless" checkbox in their product offering than to produce something compelling.

I'm not a huge fan of Sony, but I respect quality of this product and the effort they put in it despite having a DLSR line as well.

Not really. Olympus, Panasonic, Fuji and Sony have been good in this space. Canon and Nikon have been too afraid of cannibalizing their DSLR's to produce decent mirrorless cameras.

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