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Comment by wklauss | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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