Imagine if Apple and Google made full frame cameras.
Currently we have great hardware with terrible software and vice-versa.
A Sony full frame sensor, Zeiss glass, with an A series chip and good software to make it shine.
Currently we have great hardware with terrible software and vice-versa.
A Sony full frame sensor, Zeiss glass, with an A series chip and good software to make it shine.
I did – briefly – and am still recoiling from the horror.
> Currently we have great hardware with terrible software and vice-versa.
The software on even older DSLRs isn't terrible. It does the job it was intended to do quite well. It is learn-able, and it doesn't change its behaviour with an OTA-update you can't easily prevent.
More thought has gone into the UI design of even the earliest, rushed-to-market DSLR firmwares than some of the UI changes that Apple and Google have inflicted on their victims.
Please explain.
> The software on even older DSLRs isn't terrible.
Oh yes it is. Like salt on a fresh wound.
> It does the job it was intended to do quite well. It is learn-able, and it doesn't change its behaviour with an OTA-update you can't easily prevent.
Its menus are completely inscrutable. But I'm not even talking about usability. One can learn anything eventually, given enough willpower.
I'm imagining a processor like the one on the iPhone/iPad Pro acting on all those pixels. And a true software platform running on top of it.
The beauty of a DSLR is that you turn it on, and it's ready to go. Take pictures in raw and process them when you get home. If you want to adjust the exposure and what not, you can; if you do that a lot, you can get the higher model cameras with more dials, and customizable buttons so you don't have to go through menus as much.
And I envy the amount of processing that goes on when you press the button. From turning a noisy mess from a fingernail size sensor into pretty good JPGs to auto choosing the best photo from crazy fast burst mode, even before you press the button!
And audio/video, oh boy. Hyper slow motion 4k, noise canceling…
Imagine what Apple/Google could do with something the size and weight of a DSLR and 3k US$ budget.
Apple/Google would add too many features, focus on wifi connectivity, and generally ruin the one amazing thing about cameras–the ability to turn them on and immediately take photos, no fuss. No waiting for software updates, or alerts, or any of the million other things that do not belong in a camera.
Not bad.
The 1DX Mark II (admittedly a very expensive pro camera) goes from physically switched off to first shot in 0.8 seconds, and from standby to image capture with full autofocus in 0.085 seconds: https://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/canon-1dx-ii/canon-1d...
My D750 can go from OFF -> ON -> Shutter press -> focus -> picture taken in cca 0.5s in normal light conditions. There are so many moments that I managed to capture only because of this speed, they would be gone in those 3s.
Not even going into "details" like having 5x mechanical zoom on it (24-120mm), I can snap distant scene in 1s in above scenario. And I do snap those scenes quite often.
I love my iPhone and I'm happy to go to bat for Apple when I agree with them, but the Camera app on iOS is painfully slow compared to a Canon DSLR. The Canon can wake from sleep and take a photo in the tiniest fraction of a second.
I’d rather have my Nikon, but I wouldn’t be in troubled if I needed a quick shot and only had my iPhone.
Where the iPhone wins is when it’s already in my hands.
Also, you don't even need to. You can swipe from the bottom and pick the camera app from control center.
It's probably 1.5/2s from screen off to photo taken
Shutter response time on my Canon bodies is adjustable between slow and fast. Respectively 55 and 36 milliseconds.
I doubt any phone can even wake from sleep in that time.
Not parent, but FF-lust is objectively bizarre.
Read this (now very old) rant on the subject [1]
Then consider advances in optics, CAD, sensors, and then marvel at why some people are desperate for an arbitrary sensor size that plucked out of the air more than a hundred years ago.
[1] http://www.digitalsecrets.net/secrets/FullFrameWars.html
Nothing spatial in 35mm, it’s just that we have a ton of amazing glass made and bought to go with it.
And even though there are diminishing returns, quality wise, the more photons the better.
I’m sure they could make APS-C, Micro 4/3, 4x5”, to please everyone. I wouldn’t complain :)
I think a lot of professionals and prosumers who are still buying interchangeable lens cameras don’t care. Folks generally shoot in RAW and edit their photos on a PC with Photoshop and Lightroom, which affords people much more control and is much more powerful than whatever is in an iPad.
The only photographers shooting JPEGs are sports and news photographers, and they have specialized use cases. That’s why the pro cameras (1DX2 and D5) come with Gigabit Ethernet and auto-upload to an FTP server through that.
People want the pre-capture sequence to be reliable and easy to use (so lots of buttons and dials) and in general once the photo is captured and saved, they don’t care and don’t want the camera involved any more.
Of course, if people really want to upload to Instagram immediately, most cameras nowadays come with Wifi so they can just transfer photos to a smartphone and do whatever they need to do there.
An iPad Pro has one heck of a CPU/GPU, rivaling high end laptops, where most edits are made.
Having something like that (and custom silicon, perhaps) dedicated to pro photo/video/audio is something we haven’t seen.
Even if the camera can do more post-processing, I am not sure I want it to. I would rather the camera do less after exposure is complete, so I can get more control over it while editing.
Leica T series is probably pretty close to what they would come up with tho. Solid block of metal, and nothing but screen on the back.
But they can make great physical buttons. That last iPhone home button was one of the best in the industry.
I bet Jony Ive and Phil Schiller love Leicas
I'm pretty sure that the major difference between a pro and a consumer camera is the amount of easily accessible buttons and knobs.
Precisely this. After 10K shots on a Canon 1200D, I upgraded to an 80D specifically to have access to the top controls to quickly change settings while shooting. You can remap a lot of the 1200D's controls in the "Expert Feature"/customizations section, but the 80D's extra ergonomics are a true joy. The camera is molded to my hands and comfortable to wield for hours at a time.
I can't say the same for the smartphones I shoot with. My Blackberry KeyOne's camera has fully manual controls (even the focus distance can be manually set!), but the "slide your finger to control settings" UI sometimes feels like the "Reddit designs volume control" experiment from a few years ago. I empathize with the Java programmers, but it's extremely frustrating to tell the smartphone what kind of picture I want. It should go without saying that it's equally frustrating to be unable to hold the slab phone adequately still.
Reading people's passionate hatred for real cameras makes it quite clear that they aren't the target audience for a simple mid-range DSLR, let alone monsters like the 1D or Nikon D5.
I have never understood why giants like Cannon and Nikon can't match feature set, ease of use etc from smartphones. In many ways this is playing out like it did with Kodak where they set on their traditional things for so long that there was ultimately no point of return.
That way you get to keep lens sizes very small, but your effective sensor size is quite large, and you can do a lot of other cool computational photography tricks with multiple sensors.
I think this is Stockholm syndrome speaking. Most photographers have no problems installing apps and upgrading their phones. Yet ask them to set a timer, change focus/metering point and it's a nightmare. Let's not even talk about Canon's camera control/export app, whatever it's called. Software is hard.
I deal with photographers in their 50s/60s weakly. They all love their phones and hate the menu screen on their Canon/Nikon/Sony. You set it up the way you like it and hope to never need to touch it again.
Time how long it takes you to find and change the Exif copywrite on your photos, daylight saving, or how to save JPGs in one card and RAWs in another. It’s a nightmare.
https://www.ephotozine.com/articles/canon-eos-1d-x-mark-ii-v...
This might blow your mind, but professionally-oriented cameras all have dedicated buttons to toggle metering modes without looking away from the viewfinder.
In comparison, I was trying to set bracketed exposure on my RX100 yesterday, and I still haven't managed to find the feature.
I can operate my Nikons blind folded and single handed. Canons are not my cup of tea, but I can get by if needed to. Sonys, on the other hand, have amazing sensors and great glass, yet bury such important features under menus requiring pressing the Fn button while staring at the LCD, or something like it.
What's the issue, then? The Nikon shooting interface obviously works well for you, and I think that is far more important and used than changing daylight savings settings.
> Time how long it takes you to find and change the Exif copywrite on your photos, daylight saving, or how to save JPGs in one card and RAWs in another. It’s a nightmare.
I don't know enough about Nikon or Sony, but I use Canon and I know where all those settings are. Even if you want to search the web to find where they are, I don't think it is a big deal: most of those settings you listed I change once or twice a year.
In any case, I think it is better than the settings app on my iPhone, where the General sub-menu contains everything from controlling Background App Refresh (Why not in individual app sub-menus?) to enabling iTunes Wi-Fi Sync (there is an iTunes and App Store sub-menu too).
For instance, I can't imagine trying to cram the Lightroom UI into a 4" screen on the back of my camera is a good experience, especially when I have a 30" 4K screen at home to edit on. To me, the current Lightroom for iOS is nowhere near as usable as the desktop version, and still quite a bit slower.
What they already do in smartphones, but better. Almost guarantee you’ll never miss a shot (no blinks, blur, bad exposure), better signal processing, etc
> I can't imagine trying to cram the Lightroom UI into a 4" screen
Me neither. I’m not proposing that in the slightest
OK, but that seems to be turning the camera into a point-and-shoot and I am not sure most of what is left of the ILC market wants that (or maybe it is just me). For me, I would ultimately want to control things like exposure, shutter opening, etc... myself (who is to say a "bad" over/under-exposed photo or some blur won't make for a better photo?).
I think people who want a point-and-shoot like experience are by-and-large are happy with smartphone cameras today (especially with advanced processing like Android's Night Sight), and they are not going to carry around a bulky ILC just to take photos.
In any case, I think Zeiss is trying to do something similar to what you want with the ZX1, and I will be interested to see how large that market is.
Not at all.
>For me, I would ultimately want to control things like exposure, shutter opening, etc... myself (who is to say a "bad" over/under-exposed photo or some blur won't make for a better photo?).
100% agreed. But if instead of “shit, I missed this shot” I could have 3 taken before I even pressed the shutter, and one of them is perfect, I'd take it in a blink. Besides all the pie in the sky stuff that I imagine could be done as well.
>I think people who want a point-and-shoot like experience are by-and-large are happy with smartphone cameras today (especially with advanced processing like Android's Night Sight), and they are not going to carry around a bulky ILC just to take photos.
You're probably right. I don't know if it's a viable market, but one can dream.
Sounds like what you might want is a 8K video camera with a ring buffer that gets flushed to storage whenever you press the shutter button :p
You might want to avoid making arbitrary assumptions about anonymous debaters, who may just as well be far more experienced than you, especially when said experience is not particularly relevant to the discussion of easy operation.
It's not interesting to know if someone can efficiently navigate an instrument after 25 years of experience with it. At that point, quirky UX ends up entirely concealed by muscle memory, and such person ends up being a poor source of input for UX matters.
>…who may just as well be far more experienced than you
I wasn’t referring to myself. But to photographers in their 50/60s.
> It's not interesting to know if someone can efficiently navigate an instrument after 25 years of experience with it. At that point, quirky UX ends up entirely concealed by muscle memory, and such person ends up being a poor source of input for UX matters.
Agreed. I made the same point a few comments above.
I can't tell how many years of experience someone has from a profile picture. Can you?
> I wasn’t referring to myself. But to photographers in their 50/60s.
You worded it such that it referred to yourself. You can't argue using other people's experience.
Get into the enthusiast / prosumer models and there's more buttons for a reason. I want to change metering on my 5D4? I press the metering hard button on the top of the camera.
About the rest, I've never timed it because I've never needed to do it. Lightroom does most for me, and even the card thing would be roughly a one-time thing. I don't know what a comparison between a 6" touch display on a phone and a 2" non-touch display on a camera is supposed to show, but the camera menu isn't that hard: press menu, scroll to the appropriate section, select menu item and change what you need. It's pretty much the same on phones as well.
The reason people dislike menus is that there's a lot of things to control. It's nice without it, right until you need to tweak something.
Canon's smartphone app is quite terrible (although this is a slam at smartphone UX, not camera UX), but I can't really see smartphone apps for cameras as anything other than a useless gimmick.
However, that app has no relation to how it is to use a modern camera. Comparing the UI's of iOS, Sony's Android camera app, Sony's A6000 and Canon mirrorless/dslr, Canon's modern mirrorless UX is by far the best. Easiest to use, prettiest, etc.
For everything an iPhone can do, Canon works exactly the same, but then Canon also does so much more. Focus point is by touch screen, and it's much more responsive than my phone. It also seems much smarter with regards to tracking. Important settings are in the HUD, rest in an quick menu one touch away.
All of this is of course subjective and anecdotal, but I would by quite saddened to end up with smartphone-d cameras. I do not see it making any positive improvement.
I find computational photography incredibly exiting, but it's mostly taking place in smartphone space, with tiny sensors and lenses. Imagine what we could do with great glass and a huge honking sensor.
You think that highly of smartphone makers?
Would you want them to re-make the aircraft cockpit too?
Yes, please. And a kickass processor with crazy fast memory to go along with it.
>and physical controls honed over decades and used by professional photographers in all kinds of scenarios?
Not at all. We love knobs, rings and wheels with great distinguishable tactile feeling.
A more intuitive settings menu would be a side benefit.
Truly revolutionary would be to able to write first class software to a mature capable OS.
What could the state of the art in demosaic, noise, latitude, color accuracy be with that kind of speed and tools?
Mine is a supercomputer that fits my pocket with battery that lasts all day.
I trust them to make something that can be at least 10X thicker and heavier to performer comparably.
Last all day means nothing in the context of what you brought up.
I don't follow Android's ecosystem much, but battery usage on iOS is pretty restricted and very much under control. It can be done.
Do you shoot JPEGs exclusively? I shoot RAW, so the only thing I care about post image capture is being able to preview my photos, show a histogram, zoom in to check for focus accuracy and delete images. Everything else I can do on my desktop, which will always be much more capable than whatever I can put on-device.
But even RAW is not as “unbaked” as you might imagine. Specially in higher ISO
In other words, what improvements do you think camera manufacturers can add to the post-capture RAW workflow if we had a faster processor/better software?
(Of course, in pre-capture, there is always room for more improvements to metering and autofocus, but camera manufacturers know this and are constantly making adjustments and improvements each generation.)
And of course, all the stuff during capture you mentioned could be a lot better too.
Picture being a camera engineer and suddenly have 10X more speed and a decent platform to work with. 32bit multiple exposure RAW in a single click, who knows.
Yeah, I get that, but I don't think there is an improvement here by sticking a modern smartphone CPU and OS into a camera.
Making improvements to those metrics ultimately require newer sensors with lower read noise and better on-chip ADCs. The camera manufacturers can't do 24-bit RAWs @ 20fps when the sensor only outputs 12-bits @ 10 fps.
If we are doing multiple exposures, then as you know, cameras already have exposure bracketing, and I can do the rest in my PC.
Which big pocket tech companies could do :)
>If we are doing multiple exposures, then as you know, cameras already have exposure bracketing, and I can do the rest in my PC.
Sure, but we have gyroscopes, accelerometers, electronic shutters and 2Ghz processors on this dream device of mine. Surely we can do better than using a tripod, exposing entire scenes multiple times and try to align and blend them in the computer hours later.