Camera sales are falling sharply
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We paid $3500 for the privilege with no regrets (so far). I forgot pictures can look so good: high resolution, pleasing background blur, and most important it's just a camera. It doesn't have reddit, or HN, or email, or pinterest. It sits about the house where we can grab it quickly. It goes in the day pack on hikes. It blows every other webcam out of the water.
And it has smarts to compete with our current-gen iPhones, which we increasingly tuck away to combat distraction. Fast autofocus and face-recognition are lifesavers and often outperform the phones. It's like photography on easy mode. Which it should be considering the sticker price.
I get that the best camera is the one you have with you. But we carry our phones less and our camera more. It's silly and sad that we can't exercise more self-control. But from our privileged perspective, a dedicated camera was a great investment in our quality of life.
But my photographer friend was right - mirrorless are better for amateurs and have one huge benefit: they can record video much more easily since they can focus and record at the same time.
Switching manufacturers is a different beast however and you'll likely be limited to manual focus and a gimbal/in-sensor for stabilization.
About once a year, I consider moving to Fuji. Or to some other larger format mirrorless. But, the size and weight penalty just isn't worth it.
All that said, my wife's old Canon S90 compact is near the end of life. I thought about buying her a replacement, but I may just splurge on an iPhone XS instead.
On my last trip I think the weight/size of my dlsr equipment was cut in 1/3 with the same focal range.
(the picture in this article is comparison of camera/lens size..)
https://www.wildernessshots.com/why-you-dont-need-full-frame...
Heck, even the "large" 12-40mm F2.8 Pro lens on my primary body is about the same size as a mediocre kit lens on a full-frame SLR.
Of course, because they're full-frame cameras, the glass is still big, so you don't get the hyper-compact size of a micro-4/3 body+lens, but it's still waaay smaller than, say, a 5D + a lens.
I believe the equivalent APS-C Fuji 23mm f/2 is around 200g/0.45lbs.
Of course, with the Summicron you give up such new-fangled innovations as, say, autofocus.
The glass for my Sony A7ii is significantly larger than (most) lenses I had for my Olympus m4/3 body. The exception is the main prime on both systems -- I have the Sony 50mm/1.8, which is about the same size as the Panasonic/Leica 25mm/1.4 that filled the same role on my Olympus.
One is that many manufacturers haven't taken advantage of how mirrorless changes lens design yet (the shorter flange distance enables a lot of design space), so you're still carrying a lens designed for a DSLR, but with a lot of hollow space between the back element and the mount. This is especially obvious with third-party lenses; e.g. it's well understood that a lot of Sigma lenses for Sony FE are functionally just their DSLR lenses with a built-in adapter.
The other reason why you don't see a big weight advantage with mirrorless lenses is that, where they are designed for mirrorless specifically, they tend to aim for "better" rather than "lighter. Lenses like the Canon 85mm f/1.2, the 50mm f/1.2, and the 28-70 f/2.0 are perfect examples of this.
However, lenses designed to take advantage of mirrorless can be smaller and lighter, when they have the same design goals — e.g. the latest (DSRL) Canon EF 24-105L f/4 weighs 795g vs the (Mirrorless) RF 24-105L f/4's 694g.
The advantage of a mirror is that capturing the right instant is much easier when you're photographing subjects that aren't posing, such as children. You want to get that facial expression just right! Not a few hundreths of a second later.
However, assuming I'm taking photos with anything besides my smartphone (which I probably use a greater and greater percentage of the time), it's going to be my Fujifilm mirrorless camera. I think if I were starting over, I'd just go with mirrorless and just forgo the specialized cases that the DSLR and its lenses are better for.
Also, the selfie camera on your phone is probably MUCH lower quality than the main one on the back. Have someone else take your picture instead if you have the option.
But almost any dedicated camera that isn't down in the complete crap price range will blow a cell phone out of the water, for two major reasons. First, optical zoom, the number one thing I miss with my cell phone. Second, it is at least somewhat more likely that your "12MP camera" really is 12 MP with your real camera, whereas it's fairly likely you "12MP" cell phone is a lie [1].
This is even in the $150/200 range, long before we get to the ability to change lenses or all those other pro features. My ~$200 camera from 10+ years ago still takes better pictures than my cell phone, because even though my cell phone nominally beats it on megapixels, my camera actually uses all of its pixels to obtain real information from the scene, instead of being a bullet-point feature on a device that isn't even primarily a camera.
So, to anyone reading this, if this sounds interesting, you don't even have to go to the big, expensive stuff; my kid literally bought a camera at a garage sale for $5 that also takes better pictures than my cell because it had like 8x optical zoom. It cost me more to find a functional battery than the camera itself did. It's not hard or expensive.
[1]: Test: Take a picture in broad daylight, the best possible lighting conditions. Move the picture to your computer. Zoom in until you can see all the pixels clearly. Can you see sharp edges, or do you see a whole bunch of multi-pixel blobs of the sameish color, even around sharp edges? If the latter, your "pixel count" is a lie; it doesn't actually have that much resolving power.
Camera phones will try to re-sharpen the image, but some information is always lost. It's especially obvious looking at things with fine detail and sharp edges, like tree leaves against a bright sky.
I tend to buy last year's midgrade phone because I don't really need the latest and greatest. Maybe the top end really does take the full photos they claim, but that still leaves a lot of cell phones that are lying.
Most of the recent cell phones take perfectly adequate pictures, considering the amazing disadvantages they are laboring under. It's just that if you downsample the pictures to 2 or 4MP, you're basically losing no information.
(There are similar effects with video. The aforementioned 10+ year-old camera I had suffers from this as well. It has a "720P" and a "1080P" video mode, but based on my experimentation, both modes get real video out at about 400-500 "real" lines of vertical quality. I can squeeze either video's source down to that size and when I compare the full screen result to the original, I can find no difference whatsoever. I imagine more modern real cameras probably do a better job here; this thing is pretty old now, obviously.)
I suspect this is probably why you're seeing the sales numbers drop too. The big camera makers have been relying on the cheap units to bring in the money. They're transitioning now to relying on expensive, high end units instead. It's a much smaller addressable market though.
At some point I think it will be largely a professional thing. Eventually the computational photography will look good enough to make up for the space constraints of a phones' lens. But the downside will be that any photo taken with your phone will look kind of samey and be poor at getting fine detail. And having your own camera with manual control options will let people feel more in control of what they're doing.
Do iPhone photos look better when zoomed in? Of course not, but they do look better at "normal" scale, which is what counts IMO. And of course this only applies when you shoot "standard" scenes, the DSLR (with lenses) gives you ability to shoot things that the iPhone just can't.
Am I ditching my DSLR? Of course not, but that's only because I'm willing to invest effort in actually taking great photos, which isn't trivial (to me) and is much harder with the iPhone.
Maybe true, but I pretty much only post photos on instagram (using a 5 year old mirrorless camera I found for less than a new good smartphone), and non-experts consistently ask me how I am able to get such high picture quality. So non-photographers can detect the difference between modern smartphones and 5 year old mirrorless tech.
All of the tricks used in a smartphone could be used in a real camera. If they were, then real cameras will always have many stops of dynamic range advantage.
The Revenant would have been impossible to shoot even 10 years ago, the demands on the sensor or film would have been too great. This means the story couldn't be told at all! So the technology actually enables people to take photos that would have been otherwise impossible.
I'm also suspicious that the second shift is "done". I suspect the technology will always be pushed further at the high end of the camera technology market which will trickle down. Similarly, I suspect the software innovations used by Google / Apple will trickle down into the software of dedicated cameras, which will further widen the quality gap between the formats.
Quality isn't all about reproduction, it is also about creative possibilities. Right now, none of the smartphones can take a photo of a moving subject in low light. They depend on averaging frames which leads to subject blur. This isn't a minor detail, it's the difference between a photo and no photo.
I love my phone camera (Pixel 1) but if I want to take professional quality pictures I pull out my E-M10.
I got a $500 Nikon DSLR about 4 years ago and came to the same conclusion. I usually set it to auto, and I'm astounded by the photo quality that comes out. Occasionally, I'll adjust exposure or focus manually, but for outdoors, auto "just works".
Sometimes I think I should have bought a mirrorless instead, but so long as my Nikon works and I'm satisfied with its quality, I'll keep using it.
The lens is wide like a smartphone so the subject always fits in the frame. And it has enough resolution to crop later. But it's not so wide that it warps the image. Straight lines look straight. I take 15-20 pics/day and charge it once a month. It's light and small so I can shoot one-handed (very useful with pets and children).
One day I'll buy a telephoto lens with better reach. But the 24m is such a great "around-the-home" package. It will be my default for the foreseeable future.
*EF lenses, can't comment on Canon EF-S personally.
For almost a year without my DSLR, most of my photos were shot using my LG G6 phone. It was okay and I insisted feeling it was good enough.
It was last Christmas when I was able to borrow a Canon 6Dmk1 paired with a good lens. Boy, I was in for a treat again; the sensor, fast focus, bokeh and low light performance all reminded me how far I've forgotten the joy of getting better pictures using a better camera. Got myself a 77d+24mm soon after to satisfy the cravings.
There is no question that they beat the pants off a Toyota Corolla.[1] But most us us just want to drop our kids off at school and pick up groceries.
And you know what? A Corolla is actually a pretty good car. And nobody[2] really cares about their daily driver’s 0-60 time or whether it set a new record at Nürburgring.
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[1] Substitute your favourite boring daily driver.
[2] To paraphrase Joel Spolsky, by “nobody,” we mean “Fewer than 10,000,000 people.”
Still I’d like to see E-mount lenses get cheap for selfish reasons.
Those Sonys are really nice though. I just bought a new Fuji body and a 16mm f/1.4 macro. It's unreal what new mirrorless bodies + high-end lenses can do these days.
But I gotta say, the Fuji X bodies are beautiful, both in handling and aesthetics. I played with a friend's X-T3. I don't think I've ever enjoyed using a camera more. My Panasonics are fantastic from compactness/features/quality/lightweight standpoints, but Panasonic ergonomics and handling is pretty, uh, "workmanlike".
I also love the Fuji body design. Hilariously, I got the Fuji system as a travel-friendly replacement to my bulky 5D3 setup, and while there are some smaller lenses that make it quite portable, I find that I most often grab the 16mm f/1.4. This lens makes the setup feel only slightly smaller than the dslr! I’ll probably sell one kit or the other and buy an rx100 V for travel. (I rented the rx100 IV for a trip to Peru a few years back and was really impressed).
Every automobile on the road does almost exactly the same thing, with a few variations in details like cargo capacity and creature comforts.
But cameras vs. phones is a different situation. I've not heard of a phone that can do 100x optical zoom, nor remotely the kind of high quality, high resolution imaging that a modern digital camera is capable of.
If you hire an Uber, you don't care whether it's a '96 Corolla or a Hummer or anything else; it's going to crawl through traffic and get you from point A to point B in almost an identical fashion.
If you hire a photog for an event such as a wedding, you'd expect them to bring some pretty high end equipment and provide us with a hefty thumb drive or two with dozens if not hundreds of gigs of pictures that are far beyond what even the best phone can achieve.
You make the point that all cars 'on the road' do the same thing. Then you take a photography example that's not equivelent to a standard 'road' journey.
A wedding would be far more like taking a normal car to an F1 race. In such a case an F1 car excels in that particular form of driving in a narrow set of circumstances, and yet you still could technically take it on a road if it were legal to do so.
In a similar vein, 'supercar' cameras are highly specialised tools requiring significant support to get the most of them - large lenses, powerful computers and skilled RAW conversion. Not entirely dissimilar to specialist needs an F1 car might have.
So you can certainly take a 'supercar' camera as your daily driver but you'll face a ton of hassles and extra work as a result.
“Every camera does almost exactly the same thing, with a few variations in details like optical vs. digital zoom capabilities and memory space.”
“When you’re going about you’re daily life and need to take a picture, you don’t care if it’s an iPhone camera, an Android camera, or a fancy DSLR; all of them will capture the photo nearly the same, aside from minor differences which often require a professional to discern.“
“If you show up to drive around a race track, you’ll be expected to bring a high end car with... [you get the point]”
However, a sizable minority of photographers can use the extra features of a dedicated SLR camera with telephoto or microphoto lens. There's plenty of great photography that simply can't happen, or won't happen with nearly the quality, by using a smartphone.
That's not to say that smartphone cameras are bad; they're excellent today. I have always wanted to get a modern digital SLR, but now I'm thinking a high end phone is sufficient for 90% of what I would want to do, so should I really spend $1500 to $2000 to do that extra 10%? Since I'm neither a pro nor a passionate amateur, probably won't.
The idea that cameras are more diverse than cars is honestly laughable. Do you realize the level of technology that is in cars?
>If you hire an Uber
Not everyone lives in a major city and hires Uber to get around. I've been in one Uber in my life.
If a smartphone camera is a Toyota Corolla, a nice camera is a basic luxury sedan for Sunday drives. It does everything a little better, but it's a bit pricier for less use. That being said, it's really for people who just like to drive.
As I see it, the phone is a general-purpose device that also takes pictures, just as a sedan is a general-purpose vehicle, whether luxurious or not. Whereas, a camera just does one thing (two if you count video separately.)
Thus, to me, a dedicated camera at any price is like a two-seater sports car with hardly any trunk room. You can buy cheaper sports cars, sure, but they still lack the affordances of a sedan.
To me, a “luxury sedan” corresponds to a high-end phone.
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That being said, all metaphors/similes are leaky, so you are probably “not wrong.”
Your point makes sense when the full functionality of the phone is taken into account. I was viewing the argument as phone camera vs dedicated camera.
There's a whole other rabbit hole when you get into the discussion of whether the camera or the lens is the primary driver of good photography.
95% of the time you're happy you just have your scooter with you, but the other five percent of the time, you may be disappointed or downright helpless compared to somebody with better equipment. Say you and your friends decide impromptu to go to a music show twenty miles away, the concert starts in two hours, and public transit will get you there at approximately noon tomorrow. Your scooter is useless, and you have to ask for a ride. This is analogous to when you see a coyote in your neighborhood (let's assume that's a rare and interesting occurrence in your neighborhood) and you're pointing to a blurry dog-shaped dot on your phone saying "Look! It's a coyote!" and your neighbor is ordering a 2' by 3' print showing the reflections in its eyes and the steamy breath coming out of its mouth. Situations like that are frustrating, but each person will feel differently about whether it's worth embracing the expense and daily hassle of traveling with a bigger piece of equipment.
Anyway it's irrelevant since I was just picking something similarly sized to the Corolla that had been brought up.
It's about that everything that 99% of people need the Corolla does. So, there's no motivator to spend money on the better car for most people.
The first doesn't take much room compared to what it does, it can do a lot of things decently, might cost more on the long run but is cheap to start with. I think someone needs to first feel limited by the all-in-one's printing capacity, performance or cost to fully understand what will the laser printer bring to the table.
And this works at any level. Photographs using zooms lens switch to single focus length lens when they hit a point they want more of X or Y. Otherwise there's no point in giving up the convenience of multi-purpose solutions.
And while we're on THAT subject, active safety in the form of a lighter vehicle that steers more competently and accelerates at will is criminally underrated by the "Big SUV makes me safe" crowd.
My reasoning for thinking this is not a good analogy is the supercar is a device that cannot be used/exploited in normal operation. It is illegal to use the top speed or acceleration of a supercar. It cannot make traffic move out of the way for you. A Supercar will not get you to work any faster than a Toyota Corolla. The Corolla will go fast enough to send you to jail, just like the Supercar. You can't use the Supercar features without legal risk without going to a special place (the race track). People who own sports cars and supercars try to rationalize this away but it's true. They are really just driving them around to show off and can't realistically use the cars capabilities in the real world.
If a fancy DSLR or Mirrorless camera is like a supercar than it would mean everyone who had a DSLR or Mirrorless camera had to use the camera with one fixed prime lens that had bad quality and was locked at a small aperture. You had to use it in green "full auto" mode all the time. You had to set the camera up to run in it's slowest mode, and you had to set the camera up run at a very high ISO and to store photos in a high compression JPEG setting.
Only when you went to the special zone of photography would you be able to use the extra features. (Changing lenses & settings for maximum effect.)
Most people who carry DSLRs & Mirrorless cameras around can exploit their advantages ruthlessly in the real world whenever they want.. nothing at all like paying for a sports car or supercar and just using it as a show-off token.
I am not arguing against Om's point though. I'm in the same boat as him, I have a pretty expensive camera setup but have bought minimal camera gear since 2012 and use my Smartphone more and more.
I mean, really, are we going to get into discussing the people who buy a supercar and hold it as an investment/collectible and rarely drive it?
Or what about the people who track their McLaren and absolutely use it to its full potential? Those people 100% absolutely drive them for performance and use every bit of it.
And yes, there are camera owners who collect cameras. And camera owners who buy "Prosumer" models just because they want a nice camera, even if they don't use it to its full potential. Maybe not you, but we both know there are such people.
That doesn't really invalidate my analogy or validate it. If you feel around to the edges of any metaphor, it breaks. But the question is whether the basic idea is right. I think it's right enough, you don't.
Ok.
Talking about how special places are designed for the sports cars and inferring that it can/should only be used there seems to me incorrect inference of the analogy. At that point we may as well talk about expensive tire repair and maintenance, but I don't think that was intended either haha.
The point others were making is much more simple: neither DSLRs or purpose-built sports cars are particularly convenient for casual utilitarian use. People who buy both of these things lean more towards the 'hobbyist' side of things.
You are absolutely right that there are many people who lug their DSLR everywhere. But I think you might be underestimating just how many people actually do go to racetracks.
Of course, some people own fancy things as status symbols. But also, hobbyists don't have to continually "exploit the capabilities" of their hobby to be legitimate hobbyists either.
Sure, a standalone gets you higher resolution, optical zoom, etc, but consider where those photos are most likely to be viewed - you can't get the most from them without going to a special place (printer). You can't make people view them on a PC. Realistically, most people are going to be viewing their photos on their phone, whether they originated there or not, after they've been mushed through facebook or insta's compression anyway. People who own cameras try to rationalize this away but it's true.
In that sense, supercars are actually a decent analogy. If supercars were around the same cost as mirrorless cameras and SLRs (<$5k, with minimal ongoing cost), then I'd expect supercars to be incredibly popular - lots of people would love to have one for weekend drives.
Still this is kind of what I was looking for. Thank you for the advice.
To me, the extra utility of the Corolla is like the extra utility of email, text messages, phone calls, web browsing, exploring the limits of analogies on HN, and so forth.
I can do those on a phone, but not on a camera. (Actually, I'm sure that somebody has a camera that lets you send and receive mail, that's Lett's and Zawinski's Lwas...)
But if you were to talk about a cube van... We'd have something. A cube van won't fit in my garage, just as a camera won't fit in my pocket (Yes, I used to own a Casio that did, but still...)
A cube van is extraordinarily inconvenient for anything except moving my entire house. For all smaller jobs, my station wagon rules. But when I wanted to move house, I hired a proper cube van.
And if I ever need to take an amazing picture, I would probably use a proper camera.
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But all that being said, Steve Jobs did compare pickup trucks to desktop computers at an earlier time. If he were here today, he might suggest a laptop is a pickup and an iPad is a sedan.
So you might have something.
https://mobile.twitter.com/classicretro/status/1169344101973...
You’re welcome.
I'm finding it harder and harder to justify bringing along a camera unless I'm doing special like a specific photo shoot. Obviously phone cameras are no where near as good as a 40 megapixel full frame camera with a good prime lens shooting in raw. But 99% of the time I'm just going to post a photo of my kid in Instagram and it doesn't matter.
It is a tough time to be a camera maker.
Similarly with RAM. 8 GB sounds fine until you change jobs and have to use Slack. I'd argue that web developers are the drivers for more powerful hardware now. And with 5G, more and more people like to watch Netflix in decent quality on the go, so now you have to push more data through the network.
Also, out of all things to pick on about the economy, this is one of the least problematic. Personally, I think companies can and should shoot for triple digit megapixels on phones, terabyte of RAM and streaming 8k videos to contact lenses. These technologies are enablers - the more power and performance you make available, the more previously impossible use cases will show up.
That comparison is getting old these days. Slack takes ~60MB in my FF now. That's a rounding error even under 8GB.
(I honestly don't care much whether Slack has made performance improvements in the past few months, because I recently switched to the combination of not keeping it active in the browser, using the Android app, and using Ripcord client on desktop, which has sane system requirements.)
400MB for the standalone application last I checked, and that was after the newest upgrades that should make it better IIRC.
That is about 5% on a 8GB machine, and typically a much larger procent of the available RAM once you realize that a lot of those 8GBs are used by the OS and possibly other necessary processes.
EDIT: Thanks for the data points. It's better than I expected.
You obviously know this but for youngest people on HN: Back in the 90ies we could run Autocad on PCs with 512 MB.
It was slow but it was possible.
4G is fine for video, it’s really fast! Even 3G was quite fast with HSDPA and all that. What I lack is cheap data on my phone otherwise I would watch Netflix on it right now.
From what I understand, it's fine when it's just you doing it, but not when 20 other people standing next to you do it at the same time. 5G is supposed to improve on that.
> What I lack is cheap data on my phone otherwise I would watch Netflix on it right now.
That's, unfortunately, the problem with telco business shenanigans. Where I live, I managed to extend my contract from ~3GB to 22GB for something around $10-$15 monthly. I have plenty of LTE to burn on Netflix now.
Other than instant film, which ironically feels more magical than ever, I exclusively use the smartphone.
The main problem is I always have my phone on me, and carrying around something like an RX100 is a pain because of how thick the body is. It is not really pocketable, meaning it goes into a larger bag. Then if I have a larger bag, I might as well bring a better camera.
Part of me wants to sell all my dslr gear and the other part wants to get a mirrorless z6. It's a weird spot to be in because I have plenty of pics that would have been very hard, if not impossible to capture with a phone. But, I want to lighten my load when traveling.
Of course, I now own so much u4/3 stuff that it probably weighs more than a single DSLR and a single nice zoom. Two bodies, a pro level zoom, a handful of 1.8 primes, and moderately priced super-wide and telephoto zooms. Deciding what to bring on any given trip is getting to be a "problem". lol.
Everywhere there's a fixation on expensive equipment. People use it to try to replace skill. Also it serves as a way to elevate their status within their hobbies community. And man it happens in every hobby I've seen. But in the end all it really does it weigh them down. Their equipment is too bulky to use all the time. So much more gizmos to keep track of. Things are so much more expensive that you don't really take it out as much and enjoy it out of fear of breaking it. Even if there's some sort of insurance in place to cover the cost of damage, you still don't want to risk scratching your new baby.
Anyways there's this series on youtube called "Pro Photographer, Cheap Camera Challenge" that I adore. I'm not even a photography buff but it's super interesting to see these professional photographers take the cheapest cameras available, in some cases they're actually toys, and turn out some amazing pictures.
"And with cars/motorcycles you hear how it's more fun to drive a slow vehicle fast than a fast vehicle slow."
I know this is just your third comparator in your statement, but I never thought I'd see it pop up on HN. :)
It's one of those clichés you see all the time in Jalopnik comment sections...I always want to say "but have actually done that, driven the slow car fast and the fast car slow?" Because...I've got a slow car and a very very fast car. The fast car is fun to drive even when you're going 0 miles an hour at a stoplight. The slow car is fun to drive slow but awful to drive fast.
Maybe this statement works if the "slow" car is an E30/Miata/Fiat or similar but in my book, fast car going any speed is always way more fun. :)
Try that on a ZX-1X on public roads, and they'll be pulling dental records to identify your body.
I have a slower Mazda 3 (although its fairly peppy at low speeds, similar to a Prius) and a very fast Tesla -- the Mazda is most fun to drive around town under 45, while the Tesla is basically very fun to drive anywhere, anytime at any speed.
I don't even understand the original statement tbh..
I think the point of the saying is that if you're going the same speed in both cars, you're likely going to be at a different driving "x/10" effort in the slow car and "y/10" effort in the fast car. And the point is that x >> y. So, you'll be pushing yourself and the car much harder in the slow car than the fast car.
I've found that my enjoyment is somewhat correlated to how hard I am pushing myself and the car. The slower the car, the harder I have and it have to work to go the same speed. Thus, sometimes, the more enjoyment.
For sure. For one thing, the car looks flashy and draws a decent amount of attention where I live, so it's fun just driving around town.
For another, I accelerate pretty fast at lights, so that never really gets old.
And in stop and go traffic on the freeway, it's fun because I just set autopilot on.
It doesn't really look like a flashy car to me unless you've wrapped it..? Where I live (SV) they're about as common as a toyota corolla. Maybe you've done something to it but I don't feel like it's flashy like a Viper ACR is flashy.
> For another, I accelerate pretty fast at lights, so that never really gets old.
I guess but that's, again, not really driving a fast car slow then is it?
> And in stop and go traffic on the freeway, it's fun because I just set autopilot on.
So, you're saying that not driving and watching someone/something else is.
> With astronomy they say it's better to have a small cheap telescope you use all the time rather than a big expensive telescope you barely use.
True, but a camera bag also holds a book and other things, to me it's like a purse but better.
> it's super interesting to see these professional photographers take the cheapest cameras available, in some cases they're actually toys, and turn out some amazing pictures.
Compare it to the quality and the rate at which they produce amazing photos with their preferred gear. You can make amazing photos with anything, especially if you only show the keepers, but that doesn't really tell us much.
Make camera bodies as small as possible so that that they can be brought everywhere without much hassle.
The big problem are lenses. So I think they should make cameras that make lens swapping as easy as possible.
1. 95% of the people use their cameras for output to the web (i.e., instagram, pintrest, etc.) And email links to them, or actually email the picture itself when they share them.
In this case, you don't really need a high end camera such as a DSLR or a Mirrorless. That doesn't mean you can't benefit, its just that the reason you are taking the picture isn't worth to learn how to use a camera properly. For these people their crappy cell phone lens based phone is good enough.
2. Has any body looked at the used DSLRs available? Go over to KEH and take a look. You can get a Nikon D300 in excellent condition for less than $300 with a 180 day warranty!!! Want a pro body? You can get a Nikon D3s in excellent condition for $1100 with a 180 day warranty.
That D300 just 4 years ago was $1900 and that D3s was going for well over $6000 around the same time. Why on earth would anyone go and buy a new camera these days?
The camera companies did this to themselves by releasing a new camera every 12-16 months for the past decade.
I predict that those companies that can survive this downturn will have huge success down the road. People will realise how much a real camera offers in quality, capability and options. And then the market will return.
Meanwhile I have a camera body that was introduced at the end of 2012 and it's working just fine for photos and Full HD videos. I'm in no rush to upgrade, my guess is i'll keep using it until 4K60P video capable interchangeable lens camera bodies become more affordable, perhaps in 2021 or so.
Yep, Sony shoot themselves in the foot with the RX100 series. Fantastic cameras, but for some reason they make a point of releasing a new model every single year with marginal improvements, but a much higher price point - so even though we are at Mk 7(?) now, the general recommendation is to just find a Mk 2 or Mk 3 model and save yourself a tonne of money compared to the latest model.
Point taken on f-number and aperture not being equivalent, but that’s getting pretty picky ... f-numbers are ratios of focal length to aperture diameter and so effectively do represent aperture size. The point is the smaller f-numbers will give a more shallow depth of field, and at this point, that property is one of the few advantages that a high-end p&s camera has over a nice phone camera (yes, I know some phones are faking shallow DoP in software).
-- chromatic aberration -- pixel noise -- resolution (and not just pixel count)
You just can't beat a large sensor gathering lots of light for the noise and resolution, and almost any lenses are an improvement over a phone's.
Yes, the best camera is the one you have with you. But while that's good enough for photos that are just throwaways, when you have something you really want to capture at high quality, bring the DSLR (or mirrorless) with you.
Now I take the EOS 3 out specifically and only with a prime 35mm lens. The more methodical way I think about taking pictures is a nice contrast to taking a whole bunch of shots with smartphone or DSLR and then heavily curating afterwards. I just wanted a different feeling from taking photos and it's been quite fulfilling in that respect. Although breaking the habit of looking down at the back of the camera has been quite difficult.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/10/color-photos-chica...
I would love to know how he got #14 [0]. Slide film (as you're no doubt aware) has relatively little exposure latitude compared to print film, meaning it's a hell of a trick to get both the inside of the tower and the trains in the yard outside exposed properly.
You can see the issue pretty often in real-estate photos. Photos featuring the inside of the house with a window usually have the window way blown out because there's so much more light outside than inside.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/10/color-photos-chica...
[0] https://www.loc.gov/photos/?fa=contributor:delano,+jack%7Clo...
While I wouldn't be worried about ILC sales yet, compacts are an entirely different story. Phone cameras now have wide angle and telephoto lenses, PDAF sensors, depth sensing, better AI, and have powerful CPUs easily capable of high-fps 4K. Sensor sizes are approaching parity to high-end 1"-sensor compacts like RX100 and LX100 with Samsung Isocell GW1 (1/1.7" sensor) and Isocell Bright HMX (1/1.33" sensor). There will be fewer reasons to buy these in a couple of years.
Low/mid-tier compacts have long been surpassed by phones. In fact, mid-tier compacts from 2010-2012 fare better than those of today. Back then, these compacts (Canon G12, Nikon P7x00, Olympus Stylus-1, Pansonic LX5 etc) used to have 1/1.7" sensors (with a sensible 10-12MP resolution) and now we have tiny 1/2.3" sensors with 20MP due to the megapixel wars. This market is really dead now.
Super-zoom, small-sensor cameras like Sony RX10 and Nikon P1000 will not be challenged by Smartphones soon. But they are also kinda niche.
I've had a world class pro photographer comment with some disbelief on the quality of shots that are attainable from this.
The original on s7 had only one lens to work with so you had to wait during your shot while it took several at different focus.
The UI is a little clunky, but the zoom exceeds all phone cameras and DSLRs.
So I downgraded to a $1500+ mirrorless aps-c with a single, non-removable lens - my goal was maximum image quality, minimum size. But even that camera is a giant pain and I haven't used it in months.
This is saying nothing about the work involved in shooting RAW and converting everything, using a new piece of software you have to buy.
When the new iPhone comes out, I'm buying a used XS. If you can't beat em, join em.
I am looking for the above, to not have to "manage" yet another device, and dedicated cameras do need some management, especially when back from a trip, so transfer photos, share photos, empty memory, etc.
(My sideline is video, and three S1's would give me pause.)
Sony A7 Series (Mirrorless Full Frame) has everything you need/want and much more. Even the first generation body will not let you down. If you have the spare cash, get the 3rd Gen body as it has more advanced autofocus and low-light capabilities.
Depending on which program you use on your computer, you can configure it to automatically download the photos from the camera and wipe the SD card when connected via USB cable (wifi is usually quite slow to transfer large files especially video).
It has features that let it set up as a wifi hot spot a phone app that previews. It works but its really user unfriendly and a pain to use. Hopefully they've gotten better.
https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canon-eos-70d/8
I had a friend that used to use (maybe still does) a sd card with wifi to remotely access the pictures from a phone. That seemed to work pretty well.
Now that she has the Google Pixel, all bets are off. Not only has she not used the very nice point and shoot we had been using for most photos, but she completely stopped even bringing it anywhere! She absolutely loves the Pixel's portrait mode and HDR features. And it's hard to argue with. They look stunning and you pretty much never have to even change a setting on the phone - nearly every single thing is automatic and they look utterly fantastic.
So fantastic that I installed a ported version of the Gcam app to my non-Pixel Android and wow - what an improvement.
The camera world is quickly on its way to becoming a hobbyist-only endeavor. I see no reason to buy a standalone camera anymore.
On a similar note - does anyone anywhere buy standalone music players anymore? Hell, do they even sell them? I can't imagine all but a few die-hards buying them when every smartphone now comes with significant storage and most have expandable slots as well. And that's for people that even have mp3s. Most just stream everything now (spotify, youtube, etc.).
I like it for exercising. Much lighter than my phone and more square than flat, so more compact.
"The best camera is the one you have with you."
Every potential camera owner already has a smartphone. This means the standalone camera purchase has to compete with the existing smartphone ("free"/marginal cost zero) and an upgraded smartphone with a better camera (already desired future purchase, so nearly "free"), and for the existing photography hobbyist - the previously purchased DSLR (also "free").
https://shop.panasonic.com/cameras-and-camcorders/cameras/DC...
As soon as you want to tweak DoF, want proper night picture, manual control, zoom, &c, even a compact like that will do a better job. As good as phones are they are still heavily limited by physics, small sensor, small glass. It'll also give you way more margin in post prod.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/63119985@N04/48619846407/in/po... - an iphone would fake the depth of field on an image like that, which look very weird.
Keep in mind that random pics on internet don't really reflect the image quality you can get out of this type of camera, if you use it as a point and shoot and don't process it you'll probably get better overall result with an iphone.
One thing I really enjoyed was the duality of having a DSLR with a good zoom combined with a iPhone XS. No need to swap lenses: the iPhone takes great wide angle, landscape and close-up photos while the DSLR covers the all-important lemurs-in-a-tree.
Surprisingly one of the things I missed most with the DSLR was Live Photos, which are fantastic for wildlife.
My dream DSLR would run Android. I want all of the niceties of modern phone cameras, but with the ability to strap on absurdly good lenses. I'm surprised Canon and Nikon don't seem to have done this yet.
Lemur photo: https://www.instagram.com/p/B0nOhNuJ3sX/
Probably smartphones are eating in to a certain kind of enthusiast market, but big glass and big sensors can give you things that are just optically impossible in the form-factor of a phone. If only camera manufacturers can do good smartphone integration, I think they have a bright future.
Point-and-shoots are toast for sure though and I doubt anyone is surprised.
However, it has now become a question of physics, and large lenses getting in lots of light into focus over the sensor, and it being large enough that can catch all of those "scarce" photons, specially for low light photography. And the 1/1.7" sensor is about as large as you can fit inside a phone, which is why they're all moving to having multi-lens cameras and computational photography (with AI, DSP, etc).
I now own an olympus mirrorless, and it's a fantastic piece of equipment with a superb sensor (both in size and technology), interchangeable lenses, and the image stabilization system on body gives it the ability to stabilize _any_ lens I use with it (here's a mean look to Nikon and Canon that place IS inside the lenses instead of the body, to charge premium for the feature). Can't see a phone fitting all those features, because they require physical size and or mechanisms taht wouldn't fit in our pockets.
The main thing I'd like to work on is getting more video. Videos of people especially are much deeper emotional response, I just wish I took more of my children when they were smaller, and relatives when they were still alive. Hearing someone speak adds something that photo's really dont capture.
The main problem with video (apart from getting people to talk on camera) is storing and managing all the data. Its probably too hard for most people, even worse than keeping all the many thousands of photos.
I used such a camera on my travels years back and loved being able to instantly capture any moment in high quality. It was even faster than a smartphone, and it had a decent looking leather case with a magnetic lid.
I tried getting one small enough to put in a pocket but I couldn't find one small/good enough. I know carrying one on my belt looks ridiculously, but I'm hoping to make it just passable enough that I could carry it everywhere.
Another thing is how much better the displays are on phones for proofing photos. My RX100vi's display (my most recent camera) pales in comparison.
I'd also imagine that unit sales are (/were) disproportionately comprised of low-end camera purchases.
Regardless, a scary time to be a camera manufacturer.
Source: https://www.techradar.com/in/news/xiaomi-readying-four-smart...
I am not a professional photographer, but for urbex, I find that my Pixel 2XL has basically replaced my LUMIX DMC-FZ300. Sure, the LUMIX could produce higher-quality low-light images, but shooting on a tripod for a long exposure shot is often impractical or impossible. The Pixel's Night Sight [1] mode is really good.
I desperately wish I had a full frame camera with the computational chops of my smartphone!
[1] https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/11/night-sight-seeing-in-dark...
With cameras it's arguably much worse. Most people these days (especially those with enough disposable income to consider buying a dedicated camera) already own a smartphone. Camera makers see smartphones as competition but probably not so much the other way around. Apple and Samsung try to get better and better cameras because they compete with each other, they don't really care about Fuji or Canon. Camera makers are in the tough situation of having to sell a camera to people who already have one "for free". And they have to convince a crowd that now mostly consume images in low-res on a small screen. Good luck.
With smartphone cameras becoming so good and the software letting anybody take good-looking (if heavily post-processed) pictures, I don't see how they could ever recover. Sun might have been able to win the fight on the server side by competing on price and features, I don't see how camera makers can ever hope to regain the lost market share. It's a completely one-sided competition.
My girlfriend is a professional photographer. She owns a bunch of high-end cameras. They vastly outperform our smartphones' cameras, especially in low-light scenarios or while photographing fast-moving or far-away objects for instance (with the right optics of course). But if you just want to make low-res, mundane pictures for Instagram the difference is really not significant. My cheap-o Nokia 6.1 does the job just fine and it's much easier to operate than most pro cameras.
New sensors have amazing iso ranges, with a sony A7s you don't need magic AI/ML shenanigans to make it look good. Android night mode is amazing but it won't produce images you'll share outside of instagram, and even then the image quality takes a hit, it's more like a good security camera than a proper camera.
https://gizmodo.com/night-shooting-with-the-a7s-mark-ii-damn...
But the gap between those cameras and, say, my full-frame Sony is still enormous. If you care about photography, you buy a real camera. It's just that most people don't care about photography.
For example, I want to build a faster photocopier, using a camera frame, dual camera setup, real-time Image processing unit and a fast laser printer. However, almost all the cameras in the market are either feature deficit (point and shoot cameras that use CHDK, etc) or are in-accessible to me. I would love to use a Nikon DSLR, completely control it, grab pictures in real-time, process and print them. Sadly, no such options now.
A decent photocopier costs about 130,000 in India.
A Nikon D3000 or equivalent, with an 18-55 lens costs about 30,000. A decent laser printer costs about 14,000. A DIY frame, about 10,000. So with an overall cost of about 60,000 I can build myself a much better and faster photo copier.
If I photograph the same scene with my phone (Nexus 5X, an old phone!) and my DSLR (Canon 80D, usually with a decent prime), I'll like the one my phone took better. The color and contrast on its photos are much better than on pictures from the DSLR.
Do the DSLR photos look better at the pixel level? Sure, but I rarely need that level of detail. Could I edit the DSLR photo to get the same color/contrast? Yes, but that takes a lot of time when you have 500+ photos from a vacation. The DSLR really only wins out if I want to zoom in for the shot. Then the DSLR wins in a landslide.
So now my personal rule is: if I don't need to zoom, just use my phone. And it's been nice not having to drag the heavy DSLR around everywhere I go.
But when I get home to my 5k display, the phone pic looks like an oil painting compared to the mirrorless or even point and shoot (rx-100) shot. The screen is just so damn bad on every digital camera I've ever owned, that I need the iphone screen to compose and realize how good the shot will be if i take it with a real camera.
But that’s a niche application and a camera like that lasts for years. I don’t see a future for those manufacturers either, which will be a problem for me(GoPro-style cameras haven’t caught up).
And frankly though the sensor and lens are better than a phone, I’d still rather shoot on the phone.
Aside from the phone camera, they are all useless to me.
I mountain bike, so none of those are good for capturing that, nor are they convenient or rugged enough to use as a camera midway through a run on some beautiful peak.
Just bought a flagship gopro. It essentially fills all the gaps. I can use it as a webcam, I can use it for mountain biking, I can bring it everywhere and record 4k60fps, take photos, etc.
Phone + gopro seems to be the best way to go for anyone not looking to do niche photography, like extreme macro, long exposure sky stuff, professional large prints.
Ruggedized mini cameras like gopros are a pretty big factor in killing off dslrs. There are countless professionals on youtube making high quality stuff with nothing but phones and gopros.
My sister is still using the Rebel II because that's good enough for her needs.
Do businesses really expect growth to never taper off? I suppose if you engineer your products to have a finite life and then fail it could work. The Japanese manufacturers have something to learn from American industry.
As camera sensors became better, the need to replace them with the next model diminished.
Much of what camera makers are now producing are features on top of already great sensor technology. I don't think most consumers care about these additional features.
I think camera's like Om's Leica are appealing largely for reasons other than the image produced. For the same reasons one might choose to wear an expensive mechanical watch to tell the time, one might choose a Leica for their camera.
It was true. The extra effort makes better photos, plus the zoom for framing is nice. For the here and now, phones are way more convent and the cameras are quite good.
Article title should perhaps be "sales of digital cameras which don't include critical phone feature are falling sharply", but perhaps that gives it away since they do address this issue further along in the article.
Maybe my next vacation.
Once everyone has a camera in their phone buying an extra camera feel unnecessary like the past.
A good way for companies like Canon to not fall apart will be by creating complementary products for smartphones to improve the image qualities.
2011: 16
2012: 20 <--- peak
2013: 17
2014: 14
2015: 13
2016: 12
2017: 12
2018: 4 (annualized rate of 8)
The camera isn't dead, it's just not being purchased by people who don't want to learn how to use them.
My phone cost $200 and has a laughable camera.
If I spent $800 every 2 years (I suspect the mean replacement rate) on camera equipment I would quickly have a really incredible setup... I don't even need to because for a one-time price of $800 I could get a better setup than the very best smartphone around.