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Comment by braythwayt | Hacker News Reader

These days, dedicated cameras are like supercars.

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.

—

[1] Substitute your favourite boring daily driver.

[2] To paraphrase Joel Spolsky, by “nobody,” we mean “Fewer than 10,000,000 people.”

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Lots of other people have pointed out the issues with this analogy.

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 personally think you're reaching. You might as well point out that a Supercar doesn't take pictures.

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.

I think those counterpoints to the example are being a bit literal. I too have a "fancy" DSLR and I definitely consider the sportscar analogy accurate. I think the heart of the analogy is different from what you're giving as examples though. To me it means that there are places where you do want to use the sportscar, and places you don't. I rarely use my DSLR - why? Because I'm usually "commuting" and it's just too bulky for a daily driver. My commuter car fits in my pocket, and is always with me.

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.

You're being silly. All you have established is that cars and cameras are very different things governed by different laws.

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.

I don't see how the supercar analogy is any different than the standard use case of a phone camera vs a standalone.

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.

I don't think this is a great comparison. Supercars are prohibitively expensive and incredibly limited, focused entirely on their appearance and hypothetical performance. Completely affordable cameras go above and beyond smartphone photographic capabilities and over time an owner will likely explore the entirety of its features. Comparing a supercar to a $20,000 lens would be more accurate.

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.

A nice camera is NOT a luxury sedan in the context of this metaphor. The reason being that the extra affordances of carrying the driver plus four or more passengers, having a trunk/boot that can carry a full load of groceries/luggage and so forth are all characteristics of a general-purpose vehicle.

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.

—

That being said, all metaphors/similes are leaky, so you are probably “not wrong.”

Another way to look at it is the phone camera is like a folding scooter you carry on your backpack. It doesn't do much, but it's always there, and you can make it work for most things. If you need to buy groceries, you might buy a few days' worth when you'd rather get a week's worth, and if you want to go a long distance, it won't feel as nice, and sometimes it's a little embarrassing when you compare your experience to your friends', but you can get by. Beyond the scooter, there's an entire range of transportation options which are all better but are bigger and more expensive and require extra attention: where do I put it, should I take it with me or will I not need it, do I really want to bother with it today? If I buy something, will I always leave it at home and never have it when it would be useful?

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.

Fair enough, I think the semantics of metaphors (especially in technology) is a challenge.

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.

Sure but the comparison isn't about that.

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.

Your analogy is probably better, yes, except that a luxury sedan is more than just 'a bit' pricier compared to a Corolla. I'm not a car expert, but it looks like BMW's entry level 3 series is about double the cost of a Corolla.

BMW 3er is not a sedan either; it is a "compact executive", a bit smaller. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice car, and bigger than subcompact, but if you wanted something sedan-sized, pick something else. 5er is sedan-sized (and entirely elsewhere price-wise).

You must be using different terminology from me. It's definitely a sedan in US English, sedan implies form factor rather than specific size.

Anyway it's irrelevant since I was just picking something similarly sized to the Corolla that had been brought up.

Photography is a popular hobby, and it isn't surprising that people are willing to spend money on gear for their hobby. Road bicyclists might save up for a carbon fiber road bike, anglers might splurge on a Crowder rod, golfers might buy some high-end clubs, etc. None of those things are essential for the hobby, and most are are overkill for beginners, but they offer incrementally better performance and make the hobby a bit more enjoyable.

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.

IMO the comparison would be more apt between an all-in-one scanner /printer/fax with a big touch screen, and a single purpose laser printer.

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.

I like your analogy too, and it is fun to think about how modern printers have become a "razors and blades" business, as have phones (ask anyone whose phone is subsidized by their their service provider).

I recently looked for a "decent" pocketable camera in the $500 range. Nothing in that price range compares to a phone camera.

I bought a Canon M100 mirrorless in that price range and I have to disagree. Maybe a $1000 phone can come close, but you can't change lenses on a phone so I don't see how a phone camera can match what you can do with a $500 camera.

I have a feeling that "pocketable" and "changeable lenses" are completely different camera types.

The 1080p 60fps is not quite as good as what you get in a 3 year old iPhone. It's fine I guess. It's fine. I'm going to guess the video has some arbitrary limit to record only 10 minutes at a time.

Still this is kind of what I was looking for. Thank you for the advice.

If you drop "pocketable", I think the super-super-zooms are really amazing (canon sx60hs/sx70hs and nikon p900/p1000). They exceed what phone cameras and DSLRs can do.

0-60 actually matters a lot more for everyday drivers than top speed - a lot of utility in the agility provided by high acceleration at low speeds and much better feel while driving.

"Nonsense!" he thunders, then he remembers that he has 325 horsepower and a factory tune under the hood of his... Station Wagon.

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.

The ergonomics of an actual camera for zoom, focus and most setting changes are still way superior... So I don't find the comparison apt.

Agree. Also nothing can beat the pleasure of looking through a real optical viewfinder especially those of full frame cameras. For me half of the pleasure of taking pictures happens when pressing the shutter.

I’ll be one in those ten million soon as they liquidate the prices on their lenses. I’ve been eying a Sony alpha. I’m looking to move to mirrorless but don’t have a real need. My dslr is fine, but the mirrorless Sony’s are nice.

I personally don't think that the lens market will drop like that. While new purchases of cameras are slowing dramatically, there are still a lot of photographers out there and so good lenses will always be in high demand.

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.

When I ditched my 5Dmk3/fast-zoom setup for weight/size reasons, Fuji was high on my list for the replacement system. But in the end I went Micro 4/3rds. I think Fuji made a misstep by choosing a 3:2 ratio for the X sensor. X lenses are still pretty big and heavy in order to project that big imaging circle over that elongated ~24x~16mm APS-C sensor. I think they'd have been better server by something like 20x16mm sensors.

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".

Yes, exactly. The Fuji x-series cameras are wonderful, but the lenses are long and somewhat heavy, to the point that the cameras are just not small and light enough to be _easy_.

Yeah, all true. It’s nice to have the larger sensor for lower noise, but the trade-off is larger lenses.

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).

I myself may be one of those ten million. But I still wouldn’t bet on camera sales reversing their slide.

I agree with that. Eventually it’ll (35mm equiv) be like medium format cameras. Some people will want them (I like the perspective they bring, but I know I’d use it very little, so I won’t buy one). But for most people the modern point and shoot built in to phones are more than enough.

Still I’d like to see E-mount lenses get cheap for selfish reasons.

More like a truck. When you actually need truck a Corolla won't do, and on the other hand there are a lot of people who could get by with a Corolla that own trucks.

If you mean a pickup like an F-150, not to me. A pickup has a lot of utility for everyday use. I may personally hate the idea of ferrying my kids to school in a pickup, but plenty of my fellow parents do it.

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.

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.

I feel like it's a fallacy to assume objects (cars, cameras, speakers, coffeemakers, whiskey, etc) fall only into Corollas and supercars. There's usually something in between, priced way towards the Corolla side, that makes daily driving so much more fun, like a Honda Civic Si or Olympus OM-D.

I’m going to leave this here as a “performance cars and cameras” easter-egg for any discussion archaeologists:

https://mobile.twitter.com/classicretro/status/1169344101973...

You’re welcome.

What is a supercar, exactly? One that has a cape and can fly?

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.

Seems like you're just reinforcing the original point by failing to understand the distinction being made.

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.

I agree. A lot of people sent us photos of our wedding, and some we love for sentimental reasons, but the wedding photographer and her assistant sent us more than a thousand photos that each look far better technically than the best snapshot anyone sent us. We thought we'd include some of our guests' photos in our wedding album, but there's not a single one that can stand side-by-side with the professional photos on a 15" screen without looking out of place and kind of sad. We keep the personal photos separate from the professional photos to avoid the comparison, and that allows us to enjoy them a lot more.

Let’s see if it’s possible to say the same exact thing, except in the reverse direction...

“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]”

But the vast majority of drivers don't drive on a race track; they use a car for general transportation. Mainly a tiny number of professionals require a very high end performance vehicle.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercar

>Every automobile on the road does almost exactly the same thing, with a few variations in details like cargo capacity and creature comforts.

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.

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