Nikon Is ending 70 years of camera production in Japan
mirrorlessrumors.com
mirrorlessrumors.com
I've always found Nikon to be lacking in competitive models with Canon in the places that count. Canon frequently make lenses of the same focal length but for different budgets, e.g. they have 4 70-200mm models. Nikon's range has always been weirdly spotty, with some excellent lenses at the high end but weird gaps elsewhere.
Tangentially, I recently bought a superb Sigma lens and was happy to see that it was actually still made in Japan as well; I thought all the third-party lens makers had moved abroad, but surprisingly a number of them are still there.
I was also very happy to discover that Canon promotes wildlife reserves around its factories and headquarters. It's nice to see a company that reflects some of its customers' interests: https://global.canon/en/environment/bird-branch/index.html
Modern lens are made with techniques perfected in semiconductor manufacturing, and use advances in material science (meta materials in particular). I don't know how close this is to mass market, but I've seen superthin flat lens, with a marginal cost of production around ~$2 in a university facility, that work better than some $500 lens -- and the latter are expensive because they are hard to make the traditional way.
Canon putting Fresnel elements in their lenses to reduce size/weight: https://kenrockwell.com/canon/lenses/400mm-f4-do-is-ii.htm
Canon making an f/11 800mm super telephoto lens that can still autofocus thanks to the new mirrorless camera bodies: https://www.kenrockwell.com/canon/eos-r/lenses/800mm.htm
I think we'll see a big pivot in the market (we're already seeing it, really) with the switch to mirrorless. What I'm hoping we'll see is a total rethink of what's possible in a lens; adapting this new technology to make new designs that exceed what was possible before, rather than just matching it. If they can bring costs down by making use of this new tech then I think it will re-open the market for "I want something that does more than a phone camera". At the moment lens prices are pretty bonkers but I think that Canon f/11 lens is a great indicator; it's basically less than 1/10th of the cost of a traditional 800mm lens and does more than enough for most people.
And yes, they are mostly better than previous generations across the board. Which is pretty cool, that something based on such a simple idea that’s been around hundreds of years still has room for major improvements.
Mirrorless in practice really just means the camera works more like your phone camera. You view the image on a screen instead of through an optical viewfinder. That brings some nice benefits, none of them are necessarily a game changer on their own but together it makes for a major step forward in the experience. Now the viewfinder shows you the picture more like it will actually look, the processor can see the image as you’re composing it before you take the shot and provide hints and show you that information overlayed on the image, the processor is involved in auto focusing and can do things like use ai models to focus on eyes, plus the physical benefits like there’s a big complex moving piece the camera no longer needs.
Camera makers then used this change to make a bigger platform shift at the same time. Just like a major version bump in software, if you have breaking changes you’ve been waiting to make you might want to make them all at once. They widened the mount diameter of lenses, which combined with the shorter distance to sensor because of the lack of a mirror gives more flexibility in letting in more light to the sensor. And they built a new set of lenses around it, whereas a lot of the lenses in their old lineups were sometimes decades old and not designed for the crazy high megapixel sensors we have now and in the near future. Most of these new lenses released in the past few years have been very high quality, so to answer your question that’s really where the improved image quality comes from, this new generation of lenses.
In either case, when the photo is taken, the mirror whips out of the road (which generates mirror slap, another problem), and the light travels to the film or sensor. Since this path is a different distance to the one used for focusing, it requires only a small calibration error between the body and lens to end up with out-of-focus images. It is very normal to have to tweak the focus (higher end bodies will let you do this), or to have to have a body or lens physically corrected. No matter how exquisite your optics - in fact paradoxically, this effect is worst with high-end optics - the way the light path works here can be a real pain for getting good focus.
Because mirrorless systems focus and capture from the same medium, this literally can't happen with your mirrorless camera.
Modern zoom lenses have anywhere from 11 to 30 elements, in 3-11 groups, that move at different speeds relative to each other. Doing that with a tiny electric motor, precisely, for a decade is a tough task, especially when the mass of the glass starts to exceed 1kg.
With a mirrorless camera, you can reduce the mass of the lens by ~10% for a full frame camera. With an APS-C sensor, mirrorless, you can reduce the mass by 33%. With a "micro four-thirds" sensor, the mass of the lens is less than 50% of a full frame. Rough numbers. As with everything, there are pros and cons to going with smaller sensors than full frame.
The switch is quite obvious from the Canon release schedule - I don't think they have a single non-RF (mirrorless mount) lens being released this year.
Aside, I enjoy that Ken also loves this lens, despite it being mostly plastic, which he usually shits all over. It actually seems like a feature here, for weight purposes.
But that tradeoff seems hardly new to me. Consumer 70-300 for ~300 $ vs. Pro 70-200 for 2000+ $. The "only" difference is build quality and the pro lens being 2-3 stops brighter. Price difference: ~10x.
Another example is if I focus on something and then zoom in and out some lenses have to refocus and others maintain focus. This is an important feature for video and any kind of fast shooting. Many lenses have much more "focus breathing" than others. That is, the change of the effective focal lens as the lens focuses closer and closer. I had a lens that was 200mm but it was really only at infinity. At close focus is was closer to 135mm since the focus breathing was so pronounced.
Bokeh, chromatic/comatic abberations, geometric distortion are other things I can go on and on about.
It's been a long time since I paid any attention to pro photographic equipment so I don't know if fast lenses are important with modern sensors performing so well in low light. But back in the analog/early digital days 2-3 stops was a huge advantage.
Also something to consider, the pro lenses also focus faster and more accurately. I was never sure if this was down to the software in the lens, which is proprietary and why 3rd party lenses are never as good as manufacturer. I could easily see Canon or Nikon tweaking the firmware on prosumer lenses to focus a fraction slower.
More importantly, those things combine to make a certain je nais sai quoi that makes photos taken with it seem to have much higher quality. I took a quick test shot of my dog when I got it and my sister remarked that she could practically feel the dog with her eyes, just looking at the photo. Nobody has ever said that about pictures of the dog that I took with the old lens, even if I spent considerable time trying to get lighting right and the dog to hold still.
My old lens ruined a bunch of shots I took in a forest that required running at the extreme edge of its settings. This new lens doesn't look like it will do that.
Actual light transfer (e.g. t-stops in cine, but less quantitatively in SLRs, say - some lenses are brighter than others), sharpness, chromatic aberration, spatial aberration, focal speed and accuracy (assuming autofocus), consistency across the telephoto range (not for primes, obviously) - some lenses will have not just differet f-stops at different lengths, but really different characteristics. This doesn't even get into the subjective aspects (e.g. "bokeh") that some people care a lot about.
Is it brighter for the same camera body, aperture and depth of field?
If so, what would one look for in a lens's specifications to describe this difference?
They also have a 500mm 5.6 that's similarly tiny (compared to a non-PF version) and hard to get.
I'm planning on picking up one of the Nikon mirrorless FFs soon.
On the other hand, it doesn't behave like a good canon ultrasonic lens with immediate focus. not at all.
Sensor size comparison: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sensor_sizes_overlai...
I find this very fascinating because while I enjoy my ever-increasing smartphone camera and use it as a daily driver, I have a about 13 year old Canon DSLR (one of the first one they made now) with a few lenses and that 2007 model Canon D-SLR with the 1" large digital sensor can RUN INSANE LAPS AROUND TOP OF THE LINE SMARTPHONES with respect to the ability to take low light photos, get a lot of good light, and of course zoom on the telephoto, macro on the macro, etc. The autofocus is probably five times faster and the ~10 zones are lightyears ahead of the phone.
There's no comparison. Sure, the 7MP megapixels are bad. Sure, the ISO noise is pretty bad compared to modern smartphone postprocessing. But the telephoto isn't some pitiful "optical zoom", it's instead incredible powerful optics. The low aperture prime lenses produce beautiful shots whose distortion is matched to human preference.
The idea that phones can "catch up" to even 10 years ago on DSLR's would be very cool.
Unfortunately, I'm not holding my breath. Phone sensors are what 10X smaller? Doing great things with 10X less light is impressive, but at some point, you need a big sensor and good quality glass.
Would love to see us get DSLR quality pics from a phone tho.
To me, the old DSLR is simply not worth the weight of lugging it around any more. It's funny how we have such different perceptions of our old DSLRs.
I don't expect to do low-light without long exposure (ie, no impromptu shots) and I do have an external flash for bounce lighting indoors.
It's still better than my iPhone (which admittedly is a couple of years old), but weight is a huge factor I only use this when intending to get really good shots. Another is the extra time it takes to transfer files, sort through bursts and put into iCloud or smugmug.
Contributing factors may be that the pixels on the sensor are physically larger, and that the sensor-shift image stabilization helps with longer exposures.
It is now possible to build a telephoto lens for your DSLR, that costs $2 to make, is short and flat, yet has better optics than your current kit. When these become common, it will likely cause another seismic shift in the pure-camera market. Perhaps some of them will actually be bonded with the sensors, unlike what we have today.
Regardless, new lens technology -- while likely to make a greater impact on mobile phones -- is largely orthogonal to them.
Do you have any references you can share? I'm super interested.
edit: For anyone else interested, the key phrase that worked for me was "metasurface lenses".
But, I mean, it better not be considering both were about the same price!
This problem is basically solved already by taking multiple exposures and blending them in software. Once we're at the point where stacking 10 exposures works reliably even in challenging conditions (and we're pretty nearly there with the latest phones) then many of the advantages of a larger sensor are moot.
As far as glass "quality" is concerned, smart phone manufacturers benefit hugely from economy of scale. I wouldn't necessarily assume that smart phone lenses are manufactured to lower quality standards just because you're paying less for them.
Lenses on phones are limited by diffraction. They can never provide the quality of a larger lens because their aperture is so small that their airy disk is often over the size of a pixel.
Here's the problem.
Doing "things in software" is akin to saying ultraprocessed food is gourmet "food".
I feel that phones usually make better decisions for contrast, white balance, exposure than DSLRs do. With a DSLR, reaching the same finished product usually requires a ton of manual work editing photos.
Of course, the DSLR has far better detail on the pixel level, and if you need to zoom in at all, it wins in a landslide. I wish I could combine the strengths of both platforms.
That said, the traditional camera manufacturers are pretty much laggards with respect to software so their better hardware isn't really used to full advantage a lot of the time.
They're trying to solve two different problems. Nikon want to reproduce colors that are balanced and accurate. Apple want to produced colors that 'pop' and catch peoples eye when scrolling through Instagram.
My dream is a camera with a nice sensor/lens and an iphone brain. It likely already exists, up there orbiting the earth...
There's a ton of engineering that goes into designing eg; a zoom lens that can cover a focal range while retaining sharpness, minimal color fringing, etc. And that's assuming you can use software to correct for distortion... in the past that was a dealbreaker. The result is a lens that requires 10-20 (or sometimes even more) individual elements. No matter how you cut it that will be expensive.
There's no cheating physics sadly.
It was something reproducing a sort of "solar furnace" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_furnace) at a micro scale, coordinated with electronics. Think creating a dynamic lens by redirecting light from many micro lenses (mirrors?).
The upside being dynamic focal lengths using extremely short lens (the whole thing being microscopic).
Am I day dreaming? I can swear I read something or saw a documentary somewhere.
Or is what I'm describing just another name for metamaterial lenses? Based on what I've read about metamaterials, right now, I don't think it is, but I can very easily be wrong.
Edit:
Ah, maybe microlenses? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microlens
Does anyone know if they're applicable to camera lenses?
(1) Older digital sensors weren't good at all with high-iso (high read-noise, low photon-electron conversion efficiency, etc)
(2) An off-sensor DSLR AutoFocus array has a very small effective-aperture, making the lens aperture very important in low-light situations for autofocus (which a lot of nature photography is)
(3) Bokeh - Ofcource nothing beats large aperture bokeh, but this can be tackled perhaps through computation?
For (1) and (2) Modern imaging sensors perform beautifully in high-iso scenarios. Also, with mirrorless, there are cameras that can AF down to F/22 - something unimaginable (and impossible) with DSLRs.
While the demand for 600mm F/4 is there from a professional standpoint, there is an even larger demand for cheaper options - and.. this point is important, you can produce award-worthy images using those cheaper potions. In fact if you look at any nature competition a lot of the awards go to images made with cheap/budget gear.
Pick up a Canon CN-E 30-300 cinema lens and it is this exquisite, jewel-like thing that seems as though it is made by NASA. And it's $45K.
I always found Nikon cameras more my taste than canon. But that is just taste, in terms of quality, in the sense of the pictures, I never saw a difference. Not back the day when we still developed our black and white pictures ourselves and not now with digital cameras.
Lenses on the other hand a different thing altogether. There I saw defferences between the "cheaper" Sigma and the premium Nikkor ones. Not always but sometimes. I would assume that the new mirrirless cameras are less complex to build, so maybe the Thailand based manufacturing facilities are best suited. After all, it's the lense and the person behind the camera that counts.
But with the capabilities of modern cameras the production requirements for them are high and the challenge to make something that works for a variety of consumers even higher. I can't even look at a camera that isn't "weather-proofed" as I live in a place with a 90% chance of rain at any moment, for example. And a lot of these advancements are designed to work in combination with the lenses, such as in-body and in-lens stabilisation working together, weather seals that line up, etc. I think it's pretty important to maintain the same manufacturing quality between the two areas. I'm sure that's possible when moving production to Thailand, but I expect it will take time for them to iron out their processes.
My personal experience of Canon vs Nikon is that I prefer the software of Canon, and historically I preferred the physical ergonomics of Nikon, but the newest Canon models have improved a lot there. On the lens side it was always Canon for me, although I do have a lot of love for Sigma: my 150-600mm Sigma lens has a USB dock where I can actually manually configure the autofocus, among other things, which appeals to my gadget side (and honestly their quality has jumped up massively in the past decade).
Can't agree more on the weather-proof part. I was ather funny to be out taking pictures all day, only to find the camera was sitting in 5 cm of water in its protective bag. Nikon did work better druing that, than. Just an anecdote so, some Nikon's didn't like it that good neither.
Some Sigma lenses were really good back than, some on par with Nikkor. Canon lenses were, if I remember well, mostly on par with Nikkor. Been used to Nikon so, I always to break the lighter Canon camera bodies.
Nikon have already been making weather-sealed cameras in Thailand for ages (e.g. the D7500). I think your concerns here are overblown. Any quality problems with their Thai manufacturing operation would already be apparent, given that most of their cameras are made there.
They always have. Yet strangely you can buy an L lens and it may outlast a whole series of bodies. (if we continue to have DSLRs that is).
I've always wondered what the difference is between Sigma and a brand like Canon or Nikon.
I used to have both Canon and Sigma lenses. The Sigmas felt different, and the pictures they produced had a different "look" for what was supposed to be an equivalent lens. My eye isn't trained for these sorts of things, so I was never able to quantify it.
What is it that Sigma does that makes its lenses cheaper than the others?
So they also do a 150-600mm Contemporary model, which has 90% of the performance. It doesn't have full weather-sealing, and it has a different element arrangement which slightly changes the picture quality, but it also drops a huge chunk off the weight and about £400 off the price. It's not quite as solidly built but for a lot of people it's more than enough and provides a good alternative.
In my personal experience Sigma lenses tend to be heavier than Canon for equivalent build quality. ~10 years ago I'd say the picture quality was slightly poorer, but now they compete very well in a variety of ranges.
My use case also involves a fair amount of tripod work, and I even picked up a gimbal just recently.
So I'm glad that Sigma is making lenses which are cheaper / better for the price by leaving out OSS, because there are ways to not need it. If you figure OSS would cost another $200 per lens, which seems a little low but is in the ballpark, then with the Sigma 'trio' of 1.4 primes, the difference between the a6100 and a6600 is just about a wash.
Agreed on customer service.
Nikon still make many of their top tier lenses in Japan as well. I don’t see that changing any time soon.
Apple’s cross functional business org makes them really effective at transferring expertise across product lines. Just subsidizing the high end camera line might be worth it to transfer technology and expertise to iPhone cameras.
(Plus slapping an Apple logo on Nikon cameras would probably boost sales overnight)
Seems if I add any lenses to my collection I'll be buying used or new from Sigma/Zeiss. I saw the shift happening already and had mostly already been doing that. I will say the new PF series pro lenses with fresnel lens elements are really great though. While I still have my older 300mm, I also got the new pro series 300mm prime from Nikon as it's significantly smaller and lighter weight, doesn't even require a lens foot and can be shot hand-held if you have a steady grip. I suppose I should start budgeting to acquire the 500mm version of the PF lens before they move production out of Japan as I find it unlikely I'd buy anything else that's Nikon branded for lenses. For shorter focal length stuff Zeiss is far far superior.
All the Leica m43 glass are so called Pana-Leica glass: Panasonic designed and manufactured but Leica rubber stamped. They still are really nice glass, though :)
Disclaimer: used Olympus 4/3 and m43 for reaally long time but the mirrorless full frame gear feels so much better in the closely same sized package.
Last year I cracked the lens mount on my d810, and I took it to the shop where I bought it, and they sent it off and had it repaired no questions asked for a reasonable price (it's out of warranty). It took longer than I would have liked, but other than that a good experience.
Over at Fred Miranda and DPR, canon shooters always lament about the lack of competitiveness Canon was regarding Nikon glass.
I really would like to have the 13mm Rectilinear lens if only it isn't worth several tens of thousands of dollars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikkor_13mm_f/5.6#:~:text=The%....
Sigma is probably the best of the third-party lens manufacturers. I have a first-generation Sigma 50mm f/1.4 with Nikon mount (purchased around ~2011) — the build quality is great, and the bokeh is fabulous.
I can't say the same for Tamron.
They had never been particularly big, until the 1990s, with the advent of point-and-shoot digital cameras.
That gravy train ended when the iPhone came out. They are probably contracting to their more traditional role, of Big Black Cameras, as well as some very good scientific optics.
They have some of the finest scientists and engineers in the world, as well as a gigantic portfolio of patents. They aren't going away.
From what I hear, the Thai do a great job, but it's still a big psychological shock to leave Japan. Their Japanese plants were considered the "top shelf" production facilities.
Kodak would like to have a word.
Nikon sees this happening and choose which side of the divide to service. It's probably the safer bet, too, as some of the top-tier manufacturers are going to have to either coalesce or dissolve in the next decade or two regardless of strategy. At least in the consumer market strategy, such as partnering with a cellphone manufacturer, could open new opportunities.
Kodak pioneered digital photography (they literally invented the first digital still camera). All through the 80s and 90s they had the best digital camera sensors on the market and where first to release a commercially available DSLR. In the mid 90s they owned the pro DSLR space.
But they didn't want to cannibalize their film market, and after much infighting between senior managers they ended up not investing in the digital lead they had. And the rest, as they say, is history.
That's a philosophy that I have followed, myself, and I find it is quite effective.
They will have to join the queue behind a lot of Swiss watchmakers.
There has been massive consolidation in that market and most of those brands you see are all owned by one of maybe three conglomerates.
The people who make movements are a much smaller bunch.
Incidentally, recent sales have apparently been massively affected by COVID, as many of them are sold in bricks-and-mortar boutiques that customers are no longer visiting.
[Edit] - this is the queue of companies who failed to consider a rival disruptive technology.
I'd argue not having to go into an office and "dress up" has impacted the watch market as well. If I'm at home all day, I don't really need a clock on my wrist.
Lots of AirPods, too.
But that is anecdotal, from a limited geographic perspective.
No amount of valuable patents and top-notch engineers can help a failed strategic bet like this.
I also have a couple of Japan-only Casio/Oceanus watches.
I haven't worn any of them in quite some time.
Those are exactly quickly going away. Engineers and scientists need to get paid and want job stability, while patents have a 20-year lifespan.
Nikon was on top of the world in 2008 with the D300 and the D90, but the technologies that made those possible were patented years prior. Right now, the curve is with mirrorless where Sony, Panasonic, and (now defunct) Olympus have a 10-year lead on patents. It's also with smartphones, and those technologies bubbling up. In the deep learning/ML battle, Nikon is bringing a knife to a gunfight.
On the other side, they're having massive layoffs right now. When companies have layoffs, usually they let go the bottom end of the workforce, while the top end leave voluntarily.
Nikon is continuing to patent new lens designs, but so is its competition. Nikon has excellent optics, but so does Olympus, Canon, Fuji, or Sony; they aren't exactly ahead of the pack here.
Sigma has really been pushing the edge on optics.
I'd love to know things like what they trade off in terms of $, weight, complexity, aberrations, performance. And do they have to retire an old lens line to make room for a new one?
And this is way too much to ask here (I'm sure I need to read an optics intro), but how in the world do they solve that they need 12 elements, etc. to make some aberration go away, by combining 3 different index of refraction glasses in a certain order, etc! Amazingly complicated.
I imagine now there are ray tracing solvers for it, but I wonder how they did it in the early days of lens design!
Now phones have eaten both compact cameras and hobbyist DSLR markets. Prosumer and professional DSLRs/ILCs are a niche market and Nikon is becoming a niche company.
If your hobby is shooting sports, wildlife or stars (big balls of gas), buy an ILC. If all you need is a travel camera, an iPhone is a damn good one and it's smart enough to beat 9 out of 10 humans fiddling arround in Lightroom.
Nikon, if it were to survive, would need to move into new markets. dSLRs are dying, but imaging is exploding. Nikon and Canon ran into the innovator's dilemma: they didn't want to eat into their core market, so they released crippled products like the Nikon 1 or Canon M-mount. By the time they got into the game, their market was collapsing, they lost a lot of credibility, and Sony had a huge lead. It's probably too late, but we'll see.
Drones, industrial, teleconferencing, and hundreds of other markets are popping up, but Canon and Nikon are conspicuously absent.
And, when I do buy an expensive item "made in Japan", I can generally trust that it is of high quality. Compare this to shopping for appliances in the USA, where brands like KitchenAid and CuisinArt are perpetually cheapening the quality of their products while keeping the price the same and coasting on the reputation they built in the 1970s and 1980s.
For instance Sony products are not seen as ‘made in China’, just ‘made by Sony’
There’s a scale, and ‘made in Japan’ seems to so far be better than not.
That said, if they can halve their prices by building in Thailand, maybe customers will forgive them.
Since the only thing left is the high end market though, I’m not sure cutting prices is most relevant now though.
But quality? Sorry but haha. No.
...as it somehow tries to imply that it is not designed in China (but it is).
To me that kind of messaging just exudes arrogance.
Sony has…a lot, from semiconductors to financial instruments. Canon has high-end video, scanners, and enterprise printing and copying. Nikon has photography-oriented cameras, some medical optics, and semiconductor equipment, and that’s about it. They’re just not the sprawling conglomerate that can absorb losses as easily as Sony.
Sigh. I’m a camera nerd, and I hate to see the market shrink further. I know it’s going to—cell phone cameras accomplish the actual job to be done that most people have, which is snapshots of kids and cats. And, interchangeable lens cameras are getting to the point they’re over-serving the high-end market with ever-fancier lenses and marginal sensor improvements, with no real workflow improvements.
Though that still gets to my point that they make optics, and pretty much just optics. Makes it hard to pivot (ugh, sorry) to anything else, from a corporate mentality standpoint.
[0] https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/gun-control-nikon-wi...
At the risk of angering Leica fans: they’re shipping not exactly state of the art technology at very high prices, with a lot of the R&D actually being done by Panasonic. (Or, in the case of their Lux compact cameras, they’re literally shipping Panasonic cameras with a different sticker on them.)
Look at the Leica Q2: it costs $5000. The Fuji X100V costs $1300. I know there’s a bigger sensor in the Q2, but, c’mon, there’s not $2000 worth of magic hiding in there.
By contrast, Leica's digital M bodies have always been at least a generation behind... at their time of release. The way you deal with this is correct exposure discipline, such that there's less to deal with in post. Newer M bodies have gotten much better, however.
The Q is a really interesting line, since I assume it's a collaborative project between Panasonic, Tower Jazz, and Leica. Frankly, the images for both the Q and Q2 are outstanding, and I'd throw down another $5k for a 50mm Q2. If you seriously think an X100V can compete with a Q2 for full pipeline imaging (capture to print), you're nuts. I've personally seen large prints come out of my Epson P800 from an XE-3 + 23/1.4 and my Q2 and the noise reduction artifacts inherent to the X-trans filter are noticeable on paper. If all you're doing is posting to IG or Flickr, Fuji is amazing for the money.
The M9 was revolutionary in 2009, an 18MP full-frame sensor in a peer-comparatively tiny body. The M Monochrom in 2012 is the only major first-party camera to release w/o a Bayer filter with massive increases in resolution and sensitivity. They've been riding the "classic rangefinder experience" for some time since with incremental improvements, but the early digital M bodies were anything but behind. The recent M10-R and M10-M are also competitive sensor-wise.
I think that misses the point: when you buy Leica, you're not buying technology. It's not a technology company, it's a luxury brand. You buy Leica over Canon, Fuji or Panasonic for the same reason you buy Rolex over Casio, Swatch or Seiko.
Having used an M camera briefly, they aren't worth the price new, but used they are really great values that are built like nothing else. When you tire of them, you can sell them back for what you paid, sometimes more!
If you look at the photos on a big monitor, you can spot the difference between a DSLR and smartphone. But on a smartphone screen, where 95% of the photos are viewed these days, the difference is negligible. Heck my wife recently printed out 4x6 prints of her smartphone photos and they looked pretty good too.
I've recently got a iPhone 12 Pro, and it's good enough that I'm thinking of selling my Fuji X100V. DSLRs used to be accessible for amateurs. But unless you need specific capabilities (strobe usage, fast sport shooting, ultra-telephoto, etc), most people don't need to buy a DSLR if you have a decent smart phones these days.
Personally, I'm very pleased that my camera (a Nikon D850) boots instantly (approx 0.2 seconds) and has a shutter lag of 0.05 seconds (when pre-focused). It essentially never unexpectedly hangs when I need to take a shot. For my preferred subjects (wildlife) a consistently instant response is far more important than arbitrary functionality. If I want to share pictures or do other things, I can use the built-in wi-fi or Bluetooth to shunt pictures to my SmartPhone.
Why would I ever want any of that in a DSLR?
A DSLR can go from sitting on the shelf to having taken a focused photo in less than a second. The battery life is measured in weeks (unless using built-in flash). No comparison how much better experience it is.
My Sony runs Android and never hangs nor has an shutter lag. Instant response in everything. It can be done.
Also, what you're asking for is already available in most flagship smartphone these days. Instead of moving apps to cameras, they moved a good enough camera to a phone where all your apps are available.
The idea I really liked was Sony that made "smart lenses" that was basically a decent sensor and a decent lens that you clipped onto your phone and connected via Bluetooth/WiFi and used the phone as a display and storage
Photographers rarely post un-processed images. Even before all of that, settings are chosen which alter the exposure, depth of field, focus point, color temperature of the image which alter the "real thing". It's common to think "editing" a photo is some cheating magic, but it should be considered the norm, and how people share their vision of what they want it to look like.
The AI can just automate a lot of the workflow or need to buy extra equipment, still up the human to decide how they want the image to come out.
I'm not sure what's going on, but this craze about computational photography is ruining cellphone photography for me.
Try to take a selfie with the iPhone 12 Pro. It's awful. If you use the regular camera, it generates an HDR selfie exaggerating every imperfection on your face. And if you use portrait, it applies a fake looking blur and softness to your skin and is incredibly strict on framing.
Camera photography is moving further from realism and I don't want a part of it.
Turn the camera around and you get similar problems. From detail-less low-light images, to sun-saturated indoor shots. It's like everyone took the Samsung model and ran with it.
My DSLR is the only lens I have that can produce a realistic photo nowadays and give me access to the raw sensor data.
Every iPhone currently for sale and I presume most high-end Androids support shooting in RAW, you just have to use a third-party app.
as predicted, enthusiasts wanted to argue the point instead of acknowledge what the market can bear
photography enthusiasts have to realize that “the market” is more concerned about their shoes being in the photo than how the bokeh looks, and in that respect AI depth of field that comes with a nondestructive parallel full focus image, with smart HDR on by default, also available in a derivative of RAW format is more than good enough!
All in a much more portable form factor.
The potential for a 5-10% optimizations in a larger traditional form factor just isn't good enough of a distinction.
Didn't those just come out?
Oddly enough, I just picked up an X100T from eBay and I haven't been using my phone nearly as much. I don't know if the novelty will wear off or not, but I've been really enjoying it
I will concede that I'm not the average consumer and already had "manual mode" camera experience
> Without that, there is really no reason to use anything but a smartphone.
I would disagree with that sentiment, but I'm on the other side of the fence of knowledge, so it's hard for me to say
To counter that a bit I'd like to add that there is a rise of video/youtuber folks wanting smooth 4k video with tracking auto-focus, and real bokeh which is making cameras, or hybrid cameras relevant again. I don't think phones do fake bokeh in video mode or do low-light video w/o looking like ass.
The Lidar and infrared and AI will help with the low light. They fill in colors instead of take the result of the lens and sensor physical limitations.
There are apps that do what the default cameras don’t do yet, and we’ll continue to see rapid optimizations on this front.
what you mentioned is not outside of the realm of what can be done. If there is a need, making an app that does it will give you a brief advantage.
Outside of macro and wildlife photography (basically, extreme closeup and extreme telephoto), I tend to use my phone more than my dSLRs. It's smaller, more convenient, and the pictures it takes are 70-80% as good as I'd get on my heavier gear. Well, there's also an annual parade I shoot where I want to be able to control depth of field and trigger some strobes, and I use the dSLRs for that too.
I've been eying a body upgrade, but I can't really justify it. Having one crop sensor body and one full frame, I'd rather spend the money on new, fancy lenses. And the computer-designed lenses really are incredible. I have an 28-300 lens with vibration reduction that is frighteningly good for the range it covers. It has some distortion, but nothing that's not easily corrected in production. And it's very nearly as sharp as some of my pre-autofocus primes.
It seems one of the problems that Nikon (and the other manufacturers are facing) is that the quality of camera gear is just incredibly high across the board. I could spend a few grand to get a body with an extra stop or two, and a bunch more pixels. But I can hand-hold a modern vibration-compensating lens at 400mm down to somewhere around 1/100th of a second and get good results. I don't print large, so I don't need more pixels. Why spend the money?
https://www.imaging-resource.com/news/2018/04/17/glass-for-g...
It has already done that for the consumer market and part of the enthusiast market...
My guess as to why Apple hasn't done it yet is because the the pro market is peanuts (for them). It also wouldn't look too good. It's one thing to compete with Samsung, and another too put many beloved brands (Arri, etc) out of business with the snap of a finger.
But I don’t think Apple would do it, because it’s such an ecosystem to build out. Lenses, flashes, adapters, it’s all so much. It’s Nikon’s core business to build such an ecosystem, and they’re not great at it. Never did get a fully fleshed-out set of DX lenses.
Here’s my pipe dream: Apple transitions all iOS devices to USB-C, they cook up a low-latency fast protocol to connect to cameras, and they give the camera manufacturers documentation and support to build out a way to use an interchangeable lens camera that immediately lets you pipe photos and video off the camera into iOS apps for immediate processing and offloading.
I might not be super plugged in to how Apple does things, but I genuinely cannot see them being able to help themselves from making a proprietary mount, then being the only people licensed to sell mount adapters...
Also, I don't think Apple (as of today) has the capability to "obliterate" the pro market. Are you simply talking about buying other companies, or making new home-grown products?
But it goes well beyond that. Apple has been investing for decades into video editing and post production software, codecs, image processing, AI, and electronics manufacturing. Plus, it's a brand already trusted by the video and photography industry which has been using their hardware and software products for decades.
They could indeed buy other companies, but I was referring to creating new products.
With respect to CMOS chips you can go from from calling up Sony and ordering one off the menu with your custom requirements, to designing the NAND/pixel interconnects, microlenses, downstream dual-gain architectures, to working on the bonding chemistry, masked pixels, CFAs etc, etc. However, all this stuff is patented up the wazoo, and companies like Sony, Samsung, Aptina, OmniVision etc do not simply hand-over world-class tech like this.
Apple is very good at supply chain logistics, overall packaging and design, UX, Software, etc. However, I don't see them challenging the established players on core technology.
Maybe introduce a way to attach extra lens as MagSafe accessories some day.
https://www.wired.com/2013/10/this-jony-ive-designed-camera-...
I sync my camera photos to my Photos library along side phone pictures and whenever I’m flipping through to share something with a friend, they always notice and comment, “You took those on your phone!?” The difference is still huge.
I bought a sony android phone (which after a lot of research seems to be produced in Japan) to my father because he refuses to use anything produced in China and I am also very hesitant to buy stuff that is produced in countries that don't generally care about quality, the environment etc. I have thought about buying a Nikon for a long time but this maybe will make me reevaluate that pick.
Let's guess where your father's mask is made during this pandemic. Given that China has provided 200 billion masks, the answer is almost obvious. Please throw away all your masks made in China, right away!
I'm also curious how long it will take you to find a country that is both willing and able to sell you masks during this pandemic.
But regarding masks, I live in Sweden and basically no one here wears a mask, including my father. Both me and my father have been isolated of course but there is really no need for him to wear a mask. We shop online and otherwise only meet people from our own family.
I work from home and he closed his company and went retired this year. I guess the joke is on you my friend.
Can't believe we're 10+ months in and people still think like that. Didn't the Swedish gov and even the king declared they fucked up big time like last week ?
Sweden's covid handling is a total failure:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/
That was related to how they handled old people and care homes. The Swedish government still firmly believes that general mask use is at best unnecessary.
Sweden is not like your typical big american city, a lot of swedes live in houses with gardens and of course a lot of us also live in apartments in a city but that is not me and it is not my father.
If it were, we would both be wearing masks.
If it were a joke, it's not funny.
Don't worry, we're taking it more serious than most of the country.
They also provided the pandemic to start with. Great way to do business !
So far, it hasn't impacted a lot of their product line that was already being manufactured outside of Japan. But it does create a stain in the minds of those who know to look or have been on the Nikon train for years. Everyone always looked at their products with a level of quality that's going to be questioned now.
Nikon has made some great strides in products recently. The mirrorless race has been progressing fast, and optically Nikon is in good shape. Their biggest issues are financials, professional markets to an AF system that's not as good as the competition, and really really bad marketing orders from their Japan office.
Sony and Canon have managed to pickup so much momentum with great marketing and Nikon is moving the other direction.
But the "death of Nikon" warnings have been going on since I first picked up a camera in the early 2000's. They've always been behind the curve the in digital, and caught up when it was just too late and Sony had already dominated the mirrorless market while everyone else was still on DSLRs.
Disclaimer: I shoot on a Nikon D850 and Z6II.
I wonder if that's related at all.
> Don’t think this is enough to make them stay in the business. Troubling times for Nikon :(
Is there some context on this? Is Nikon facing trouble, and if yes, why?
That leads to a world of trouble for them:
- mobile phones eating the “good enough”/ “well integrated” spectrum
- Sony eating the “best value”/“modern camera” spectrum
- Fuji eating the “different form factor” spectrum
- Panasonic still hanging on the 3/4 side
They’ll survive, and keep making good camera that pros are waiting for, but it will be rough.
A bit like how Vim and Emacs’ future is not bound to how they do against each other. It would more about securing a place in their user’s life in the first place.
Even in the early 2010s Nikon was thought as the innovator and techically better than Canon but Sony stole that title. Nikon fumbled with the mirrorless market quite spectacularly and nowadays its mirrorless cameras like Z6 and Z7 are basically copies of what Sony published year or two earlier but with quite bad native lens line-up.
The funny thing here is that Nikon outsourced the sensor development to Sony in the 2000s.
I also bought a Fuji this year (X-T30), upgrading from an old Canon Rebel. I'm so far really liking it. For me it's as much about the form-factor as it is about the image quality.
Regarding phone cameras; they are quite nice these days but it's a different market. You can pick up a decent mirrorless camera for the price of a top range smart phone and it will give you a much wider range of options in terms of quality, focal length, stabilization, etc. That matters to only some people but those people still exist.
From the form factor to ergonomics, plus I use it as a webcam with incredible bokeh. Mirrorless is the future, and I don't even miss full frame.
Canon kind of "owns" the DSLR video camera market, but gets regularly beaten in still images for pros.
What Canon has, is diversification. It's a much bigger company, with many different markets.
If a device records twenty minutes or more of continuous video, it is classified as a video device, which changes the regulatory structure.
If you watch movies, these days, it's almost unheard of for a single shot to be more than a minute or two in length. Even films like 1917 are really digitally-stitched montages.
I think the real reason is that Canon is ferociously dedicated to video, and they market that aggressively. It's a very different market from still images.
"Camera Sales in 2020 Have Plummeted As Much As 54%"
https://petapixel.com/2020/11/06/camera-sales-in-2020-have-p...
Really sad since they made such a great camera line. Perhaps a buyout is still possible.
(I got a tour of the Mirror Lab at the University of Arizona a couple years back; many large telescope mirrors are made here. Pretty cool. As I recall, one of the key steps involved getting raw material for glass from Japan.)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jNgEHCd5XKo
I just remembered that I watched this the other day, and it feels strange that it's about to end for good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-field_camera
If so, Lytro made a camera based on that tech.
I really feel that Japan Inc. needs a version of that Stephen Elop “burning platform” rant.
The F5 appeared in 1996. Are you really saying that Nikon haven't produced a great camera in 25 years? I personally think the D3s (2009) was a pretty amazing camera for sport / low-light work, although obviously it has been superseded since then.
It is the “wow” factor that ultimately makes or breaks the internal psychology that drives greatness at companies.
I like all of them. Are any of them amazing? Sure, why not?
The D70 was just $1000 which was great. The D2X and D3 are built like tanks. I think my D850 is the best DSLR ever made.
DSLR don't make sense. The mirror in film SLRs was always a compromise [1] that doesn't exist once you have a digital sensor. It was a compromise that became popular, at least in 35mm. The DSLR was a legacy format that was "professional" only because camera manufacturers would put things like big focus motors on mirrorless cameras. Market forces slowed the adoption of mirrorless and gave the SLR a reprieve to their inescapable demise.
So in a sense, ya, the F5 is greater than any D-SLR. The F5 is the pinnacle of the SLR, an excellent solution in the film domain. Digital SLRs are compromised format for a solution no longer needed.
[1] The SLR lets you see what the film will actually see. +1. The SLR has mirror shake -1, and a film plane that's far from the last lens element -1. For small "sensors" like 35mm, it (usually) wasn't that big a problem (lightweight mirrors, geometrically smaller distances between lens and focal plane). For medium format, SLRs (like Hassleblad) were neck in neck with other solutions (Rollei, Fujifilm). For large format, I don't think there was any SLR made.
Good thing with Nikon was that I could just use my old glass without adapters.
Nowadays, I just use film and my phone.
First a cop out to what I'm about to say. My arguments are specifically for geometric optics as used in photography. Also, my argument is in the limit that (non-optical) technology gets better. Also, while I took (and loved) many optics classes at university a lifetime ago, I ultimately did not become an optical engineer. I'm sure there are many nuances in my arguments bellow.
But largely they should be correct.
The Lytro camera is a camera that records the angle of incidence of light rays. If you have the angle of incidence of rays then the entire problem of (geometric) lens design is finished. Everything a lens can do can be done in software. Think of Lytro as software defined radio.
With a light field camera you can design the physical lens with a single objective: f-stop. Gather as much light as possible. You can adjust everything else in software. This is like SDR where (I guess) you optimize the antenna for bandwidth and noise.
By adjust I don't mean "adjust" as in apply AI or heuristic to make it appear as if you've achieved a goal. This is what your cellphone does. I actually change the lens. Since you have the ray's angle of incidence you can roll the rays back to before they reached the camera lens, and then put your own, software defined, lenses. This is probably not how you would implement the algorithm, but it illustrates the point.
Therefore you can change focal length, aperture, break physical limits (ridiculous index of refractions with no dispersion. infinitely thin lens).
Back to reality, what does it take to achieve all of this? Optically the Lytro all ready did all of this. It failed, but for the reasons that an Apple product would hit it out of the ballpark - implementation. With better software/computer power the product would be easier more convenient to use. With bigger, better sensors (to better capture the ray's angle) the camera would be able to emulate more lenses.
Therefore, 20th century type photography is dead. A modern photographer could just take a camera out, really take a shot without minding much about aiming it [1], completely ignore light and focus, and everything else could be done in software.
Frankly I think this will kill photography - but honestly, I think cell phones have killed most non-art, non-professional photography already. Amateurs are far worse (i.e. boring) photographers today then 30 years ago. That's a judgement call, sure, but that's what I enjoy.
[1] As long as the subject is captured, it won't really matter. You can pan in post processing. You can even adjust for perspective [2]! Just roll the rays outside the physical lens, and move your software lens to where you want it.
[2] Perspective - the size of elements of the scene wrt to each other - is strictly about where the camera is wrt to the subject. It has nothing to do with the lens. Lazy photographers make the mistake of "zooming" into the subject to get close - but the subject is as flat. In software, you can move the lens, and therefore even change perspective.
But a ray has both a position and a direction vector. If you can measure the complete ray vector -- its position and direction at the same time, then you can compute where it came from, even if the lens is not perfectly designed. The light field sensor relaxes the lens design problem considerably.
An earlier technology called a Shack-Hartmann sensor, similarly measures the full light field at once. It's used for things like measuring the wavefront quality of lasers.
There is still a problem, which is that you have to assign a physical sensor pixel to each point in a 4-d space (2 position and 2 direction coordinates), which means that you have to give up some of the spatial resolution of the sensor. This makes it hard to compete in a market that is clamoring for more and more megapixels. Instead, the sales pitch has to be more nuanced, as in comparing the actual image quality of the pictures, which is a harder sell when the quality of pictures from cell phone cameras is pretty damn good.
I agree, if I remember correctly Lytro had 1M pixles (??) during the 10Mpxl era. But as larger sensor appear (to my surprise - a sensor is a fixed area of Si!) to become cheaper to make I think this problem will go away.
Also, these are problems that companies like Apple excel at smashing. Apple disdains what the consumer thinks they want and they have a legion of fan boys to become early adopters and proselytize the masses. Incidentally, I think the founder of Lytro now works for Apple.
As you say, the implementation failed but it demonstrated that the technology was feasible. Now the IP is with Google. I'm just waiting for the day when someone perfects light-field technology for cell phone cameras.
From what I read was that the software was slow, and it was a pain in the butt to go back and re-frame or refocus a shot. People don't do post-processing for mere white balance [1], why would they bother for focus, focal length, depth of field, pan, and perspective?
On the other hand, it means that high end gear is done. Once a well executed light field camera comes to market professionals will flock to it. They have to do post-processing anyway so they'll adopt the camera that is smaller, lighter, single insanely fast lens. Most importantly perhaps, a camera where they don't have to wrestle the bloody auto-focus (the kid! focus of the running kid on the edge of the shot!).
Better sensors and faster CPUs and digital cameras as we know them are dead.
[1] That's why I like film, preferably B&W. Take the time to do the right shot. Accept the results.