Sony discontinues its last DSLRs
engadget.com
engadget.com
When you look through the viewfinder your looking through the lens due to a mirror and a prism that sits on top of the camera. When you take a picture the mirror flips out of the way and the image goes straight onto the film/sensor (after the shutter opens for a precise amount of time). There was some interesting tricks with light path to the the autofocus sensor. The prism is great because it un reverses the image.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_single-lens_reflex_c...
Because of digital you can read the sensor and now show the image in a small screen in the viewfinder instead.
However, single lens reflex cameras without a pentaprism are not unknown. [1] They typically correct top-bottom orientation leaving left-right reversed. They are simpler, needing only a single mirrored surface. Most twin-lens reflex cameras also operate this way.
Though SLR designs became popular, rangefinder cameras avoid a great deal of the complexity and bulk of SLR designs at the potential expense of parallax issues. On the positive side, a rangefinder camera will typically allow seeing elements outside of the film area and tend to be more compact. One reason for Lecia cameras popularity.
[1]: The Graflex reflex cameras are an example, http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Graflex_reflex_models
Sony, Canon, Nikon, they seem to have roadmaps for a full range of lenses for full-frame, from wide-angle to super-telephoto.
But APS-C? Meh. It’s a little confusing as to what works with what (hi, Canon, with your EF-M mount), and given that they never fully fleshed out a set of compact-but-performant sports lenses for that sensor size…it all seems perfunctory.
They seem to want to only sell full-frame, as that’s where the sweet meat of the margins can still be found in camera sales. All their APS-C cameras feel like “get the value buyer in the door”, but, that seemingly hampers growing into the rest of the system, as they only have a middling set of crop sensor lenses.
As smartphones have continued to get better (first via optics, then via software/computational processing) it has been the physics that has kept full frame (and medium format) relevant.
Personally I was a huge fan of m4/3 for the lower weight/smaller/open format interchangeable lens system but one cannot deny the cross-over between it and smartphones is perhaps too close to survive (Olympus is already out).
APS-C isn't as bad as m4/3, but why invest tons of resources/time into a format that can also get swallowed by the megafauna that is smartphones (via e.g. periscope lenses)? Instead, they can offer consumer grade/entry level FF cameras, with no lens system dilution or headaches trying to implement an inter-compatible flange focal distance (between APS-C/FF).
I recently bought a Sony A6000 to see if I would enjoy having a dedicated camera over my smartphone. Overall I like it, but I'm really shocked at well my smartphone does in comparison for 90% of photos.
There are certainly some major benefits to a dedicated camera such as low light performance, depth of field, better focusing, etc. But, honestly, for 99.9% of photos people are going to take (portrait photos of friends/family and etc), a decent smartphone does a better job.
There is a great deal of "super 35" cinema glass that commands non-consumer prices due to the quality of the optics. For stills, "full frame" lenses make more sense since they serve APS-C as well.
Digitally, APS-C sensors made even more sense as television (and video) moved away from 4:3 ratio. APS-C stills cameras introduced by Kodak in the days before digital became common is another story...or the same story of Kodak trying to lock in a proprietary system (that story goes back to the first Kodak cameras).
My (limited) understanding being that mirrorless tech. has basically whooped moving-mirror tech. 's behind in a major way.
Any photographer care to comment on why that might not be the case?
It is not a huge loss though, because pros almost exclusively buy their DSLRs from Canon and Nikon.
I have to disagree about viewfinders and batteries being inferior. The viewfinder is an acquired taste. If you look at cinematography and movie production, you’d need to search for a long time before you found an optical viewfinder. And I just shot a 12hr production on a single battery, using the highest resolution DSLR on the market. No pro photographer will ever need more than a day of battery life.
I respectfully disagree with that. Current generation viewfinders have excellent resolution and very little lag, and while that will never be as perfect as an optical viewfinder, they do have the great benefit of being able to show you the image as it would be after exposure (so you can see which parts would be over or underexposed for example), and can overlay much more useful information.
Don't forget that EVF can surpass OVF in image quality because they can apply lens correction to the viewed image which brings the image closer to the final product. (although AFAIK it's not done currently)
Canon and Nikon are also shifting en masse to mirrorless. So the tides have clearly changes across the board.
I upgraded last year to a Sony A7ii, and this one's even better.
The tl;dr is that, at this point, optical viewfinders are overrated. The best EVFs are just as good.
Pros aren't married to glass or to viewfinders, though. They're married to lens mounts. Glass investment dwarfs camera body cost. That's the sticking point.
The worst part of the A72 was the battery and the buffer. The A73 made both of those concerns a non-issue.
It's not so much that "mirrorless tech. has basically whooped moving-mirror tech. 's behind in a major way." But that mirrorless tech has gotten good enough that the inherent advantages of eliminating the mirror aren't overshadowed by the need to use an electronic viewfinder instead.
Huh? EVF and OVF have their own advantages but it is not correct to say optical quality of one is better than the other.
EVF can do things such as boost the exposure which makes things like the 800mm f/11 possible. This would be much too dark otherwise on an OVF.
EVF can also electronically correct the image for certain types of abberations that the lens introduce.
EVFs also don't introduce their own abberations that OVFs do because there isn't as much glass or mirrors to move the image from the lens to the viewer.
OVF certainly have advantage from being a "live" image for tracking purposes but EVFs have mostly caught up enough to make that difference negligible.
But modern EVF is good for most purposes. And I'm sure the newest Canon digital bodies have even better ones than my Fujifilm X-E3. (Which itself is at least "good enough," while the X-E1 was more like "mostly sufficient.")
But these particular SLRs? Nah. They were nice and all, but not particularly differentiated in any way.
Whereas an EVF can fairly accurately show you composition, exposure at current settings, any sort of raster graphic they want on the screen (eg the head silhouette to frame passport shots), etc.
My biggest gripe with the EVF is that it kinda sucks for astrophotography. I have to crank the ISO way up, take a test shot, and then turn it down before a long exposure. Our eyes are just much better at focusing on dim points in the sky.
They are very different. Even though that DSLR is eight years old, it gets battery life that any mirrorless camera can only dream of (>1000 shots without a battery grip). Even though the mirrorless has one of the better EVFs among it's peers, the resolution is not quite as good as the OVF, and it does have visible lag and smear that the OVF simply doesn't have (the EVF is a 85 Hz OLED with 1280x1024 pixels or something like that, iirc).
The DSLR has a faster AF if you are wildly out of focus, though the AF is overall much worse - the mirrorless has like 10x as many AF points, and they are all over the frame, and it has flawless video autofocus, as well as almost perfectly accurate autofocus.
The full-frame mirrorless is about the same size and weight as the APS-C DSLR. A full-frame DSLR would be quite a bit bigger and heavier.
The real difference is that you get a lot of stuff just like that in a mirrorless which are somewhat of a pain in a DSLR. Viewfinder magnification, good video AF, silent shooting with the viewfinder, customizable finder display, nightvision, histograms, distortion correction in the finder (critical for precise framing with ultra-wide lenses), focus peaking etc.
There are some differences which are pretty much purely hype. Things like eye AF for example pretty much only matter for people who mostly do "ultra-blurry background" portraits which have such a thin depth of field that when the iris of the eye is in focus, the eyelashes are already blurry. It's a very specific thing to do, but gets around 90 % of the air-time in "totally independent reviews I swear I'm not sponsored".
At the current top-end, DSLRs like the Nikon D6 are said (not that I would have any idea about that) to still have somewhat faster AF than comparably expensive mirrorless cameras.
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As for Sony, they inherited the A-mount when they bought Konica-Minolta. The A-mount was at that point in time already a legacy mostly-mechanical-with-some-electrical-bits-kind of mount (e.g. mechanical aperture control, mechanical autofocus through a coupling in the mount). The E-mount is a modern, fully electronic mount, though designed for APS-C (full-frame just barely fits into it). I think when the E-mount was introduced it should have been clear that anything A-mount is on the way out. Also, A-mount SLRs where never particularly high-end, so in terms of performance I'd expect them to be significantly below what Nikon and Canon offer, especially because it does not seem like there was much development on these after the E-mount was introduced.
Just like Nikon F is clearly on the way out with Nikon Z being around, an Canon EF being on the way out with Canon RF around, the same is true for the A-mount.
I swear that my 2008 Nikon D700 had functionally unlimited battery life. My mirrorless camera would be hard-pressed to get through a day of shooting on vacation on one battery, but that tank seemingly had a Mr. Fusion inside of it.
(And the battery life is the real killer.)
That’s arguably not an SLR. Sort of. It’s an SLT. Used that neat semi-transparent non-moving mirror to simultaneously directs light to the imaging sensor and the phase-detect sensor.
I just hate that Sony can't be bothered to give an explicit send-off to the A-mount line. Coupled with their abysmal customer service reputation, this really makes Sony my textbook example of a faceless, uncaring $BIGCORP. (Oh should I call them $ONY now?) It's really such a shame since I like their products, otherwise.
I've owned an SLT-A35 since 2011. Being the first interchangeable lens camera I bought, this purchase was a declaration of investment in Sony's ecosystem. Four or five years later, the A-mount line grew stale in favor of the mirrorless line. 2015-2016 was confusing because Sony won't just admit their roadmap for the A-mount. I remember they did release a few more A-mounts but it was either at the very high end or was Japan-only.
FWIW, at least I scored one great deal because camera shops started to practically give away their A-mount inventory. And I got a mount adapter that I now use with an a6K. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The alpha 6000 was released in 2014 and the last firmware update is 3.21 released in 2019.
I have two Sony cameras - an Mk1 RX100 and a A7R III, both acquired shortly after their initial releases. I don't think I've ever updated the firmware on the RX100, and just once on the A7R III (I believe it was to get the uncompressed RAW capability), mainly due to laziness. But for my amateur level use, I don't think I've ever had any problems.
There have also been some updates that e.g. allow better use of the camera as a webcam.
Besides this looks like a product team that got fired or didn't get renewed or something. There are contemporary Alpha cameras that are still getting updates, but the NEX was just a flash in the pan.
(Honestly, Canon and Nikon don’t exactly tell a coherent story there either…)
It’s really unclear if they ever want to fully flesh out the lens line for that sensor size, and they don’t seem to have much enthusiasm for the line. Honestly, they seem to just want to sell full-frame.
I know I only reach for my Pentax K3-II for special occasions or special uses, like trying to capture wildlife (which is too far away and too fast for most smartphone captures.) But Pentax seems to be a (nearly) dead brand in this space. If I wanted to keep doodling in the hobby, I'd probably eventually have to switch to mirrorless or switch to the Canon/Nikon duopoly. I would greatly miss the rugged feel, durability and weather resistance in my Pentax body and lenses.
I expect they'll slowly stop releasing new DSLRs over the coming years.
And FWIW, a good friend of mine is a pro photographer and said he'll likely not buy any new DSLR bodies. But, he's still a few years away from needing a new body. Not to mention has north of $30k in glass, so would still run an RF with adapter for quite some time.
Most Sony users knew the Axx series (SLR/SLT) were dead when the A7 (mirrorless) released. Sony basically abandoned everything else to focus on their mirrorless platform and it gave them a huge market presence.
Then I realised that actually all my old lenses were really bad quality, and an A7-III would need an adapter for them anyway. The only one that was vaguely decent was an old 400mm prime lens, but even that one I picked up for a pittance on Ebay a decade ago.
So, I bought a Nikon. The modern lenses I have bought for that are miles better than the old lenses I had on my old camera.