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Comment by ur-whale | Hacker News Reader

The question being of course: is that in any way a loss?

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?

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Most professional photographers who used DSLRs ten years ago are still using them. Electronic viewfinders are fundamentally inferior in terms of the viewing experience and battery life, but have other pluses like light weight, low cost and configurability (all of which amateurs prioritize more than professionals).

It is not a huge loss though, because pros almost exclusively buy their DSLRs from Canon and Nikon.

Yeah. Even Canon is switching over to mirrorless at this point although I assume they'll keep one or two pro reflex models in their line for the foreseeable future.

I'm a pretty enthusiastic hobby photographer, and I jumped on mirrorless systems + EVFs several years back. On the Olympus OM-D E-M10 (and what IS it with Japanese electronics companies and ridiculous nomenclature?), the EVF was absolutely never a problem EXCEPT in that it impacted battery life a bit (solution: a second battery in your pocket).

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.

Get the A73 and you’ll never think about the battery again.

The worst part of the A72 was the battery and the buffer. The A73 made both of those concerns a non-issue.

I'm very, very happy with the A7ii, especially at the price point. Battery life is not in my way in any meaningful sense. I have no plans to upgrade.

Pros buy new cameras about once a decade. And they don’t like drastic changes in UI. The reluctance to change and infrequent purchase cadence makes supporting the professional market a real bear. I understand that they typically sell their flagship models at a loss, but write the loss off as R&D.

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.

> Electronic viewfinders are fundamentally inferior in terms of the viewing experience [...]

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.

> that will never be as perfect as an optical viewfinder,

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)

EVFs have gotten much better since the early days of mirrorless. I prefer them immensely now, especially when it comes to manual focus or low light shooting. I would honestly reach for my mirrorless for my professional concert shooting over my SLRs.

Canon and Nikon are also shifting en masse to mirrorless. So the tides have clearly changes across the board.

Sony's SLRs didn't have a optical viewfinder anyway and haven't done for models released in the last 10 years (a580 was the last one with a optical viewfinder).

Arguably an optical finder is still better in certain ways, such as optical quality and the fact that they're always "on." But electronic viewfinders have gotten quite good and this is clearly the future for most uses.

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.

Personally I find resting the camera against my face and looking through the viewfinder to be more much comfortable than holding it out from my face and looking at the LCD. I can hold that position against my face basically indefinitely.

Absolutely. I'm talking about electric viewfinders that you look through just like you would an optical finder. Not using a back screen (although that can be useful too in certain circumstances).

> such as optical quality

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.

I'd still almost certainly take a DSLR OVF if other things were equal (which of course they're not).

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.")

As noted below: battery life and tracking autofocus is still superior if you get a really high-end DSLR; a Nikon D850 has just insane battery life if you use it like an old-school film camera with minimal screen usage, and the ability to track, say, birds in flight, is still superior.

But these particular SLRs? Nah. They were nice and all, but not particularly differentiated in any way.

I haven't tried the latest generation, but the display-based viewfinders just aren't quite a match for a good optical viewfinder in some ways (but have benefits in others). Running the sensor and a display at all times also is energy-intensive, pushing down battery life. It's a tradeoff, and while it clearly falls strongly towards mirrorless for most people, it doesn't for all.

addendum: someone pointed out that Sony already had digital view finders and only used the mirror for the autofocus sensors. That's a lot more relevant then, and somewhere as far as I know really technical progress makes the design obsolete.

I'm not a pro photographer but I do enjoy amateur stuff. In terms of the newest cameras the DSLRs have essentially no advantages and many disadvantages. The one major thing you could cite as an advantage is the quality of the picture you see when looking in the viewfinder. But for most folks that isn't enough to make up for the drawbacks of reflex cameras.

Quality isn’t overly important through the viewfinder. You’re just using it for composition.

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.

Not sure what camera you use, but in Canon's terminology you can turn off exposure simulation which will make the image through the EVF look like a correctly exposed image with ISO cranked way up but you can set your shot ISO as low as you want.

I own what some consider one of the best APS-C DSLRs ever made, as well as a last-gen full-frame mirrorless camera.

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.

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.

Even though that DSLR is eight years old, it gets battery life that any mirrorless camera can only dream of

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.

LCD (essentially fake) viewfinders are miserable experience. They suck up battery and don't give an optical view through the lens.

What? You literally see what the sensor is seeing...light is still passing through the lens.

If you have access to a DSLR with a rear LCD and a live view mode, compare that to the viewfinder optical view. Nowhere near the same quality.

(And the battery life is the real killer.)

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