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Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

Nikon and Canon are both basically ending production of anything DSLR, except for basically the newest models and lenses which still show a profit.

As old inventory runs out on some of these older designs, they finally and officially mark them discontinued.

Nikon really needs to focus on their mirrorless lineup, especially since the Z mount is lacking a number of essential pro lenses, like anything over 200mm, macros, and other specialist lenses. Plus, their other new lenses (including the 'trinity' of pro zooms) are still in very short supply.

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It's possible they're in a downward spiral at this point, i.e. they were late to the mirrorless game and still aren't turning a profit on that platform yet because there's so much R&D left to do on new lenses, yet DSLR is cratering and no longer providing enough profit to fund R&D on mirrorless.

We saw it with Kodak and film->digital and now we may be seeing the same kind of death with DSLR->mirrorless in a big name like Nikon or Canon. Meanwhile, Sony got into it early and is eating everyone's lunch.

Kinda. The lunch table is shrinking too. Camera sales peaked in 2010, with 121M units sold. By 2019, they were at 15M units sold, and 2020 was a disastrous year, with COVID19, and it's not clear if there will be a rebound.

My camera is from shortly after 2010, incidentally, and I don't see a need to upgrade. At the same time, mounts are chaos. I have many thousands of dollars of lenses, and I'm not ready to make that kind of investment again, especially with the kind of uncertainty we have in the market.

Nikon and Canon likely got in too late, but the flip side is their mounts are better designs than E-mount. Coming in years later, they learned from Sony's mistakes. If they don't die, Sony might be squeezed out, or might make yet another mount.

Sony's support for A-mount all these years was less than acceptable.

What I would buy into is a mount-agnostic camera which adapted to A-mount, F-mount, K-mount, and EF-mount lenses with everything working (autofocus, video, etc.), and conversely, lenses which adopted to multiple mounts. Sigma almost did that, but mount conversions cost about as much as new lenses. There ought to be a swapable part.

You missed that boat - Tamron was doing that eons ago with their Adaptall systems. It was easy to do when everything was mechanical - aperture setting tabs on the lenses telling the body what was going on, basically an all-or-nothing lever arrangement doing the stop-down, manual focus, etc. With everything being electronic and "you'll need to reverse-engineer that" proprietary, a simple swapable arse on an otherwise generic lens really isn't in the cards anymore.

> My camera is from shortly after 2010, incidentally, and I don't see a need to upgrade.

Mostly same boat. I had (well, still have) a Nikon D70 from 2004. Just last year I benched it in favour of a Nikon D300s from 2009.

I've bought newer lenses because lenses have appreciably improved over the years, but in general I really don't think the camera tech has moved that far for most people's application.

I love Nikon, but I've spent... maybe $500 with them directly over my lifetime (35mm prime + 50mm prime bought new). With the F-mount remaining more-or-less compatible for over 60 years, there's a huge used market for their lenses and the older camera bodies are still workhorses a decade later.

It's sad, but the fact that they haven't been trying to wring every last cent out of the market with different lens mounts, planned obsolescence in the bodies, etc may in fact be a significant factor in their downfall.

Recently improved tech is about recording video, nowadays it's also big use case as much as photo.

Definitely. My camera is "only" from 2016 (an Olympus EM-5 II), but the video on it is absolutely subpar by current standards and I'd want to get something newer if I did more video. I also find that the autofocus tracking on swiftly moving objects (e.g. birds) isn't as good as it could be.

Same here. I've spent more on adapters for F-mount lenses on foreign bodies than I ever spent directly on new Nikkor lenses.

Just restarted being serious, kind of, at photography with a D200, 18-140 Nikkor and a FX Tamron up to 300. And the pictures are nice! I guess cameras, especially sensors, got good enough around 2010 to not make that much of a difference anymore. Which leaves lenses, like always. And the difference between FX and DX. I don't think Nikon will go under so. There lenses are decent, as are the Z-series bodies. And then there are people like me, that won't switch to another brand. Of the big three so, I do see Nikon the weakest. Not because of their products, but because Sony and Canon have additional revenue streams to cameras. If Nikon goes under, that would be quite said so. And the time to gear up maybe faster on a Z mount system. One can dream of a Z7 and and Z6II, can't one?

I do not consider Canon's mounts to be better than Sony's E-mount.

Canon is stuck with 2 mounts, the EF-M and the RF, with the RF being the more future proof one. But there is no way to adapt the EF-M to the RF. And there is no way to adapt any other MILC mount to RF.

Meanwhile, the Nikon Z-mount is as close as you can get to a universal mount. You can adapt almost everything E-mount, everything Laica, everything DSLR. And there are videos on YouTube doing just this. Its a combination of the largest diameter with the shortest flange distance.

I forsee Canon getting stuck in indecision.

I foresee the Canon EF-M competing favorably with the Nikon One mount.

One major limitation of E-mount is diameter. E-mount is 46.1mm to Canon's 54mm and Nikon's 55mm. I think a lot of the other limitations can be fixed, but that one is a bit tough for Sony. That means they will run into issues with vert fast/wide aperture lenses.

Nikon goes down to f/0.95 on their 58mm.

Nikon seems like the clear winner here.

In 2018 I bought a Sony A99II to use with my old Minolta A-mount lenses. I have a hunch it is going to be the last A-mount camera they ever make. If/when I buy another camera body, it will be an E-mount and I'll use an adapter to fit my A-mount glass.

Z-mount has the largest diameter and the shortest flange distance of any full-frame camera, so there's plenty of AF-ready adapters to most other mounts.

DSLR will remain in use for professionals. The battery life alone is a big driver, but also the superior AF abilities.

This was true in the past, but I don't think it's the case now. Professional mirrorless cameras support extended batteries and use the same sensors and processors as their DSLR counterparts. For example: Canon's EOS R5[1] uses the same processor[2] as the EOS-1D X MkIII[3].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_EOS_R5

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIGIC#DIGIC_X

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_EOS-1D_X_Mark_III

The autofocus system is different, though, and it matters for things like sports. The system housed in the optical viewfinder is faster than the one used in the live view sensors (which are comparable R5 and canons DSLRs as you state). The battery difference is also huge and very significant for professionals. A 5d lasts like 900 shots, an R5 lasts 300 shots. A pro will be switching batteries on an R5 a ton and will have to pack more in the bag, even with an extended battery grip, compared to a 5d or a 1d which has this grip essentially built into the body already (hence the size). No matter how far sensor technology marches forward, having to keep the sensor active and a small screen running in the viewfinder is going to use a lot of battery, compared to looking at the light in front of you through a prism, which uses none of course.

The market is moving towards MILC, including Canon's and Nikon 's top sports bodies (R3, Z9). With fast sensor readout and improved processing power, they will focus better than 1DX3 and D6 in most circumstances. Both with grips and larger batteries. They won't match DSLR at idle battery life, but the differences in shots when taking many bursts will be much smaller than CIPA suggests.

Technological replacement happens when new tech has important advantages over the old, without needing to outperform it in every single way.

They may not focus better in every scenario, just 'different'. And I've found there are certain types of photography where focus on even entry-level mirrorless destroys the DSLR experience.

But for sports and wildlife, you do need to get the highest-end bodies for a pleasant AF experience that can match the high-end DSLRs like the D850, D500 (which IMO were basically 'magic' in giving keepers once you understood the system).

The bigger advantage with mirrorless, as the image processing pipeline catches up, is the ML algorithms that can run on the entire image giving more control over focus tracking in weird situations, where the more optical AF systems in DSLRs don't have as much data to build from.

It's crazy how good AF got over the years on DSLRs, and it's also amazing how quickly all three (Sony, Nikon, and Canon) have put together competent AF pipelines in their mirrorless bodies. Sony leads here a little, but just barely, and mostly because they were all-in on high-end mirrorless before Nikon or Canon really got serious.

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