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Comment by jonpurdy | Hacker News Reader

I recently bought a used 2016 Spark EV (having a baby and needed something other than my motorbike). It does have a touchscreen, but mostly for extraneous information and radio functions. Everything else has dedicated knobs and buttons. (The one dumb thing is that the fan speed updates on the screen, rather than just having ticks above the knob.)

It is a California "compliance car", which means it was just a modified petrol Spark, so it didn't have product managers trying to jam in unnecessary touch-based interfaces.

I just hope that all companies building electric cars don't move in the all-touch direction of Tesla.

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This is the exact same stupid thing that happened with DSLR cameras.

Old SLR cameras had a ring around the lens for f-stop and another dial on top for shutter speed.

New DSLR cameras even now hide all that stuff in a menu on the touch screen, as if it isn't something you want to change ALL THE TIME - and develop instant muscle memory for.

never mind that when I'm taking a photo outdoors on a bright sunny day, there's no way in fuck I'm going to be able read your LCD screen.

Never mind us older folks, who often have vision problems with up-close viewing, which is a solved problem when you can spin a shutter or aperture wheel by touch. But not when you need no-glasses to view the objective, but reading glasses to view the fine print on the screen.

I think backlit E-ink screens would be great for cars. I too want something I can see well in the day.

E-ink is slow/inefficient to react, so probably not suitable for speedometer and tachometer type gauges. Apart from that, I agree.

my truck still has a physical dial for the speedo and tach.

(although i've never understood why it has a tach since its a manual anyway... but i guess i can close my eyes and imagine my V6 ranger is a corvette...)

Perhaps they can be fast enough and my assumption was wrong, but I was imagining an e-ink version of a mechanical gauge like that as being sort of blurry and perhaps more delayed than the real thing.

Could be they want you to buy their Pro item where the actually offer reasonable affordances?

Most "pro-sumers" wouldn't bother to adjust what the auto-focus calculates anyway.

I'm not convinced about that.

I was using those dials all the time as a 16 year old learning to use a camera. It's really easy - especially when you can set one of them to auto and just control the one you care about - plus so quick when they're on a dial.

But I can believe no one wants to do it now, it's amazing how much a bit of tactile feedback can make a task 100X easier, and something you can do instinctively.

Tactile feedback and consistent UIs are great and a common feature (if not a defining one). I've got a Pentax dSLR -- it's got an excellent UI (better than canon's, imo) and their manual tweak focus adjustment & focus hold system does just work very well. It also has an excellent set of manual controls. A pity that nobody else has heard of them...

> Most "pro-sumers" wouldn't bother to adjust what the auto-focus calculates anyway.

I think that is the 'sumers. The prosumer gear is for people who actually want to play with all that stuff, but don't want to pay $10k for a pro body and lenses.

Which DSLR no longer has an aperture and shutter speed knob? I know the MFT mirrorless lost most of the controls, but did the latest Canon/Nikon really do this? My DSLR is eons old, so this is just baffling to me.

I haven't used one for a while so this may have been fixed. But I've never seen a DSLR with the same type of touch manual controls as an old SLR.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong and tell me where to buy one!

I have an older Canon 5Dmkii, and it has a dial for shutter speed near the shutter release and also has a dial ring for aperture control on the back. I'm pretty sure the mkiii and mkiv do as well. I know the 1D I used in the past also had the same configuration of dials.

As with anything camera related, where to buy could be B&H, Adorama, Sammy's, or your local camera shop (if they still exist in your area).

My Nikon D850 (DSLR) and Z6 (mirrorless) both have separate physical dials for shutter speed and aperture. The D850 has buttons that allow the physical command dials to be used to control ISO, white balance, bracketing intervals and load of other things. Important settings are shown in the viewfinder and top panel and I only really use the rear monitor to check the histogram for over exposure. I almost never need to use the menu system / touchscreen to alter a shooting setting.

I believe you want a Nikon DF or (and yeah, I know they're not DSLRs) any Fujifilm X series.

https://www.nikonusa.com/en/nikon-products/product/dslr-came...

$2,749.95

Who knew a few physical dials would be so expensive...

Some MFT's have plenty of physical controls (buttons/knobs). See Olympus OM-D line of cameras.

> New DSLR cameras even now hide all that stuff in a menu on the touch screen

Don't approximately all DSLR have separate physical knobs for aperture and shutter speed?

Agreed that a DSLR without these would be nearly useless.

I think I should correct to "dSLRs that I can afford"

I'm guessing that all-touch is just cheaper these days, no QA testing for all the little mechanical bits

Less design and engineering, sourcing and manufacturing of all that hardware too.

It annoys me about capitalism. There's a massive incentive for manufacturers to cut corners to save $100 on a $30k car, as they sell 10,000 cars and use the $1m to pay themselves a bonus about how great they are.

Almost everyone will want to pay $30,100 for the better product though, but the market can't differentiate on that.

I actually used to work as a test driver for FCA, and we were specifically told to report on knobs/dials not working or wiggling too much. Our training had us touch literally everything in the car that moved. Albeit, I'm not sure how much of that feedback was actually acted upon, based on the quality of some of those cars.

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