Comment by mastazi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mastazi | Hacker News Reader

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> A lot of these features are nice to have but definitely not essential, especially for general amateur photography.

While I agree with you, I feel like on a mirrorless, the Sensor Dust Protector Curtain is essential if you want to be able to change lenses while out in the field.

Many years ago I used to work for a small local paper, they gave me a DSLR so I had the luxury of the sensor being at least partially protected by the mirror. (I wish they gave me two bodies so I didn't have to swap lenses, but it was a small newspaper and they didn't have a lot of money).

Now I own a mirrorless (that I don't use professionally) and I would never attempt to change the lens unless I'm in an indoor, non-dusty room, without fans or a/c operating. Just looking at the naked sensor staring back at me makes me nervous ;-)

I can't imagine swapping lenses on the mirrorless while on assignments, I think I would have to resort to buying a couple of bodies just to avoid lens swapping.

The curtain protection would solve that problem.

I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. Sensors can be easily cleaned! I’ve changed lenses on my Fuji mirrorless in wind, dust, huddled under an umbrella, etc. On the one occasion in the past 5 years that dust spots were an issue in a photo, a quick few pixel clone stamp solved the problem.

For the average shooter, even one who uses their camera like a tool, maintaining it reasonably should make this a nonissue.

Yes if you use your camera as a hobbyist I agree with you. For professional use, the clone stamp solution is not going to work, as I explained in the sibling thread. In that case you would need to have your sensor professionally cleaned, which can be done relatively easily as you mentioned in the beginning of your comment, but costs money at least where I live (Sydney, Australia).

Maybe I'm less fussy than others, but I've never understood why people are so obsessed with making sure their sensor is spotless. If a dust spot is in a place it's easy to see in the resulting image, then it's trivial to remove it in post. If it's somewhere that's hard to remove, then it's not noticeable. Maybe my standards are low :)

Like in any field, when you go from hobby to doing it as a job, any trivial task becomes a problem if you have to repeat it dozens of times per month.

Perhaps you can create a macro to apply the same edit automatically to all your imported pictures. In a fast paced industry like news, that's still an unwelcome overhead though.

You don't have to create a macro. Any good photo editor will let you copy/paste an edit template on a thousand photos instantly.

I’m not familiar with edit templates, they would be ok as long as they can be stored for later reuse, this is because the typical workflow in news is that you don’t edit 300 photos all at once at the end of the month, it’s more like: you edit 10 photos every day, and sometimes you edit 5 of them at noon and another 5 at 6pm (numbers and times are made up obviously).

I would love to have a protection curtain like that on E-M5. But so far, it hasn't been essential. I routinely change lenses outdoors, and haven't had (or noticed!) a problem with dust on the sensor. I have a routine for doing the swap quickly, with minimal exposure of the sensor. It's obviously not watertight, but it seems okay. Although i do feel a bit like Dave Bowman re-entering the Discovery without his helmet on every time i do it ...

I wouldn't know what I would need that curtain for. But I am using Olympus cameras which have the strongest sensor cleaning avialable. Olympus also was the first brand to offer sensor cleaning and never gave up their lead.

Yeah good sensor cleaning minimises the issue but I feel like the curtain would remove the source of the problem altogether

It wouldn't. It would minimize it but it still happens with a curtain or DSLR.

That’s true I should have worded differently. What I meant is that I prefer preventing Vs taking care of it after the fact

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