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Comment by jjav | Hacker News Reader

> Never is too late. But, if they update = someone use this camera.

Cameras don't age like software or phones, this is why I like them.

A 10 year old DSLR like the Nikon D7100 (I have one) is still a very modern camera and it'll be good for a few decades to come.

(Sadly this is why good companies like Nikon struggle financially, since there is no forceful upgrade treadmill unlike for phone companies. But as a consumer I absolutely love being able to buy something solid that'll work for decades.)

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Nikon fan here.

My first camera was a D3100 in 2010ish, which I recently sold to a friend of mine for $100 and they are still taking fantastic photos with it.

I have a D750 I bought when they were new and that fucker still works fantastic, taking gorgeous photos with the right lens.

Even bought a D3500 cause I missed the little guy. Same sensor as the D750 (expeed 4) just DX format and worse AF. Weighs like a third of the D750 too!

Nikon makes fantastic bodies and lenses.

Indeed!

I also have a Nikon D40 (2006) and it is still a perfectly great camera which I use fairly often. I only upgraded to the D7100 to have better physical controls. But I keep the D40 charged (charge lasts about 6 months) and with a small lens so it's ready whenever I want to grab a smaller lighter camera.

What's nice about that camera is that it will be good for even longer than a few decades to come if nothing otherwise falls apart. It will be good until you find the image quality unacceptable. Considering the image quality is already high enough to not be any limiting factor in most cases, I doubt you'd ever be hurting for an upgrade ever. The lenses too are unlikely to improve dramatically in the future. Lens designs at this point are 100 years old already because the laws of physics are sort of firm on what is possible. Autofocus motors are already plenty fast enough to capture a sprinting cheetah.

Once you are bought in, there's no point to upgrade because if anything it will be to spend thousands for marginal gains. Only worth it to pros who can spend thousands on gear a year as operating expenses for business where they bring in factors more with that equipment.

> It will be good until you find the image quality unacceptable.

As you said, probably never. There's only so many pixels the eye can see and the human eye isn't getting upgraded.

I have a print on the wall here which is 4ft wide, taken from a cropped section of a photo from my 24MP D7100 and it looks fantastic. Unless someone is printing out murals, there's no need for more and more megapixels.

Yeah!

If you don't need the video features of newer cameras, the main advantage of newer DSLRs is improved low light performance.

You don't need the extra megapixels unless you have specific needs, such as perhaps astrophotography.

An "ancient" ~7.2MP sensor gives you 3000x2400 pixels. Plenty for full page prints at 300DPI.

Even with the low light abilities, its not like low light photography was impossible before the sony a7s.... You do things like use a tripod or monopod. You can bring in supplemental lighting. You can also hand hold a wider lens and get away with lower shutter speeds too, and pull up what you can in post processing from the raw file. Noise can be made to look a lot more like film grain using some tricks in lightroom.

Right, of course. But being able to use faster shutter speeds is just a win in general for a huge number of applications.

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