No one tried.
Everyone wants proprietary lock-in. No one wants to open up.
It's very much like the pre-iPhone phone market. It's not that no one wanted an iPhone, but that before Apple, no one was willing to try making one.
As a result, the camera market is all but dead:
https://www.canonwatch.com/here-is-what-happened-to-the-came...
My phone works better for most purposes (holistically) than my full-frame camera. At this point, no one has money to make the kind of investment needed to revive it, and an open model is unlikely to see the light of day. 2024 models aren't much better than 2014 models. My main camera is from 2012, and not worth upgrading.
Curiously, lenses keep progressing at a slow but steady clip. Sigma just announced an f/1.8 full frame 28-45mm zoom lens.
There were many attempts, some listed in other comments[1][2].
> 2024 models aren't much better than 2014 models.
Depending on the type of photography that you do, there were significant improvements[3]. Not to mention mirrorless replacing DSLRs.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40970059
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40970490
[3]: https://fstoppers.com/gear/decade-evolution-cameras-now-vers...
Even the basic GPS tagging is not available on most cameras. You have to run some crapp on your phone and hope that Bluetooth works.
Interestingly, Android was originally meant to be a camera OS, until they pivoted because mobile phones were a larger market[1].
[1]: https://www.androidauthority.com/android-history-digital-cam...
For a cool $10k? Not going to be popular in any case, as are the RED cameras. These are all pro-level cameras.
> Nikon Coolpix S800c
A useless toy, that happened to have a just barely better image quality than built-in phone cameras at that time.
If you try to find mirrorless cameras with Android, with a reasonable price ($1k-$3k), then there's only NX. Nobody else even tried that seriously.
NX was great, I had it for a while (it was stolen). It suffered from Gen1 diseases, that could have been fixed. But _nothing_ comes close in usability ever since. I have Sony Alpha, and it's UI/UX is just shit. I don't use it at all anymore, I don't want to spend time categorizing and manually geotagging its photos.
There was ONLY the NX. There were _no_ other mid-level Android cameras. And Galaxy NX was produced by Samsung, which is not known for their cameras.
So there was a grand total of ONE model of mid-level Android cameras. And it was fairly successful, but never got any improvements.
> people just didn’t like it and chose smartphones.
Most people haven't heard about Android cameras and never had a chance to try them.
No, these were not such attempts. A touchscreen camera is NOT what I want. The point isn't to make it phone-friendly or phone-like, but to make it open. Knobs and buttons are good.
The Olympus AIR and Sony QX series cameras would be awesome if they came with open APIs so I could program them. They came with proprietary Sony / Olympus kludges which ran on smartphones. The Olympus AIR is officially dead; the app is no longer maintained, and doesn't work on modern phones. Olympus was actually starting to try (in contrast to Sony), and released things like 3d CAD models, but the product was discontinued before it was finished.
Tossing Android on a camera is not the same as an open camera. An open camera would allow me to:
1) Write apps for it, taking advantage of what it can do.
2) Make accessories for it. This includes an open mount standard (of which MFT is the only one; I have the spec for the asking), an open hotshoe standard, open batteries, etc.
I'd be able to do things like super-resolution, custom white balance, custom autofocus systems, custom grids (rule-of-thirds / etc), and so on. I'd be able to program a handful of them to all have the same white balance, settings, and trigger, so I could shoot from five angles at once. I'd be able to use them for machine vision applications or video conferencing, for the coding. For power zoom lenses, I'd be able to eliminate focus breathing by adjusting focus and zoom together. I could make a panorama app, a focus stacking app, or an app which did smart image stacking for low light. I could toss on a machine learning algorithm on it, and have a custom shutter control so it decided when to shoot. I could use IBIS to track the stars for night photography.
That's what an open camera would consist of.
NOT a touch screen, Android, and connections to Instagram and Youtube.
> Not to mention mirrorless replacing DSLRs.
I was shooting mirrorless long before that.
Indeed, 10 years ago, you could buy a Sony A7R. Go to DPReview, and compare high ISO images from the A7R versus a top-of-the-line $6000 A9III and tell me which one is better. Or compare them on DxOMark.
10 years buys us:
- Higher video resolution
- Better autofocus
- Instead of obscenely fast shooting speed, we now have incredulously fast shooting speed
Unfortunately, the images aren't noticeably better, though.
120fps is kind of useless (unless you want to spend your life sorting through images; that's over 7000 images for a minute of shooting). Some models do give more resolution (notably, not the A9III in this comparison; the A7R had more), but that's only usable under bizarre conditions (even shooting 24MP, with an f/1.4 lens, if one eye was in focus, the other eye would be limited by DoF and not the sensor). Plus, a 4k monitor tops out at 8MP.
I will mention: If cameras used the same kind of smarts as a Google Pixel Pro, the images would be much better.
Yea and the abysmal experience with the iPhone 1, 2 and 3 showed precisely why.
> No one wants to open up.
The first iPhone was only available on a single cellular carrier in the US.
> no one has money to make the kind of investment needed to revive it,
It's not the lack of money. It's the lack of expected ROI.
M43 also lives on fine in Panasonic's lineup. Logitech just released a M43-mount $1000 live streaming cam ("Mevo Cam"). And like you say, the standard is open. I don't think it will die. The compactness of the lenses and their relatively lower price makes a lot of sense esp for new entrants (see "Alice Camera" etc).
Just the leaps in ISO we’ve seen absolutely makes this statement untrue, something smart phones absolutely are way far behind on.
A7S went ISO 50 - 409,600. That's early 2015. MSRP was $2500.
That's the same as $6300 EOS R1, double the $5400 Nikon X6III, 8x the $1500 Lumix S9, 8x the $4300 R5 Mark II, and 8x the $6000 Sony S9.
Those are the most recently reviewed cameras on DPReview.
Per DxOMark, like-for-like, we're up maybe 30% in a decade for typical cameras. You won't see that in a photo.
As others have mentioned, lack of geotagging, wireless connectivity, and other convenience features made them poor competitors to smartphones. And it wasn't just wireless connectivity being behind the times, Canon's T7i (aka 800D) launched in 2017 still made you find a mini USB cable. They were good at optics, but dropped the ball on the rest of the product.
Even though the phone had worse quality pictures, it brought many other things to the table.
Even when discussing just the on-camera UI, there's nothing about "tools for professionals" that says they must never change the UI, or that every setting must be immediately accessible in a flat hierarchy, or that you must use a one-axis scroll wheel to change a 2D focus point, etc.
Yes, it's a great thing that there are features of a standalone camera (like instant on, or physical buttons) that smartphones don't have. However, that doesn't mean the cameras have to disregard all the UX and UI changes other electronics have gone through over the last 10-20 years (some good, some bad, but over the long term they've become more approachable to more people). Meanwhile cameras remained largely unchanged and as a result DSLRs are pretty much a dead segment now. (I too loved the viewfinder and ability to use them without an screen, especially when optical... but not the rest of the experience).
As a former amateur photographer, I eventually sold all my bodies and lenses because it was just such a pain to use them compared to the smartphones and prosumer prime compacts of the day, which were all iterating much faster than the "proper" DSLRs. Back in those days, even just getting the photos off the camera wirelessly was a pain, requiring the use of 3rd-party WiFi SD cards or really old USB cables. I think these days mirrorless is once again trying new things, but I'm out of the hobby now and can't afford to reinvest into it :(
Well, the person upthread did say "I don't think any of the camera manufacturers have good UX people" (emphasis mine) and the kitchen appliance companies don't either
The menu hierarchy isn't flat.
Physical knobs for everything, even customizable. Touch to focus (though I prefer using the ring tbh).
BT/WiFi transfer. A bit slow (2-3 sec for a 50mb raw photo) but fine for what I need. I use a USB-c SD reader for my phone and sync the entire card to an SD card in my smartphone.
Full size HDMI built in.
I don't think I would say that cameras are dead, it's just that it's a hobbyist thing now. Most of my friends would never buy a camera except a cheapy one like an Instax for fun, they're not dropping a grand on an f1.4 35mm.
Can I ask how your experience with the electronic viewfinder has been? Is it as fast and clear as a traditional dSLR's optical viewfinder?
You can tell that it is a screen because of the HUD etc but it doesn't "feel" like one in practice.
I hear that the newer ones are better still.
If you go to a camera shop they should let you try it, that's how I went for mine.
It was sort of an insane jump but I'm having an amazing experience.
I told the wife I'd take very nice photos of a kid to try to justify the cost.
The glass alone can be $750- 1-3k. I'm borrowing glass rn.
Check out the sonyalpha subreddit to see what people are doing with it
"They sell tools not toys" - no offense, I hate deceptive UX engineering and e14n as the next guy - and vibration motors in Dyson vacuums - but that kinds of denials existed, and IMO had hamstrung Japanese tech products for too long.
"Piddly old wifi" is part of the problem, it's certainly what I'd expect camera vendors to support. You can push multiple gigabits over a good wifi connection these days.
If any camera companies are reading this, you probably read "I wish my camera came with a purpose-built app specific to your brand of cameras manufactured in 2024 (to be EOLed and replaced by a different app next year) and reimplementing an entire photo library with sync to your own subscription services because your manager says you need subscription revenue," but no I'd just like it to join my house's wifi network and give me a button on the computer to copy the files to a folder or add them to my Photos library.
Most people with DSLR’s or mirrorless are working with around 3lbs even with a lens.
This seems like the kind of thing that a single, dedicated hacker could crack wide open.
The pieces are all commodity, no? People can buy lenses independently, so you don't have to design those. Everything else should be COTS--processor, networking/cellular, display, etc.
It might not be super cheap, but it shouldn't exceed $500 on the BOM. And then people can iterate on it over time.
Phones have taken the place of the old point and shoots.
That doesn't mean that manufacturers of pro-sumer interchangeable lens cameras couldn't do a better job with software, though...
No they weren't. There just weren't any other options that were as affordable or convenient.
A kilo of SLR does not compete in the same space as a Kodak Instamatic.
Phones are now sitting in that segment of casual photography. And are "affordable" and convenient.
Those of us who are nerdy about pictures, go and buy a mirrorless. But that's always going to be a small and different segment.
This may not last forever. Phones are becoming less "cool" to people. They might come around again to carrying multiple specialized devices.
Now only C will buy a dedicated camera. But in the late 0’s and the 2010’s, segment B did too—lots of people bought DSLRs to get better quality pictures — often sticking to the kit lens and not getting all geeky about photography… just putting everything on automatic would still offer much better quality than a compact camera or a phone camera.
As phone cameras got better, people in this market segment switched to phones — they might just care more about the type of camera on the phone than the most casual of users do.
Consequently camera sales have plummeted: https://www.statista.com/statistics/799526/shipments-of-digi...
The first company to really "get" the integration of point and shoot cameras into the mobile ecosystem properly will win big.
Fuji is already selling boatloads of X100Vs, and there's the Ricoh GR3, etc as well. There's a trend for ergonomic nice high end fixed lens cameras.
And for kicks go on eBay and look up the prices of used old Canon PowerShots. Have a nice condition pink one in a drawer you can make some coin. From worthless e-waste to $300 status symbol...
In terms of computational photography... I think they're fine... a lot of things can be done in post-processing, which is fine, and there's been amazing advances in autofocus and stabilization.
The camera which is several years old at this point already has some good video stabilization. The AF is backed with good hardware, its pretty good and can even do face detection. Its far faster and more accurate than my much newer Pixel.
I wouldn't really care to do much post processing on the camera itself other than the basic filters and affects it can already do, as the interface is pretty small so it is hard to get details. If I'm really going to do some post-processing I'll be pushing it to my desktop with a large monitor so I can really see what I'm doing. But honestly if I'm going to work at it on my desktop I'll more likely just pull out the SD card and stick it in the computer and get far faster transfer speeds.
About the only feature I'd personally like would just be some kind of direct camera integration with Google Photos/OneDrive/iCloud/OwnCloud/whatever, have it just start syncing photos the moment it detects its online. That and good built-in GPS support. Apart from that I don't really know what else I'd do with more "smart" connectivity. I bought a camera like this because I wanted to manually adjust things instead of having some AI model twist and warp the photo into whatever the training data suggests looks good.
I'll consider a switch to a Panasonic for my next camera, since OM Systems seems mostly moribund.
FWIW I don't know if they'll make another G9x. The most recent similar camera would probably be the G7x Mk III. I think that's probably the camera I'd get if I were to replace my G9x tomorrow. I'm a huge fan of the small size of this G9x though.
https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canon-powershot-g9-x-mark-i...
https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/powershot-g7-x-mark-iii
I've heard positive things about Panasonic's devices in this market and strongly considered going with one years ago.