It is so odd to see people with this camera out in the wild. I talk to them. For many it is their first camera. They show me their photographs and they are horrible and they tell me they are trying to sell them.
This camera is selling because baby boomers are in retirement and traveling and they all think they cam be a great photographer if they buy this camera. It is a tragic waste of money and a waste for the environment.
And flooding the internet with crappy photos just makes it harder for people to find good photos and uses more carbon to store their 90MB images in the cloud. Photography is just consumerism now. They care more about the technical than technique.
And to make a further point, they talk more about their camera and lenses then they do their photographs.
Also, I am the kind of assh0le that tells them to their face what is wrong with their photographs and the conversation ends. So they see my judgement.
I no longer own a camera but for my phone. And with that phone I take pictures that people print and hang. The creativity is in composition and subject, not in detail and pixels.
I am not bitter, I have compassion.
I could imagine you being a Jew calling Jesus bitter when he kicked over the banker's table in the temple.
I think he explained it well.
I find it a bit sad; I could understand it for a dinky plastic camera, but with a flagship device, why can't they just make a bunch of parts and put it on a shelf for 30 years?
Eventually I'll probably buy a mirrorless; but I guess with a shutter count of 196 613, it's had a pretty good run…
They would be better off carrying around a Cannon SX740 for 1/6 of the price. If you cannot take a good photograph with that then you will not take one with a Z9.
People buy these cameras because they have the money that other people do not and they think the camera makes the photograph. It is like thinking the paintbrush makes the painting.
btw how old is your phone? Car? MPG? Washing machine? Fridge? How many electronic devices have you bought in the last 5 years?
At least it has helped to dig Nikon out of a hole, and the market is competitive again. I still have no need for any of it yet but maybe if I take up birding when I retire…
I made the switch to Fuji's X-T* and X100* line a few years ago and I haven't looked back. I unearthed a Nikon D4 from the camera bag a while back and I was just disgusted with the form factor. I'm so far gone from my brutalist photography days and I love life as a jpeg maximalist.
Personally, I am occasionally taking full advantage of bargain top-notch kit on the second-hand market, as older gear and stuff that doesn’t fit people gets sold off.
I've been picking up lenses on the cheap too. I can't justify buying them new when the depreciation curve so favors the second-hand buyer.
I have a wonderful collection of old CAMERA Magazin issues, and plenty of old brochures and pro magazines from the 1990s, and technical image quality has not advanced as far as people think it has, even if pixel peeping suggests otherwise. That alone helps me calm the GAS down when flipping though the PetaStoppers of the web today.
A mate has been desperate for a Hassy for, I swear, a decade, and has finally bought his dream 907 or something, and the only pics I saw from him so far were shot through a plane window. If it makes you happy, I guess. On the MF itch, I found a cheap-as-dirt 645Z and as you suggest, the images and colour depth are a marvel.
So much for not lugging heavy cameras around.
Video AF is terrible for both the X100s and the X-Ts to the extent that I consider manual focus a must.
Sampling bias there.