The demise of the DSLR
blog.mingthein.com
blog.mingthein.com
Techno Utopianism ideologies appear predicated on the belief that technological advances can always implicitly trump physical design constraints.
The well trodden technological aesthetic differences of larger sensors, and / or spherical or anamorphic lens elements immediately spring to mind. The article appears lacking a significant bit of insight into the mathematics behind optics and creative image capture.
If anything, the lesser capable world of smartphones etc. have provided the agency to give people a means to pique their interest in photography and expand their tools.
Suggesting a demise would seem to be anchored against evidence to the contrary[1].
[1] http://www.robgalbraith.com/content_pageecb5.html?cid=7-1166...
E-glass has been pretty crappy so far. They're now launching a few good ones. I'm excited about the alpha mirrorless opportunities though. Maybe we'll finally be able to have a SLR-like body that's agnostic to mount.
In terms of the aesthetic differences of larger sensors, he doesn't negate that SLRs will disappear. If you want the maximum quality, and can put the time to prepare, than getting an SLR like Nikon D800E with a great lens makes a lot of sense, with a full-frame aesthetic. Expect though that most of the work produced could be from a smaller Olympus or Fujifilm camera.
Cheers,
I made the switch after a holiday with a new baby - trying to carry a serious DSLR and nice lenses around with a baby just didn't work. The whole m4/3 camera and lens kit feels to me like it weighs about as much as one of the serious lenses I used to have!
A real fear is that, despite how happy I am (and clearly the author of this article is too), I don't think they're selling enough across the board (if you don't already, I'd suggest any avid photographer read Thom Hogan's stuff, and he talks about this often - e.g. here: [1]).
[1] http://www.sansmirror.com/newsviews/the-m43-users-are-nervou...
(Tip: the same fisheye lens is sold under all three names. Amazon carries all three and the prices bounce up and down wildly in the $250-$350 range. So put them all in your cart and check it once in a while to see when one of them is down close to $250.)
The quality of these lenses combined with their small size and light weight makes the system a real winner for me.
I've never actually owned a DSLR. I used to shoot with a Nikon FE film SLR with some nice lenses, but switched to compact cameras when I went digital. The Canon S95 I used for the last couple of years takes great pictures. But I wanted to be able to get fisheye photos (for panorama stitching) and better macro shots, and the m4/3 has really delivered.
Thom Hogan is right that Olympus and Panasonic are having trouble selling enough of these cameras and lenses, and it probably is because people aren't moving from DSLRs to m4/3 but instead just using their smartphone cameras. For most of the photos people take most of the time, that's more than good enough.
But I also agree with his conclusion: no one should be scared away from m4/3 because of these uncertainties. You can get great cameras and great lenses right now and use them for many years.
These were taken with the Olympus and various lenses (except for the stained glass photo that I took many years ago). Some are just snapshots, but a few I'm really pleased with. All are straight out of the camera except for cropping, and defishing in the photo of the two dogs:
I'm hoping that the new Olympus EM-1 (a video leaked last week of that) will be a big seller for them, and take some the business pressure off.
Thanks for the pointer to Thom Hogan's mirroless site, I only read his Nikon site. And Ming Thein is a favorite of mine, good to see him on HN.
No photoshop, just use whatever the camera provides (my apology for the lame URLs :)):
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-15qdzEgp2qc/T4sjy6QubzI/AAAAAAAAF5...
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-o9yvao54n9w/T4skHvTnz_I/AAAAAAAAF6...
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-r4fvqPFKEDA/T4skXAsPPlI/AAAAAAAAF6...
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zfu1XPoYZxg/T4skPi0M8-I/AAAAAAAAF6...
Jokes aside, as a kid once very interested in photography and took courses, I was shocked one night to watch TV and see one of those garbage entertainment gossip shows in passing mention how one Sports Illustrated Smiwsuit photographer's camera choice would shock you: he was using point-and-shoots (not all the time, but a good portion of the time).
Surprise, surpise, I search and I find him: Terry. Richardson.
http://www.aphotoeditor.com/2009/09/25/terry-richardson-talk...
A DSLR, like a programming language, is good in some contexts and not in others, and timing vs equipment needed does make a difference like he says, but the death of DSLR? Were we not discussing the slow death of PHP in the PHP thread a few hours ago? Haha. Good tools die, bad tools die, but they will remain tools with supporters and detractors.
It's not a fun time to be acting like an incumbent. Canon and Nikon are too stuck to their old systems to innovate. Sony, Olympus, Samsung, Fuji and Panasonic will eat their lunch, and if they don't watch out Sony will eat their high-end as well. The Alpha 99 is a serious contender already.
The camera is the least important component since it is nigh on impossible to find a terrible SLR. And you if you are serious about photography, you will end up spending more money on lenses than on cameras.
If you were making a lens, would you prefer to make one or two versions or 6-7 versions?
Canon and Nikon make some good stuff but they also make some pretty pedestrian lenses. These days with automated design, lens are much less of a black art and it's much harder to have an edge. From what I read Sigma has been churning out some really good ones lately for example.
The electronics companies are in a terrible position. The only people who will buy their bodies and lenses are cost-conscious hobbyists--a group that is rapidly shrinking. You're never going to show up at an NFL game or press conference and see a bunch of Sony and Samsung systems.
That's not true. Zeiss for Nikon/Canon is a manual-focus only line. They make totally different autofocus lenses that are only available in alpha mount. And Sony also makes their own high-end lenses that are not Zeiss (their G line of Minolta heritage).
>Canon and Nikon do make some mediocre lenses but they are all cheapies for cheap bodies. The top end is what will keep them in business.
The only top-end that I know of that's really unique to them is tilt-shift lenses, and mirrorless can even take care of those by allowing for tilt-shift mounts for normal lenses in the mirror box space. For any other specialty lenses (telefocus mostly) mirrorless will allow for fully featured adapters.
>The electronics companies are in a terrible position. The only people who will buy their bodies and lenses are cost-conscious hobbyists--a group that is rapidly shrinking.
Industry statistics say otherwise. Mirrorless is the only growing category and Canon and Nikon are basically not in that market as both EOS-M and the Nikon 1 system have been flops. Nikon is especially in a tight spot because they depend on Sony for sensors.
>You're never going to show up at an NFL game or press conference and see a bunch of Sony and Samsung systems.
I wouldn't be so sure. Sony in particular has the ingredients to make that happen (good telephotos and fast bodies).
Mirrorless is like the netbook of digital photography. Over time, demanding photographers won't put up with the depth of field, EVF lag, and poor ergonomics, and casual hobbists won't put up with the size and inconvenience. Most of the mirrorless market will get eaten out from underneath by ever-improving point and shoots. The rest will get eaten by full-frame DSLRs--most of those customers will buy Nikon or Canon.
That's just bullshit. Your lens snobbery doesn't hold much water. Canon has never been known for its great lenses for example.
>Over time, demanding photographers won't put up with the depth of field, EVF lag, and poor ergonomics
The depth of field and ergonomics will be the same on an Alpha mirrorless as in a current Alpha. And demanding photographers are already saying that EVF is the future[1].
>Most of the mirrorless market will get eaten out from underneath by ever-improving point and shoots. The rest will get eaten by full-frame DSLRs--most of those customers will buy Nikon or Canon.
Do you have any argument for this when the market is going in the exact opposite direction with mirrorless system eating up both those markets? You're just arguing what you'd like to happen but the market isn't cooperating with your worldview.
[1] http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.pt/2013/05/i-think-writing-...
To the extent they are using mirrorless cameras, they are using them to complement their top-end DSLR systems, not replace them entirely. Thom Hogan among others has written about this extensively.
EVFs have numerous shortcomings, and most of their advantages are already available on high-end DSLRs with live view technologies. EVF is not great, and not even your linked article says it's great. It's just something photographers have to live with to get the lower cost and smaller size of mirrorless cameras.
As I've already said, I have no doubt the DSLR market share will shrink. Where we part ways is whether this means incumbents like Canon and Nikon are going to get put out of business by electronic companies like Sony and Samsung.
The example I gave was of a long-time professional photographer that now uses EVFs exclusively and says they are both the future and much better than traditional viewfinders.
>EVFs have numerous shortcomings, and most of their advantages are already available on high-end DSLRs with live view technologies. EVF is not great, and not even your linked article says it's great. It's just something photographers have to live with to get the lower cost and smaller size of mirrorless cameras.
The A77 and A99 are direct counterexamples to that. They cost the same as their competitors and have the same size. Those are the cameras in the example I linked so at least that one pro didn't go in looking for cheaper or smaller.
>As I've already said, I have no doubt the DSLR market share will shrink. Where we part ways is whether this means incumbents like Canon and Nikon are going to get put out of business by electronic companies like Sony and Samsung.
I don't think Canon and Nikon are going out of business, I just think this is the classic Innovator Dilemma situation where the new technology that is considered inferior ends up dominating. After all the current crop of companies are the result of the long evolution of the 35mm standard. Initially that was the low-end to take advantage of cheap movie film, no match for the medium and large format serious stuff... The same way Hasselblad is still in business but mostly irrelevant I fear Nikon and Canon will be that way in 20 years if they don't innovate along with the market.
I’d love to get my hands sometime in the future on the 40 megapixel smartphone announced by Nokia.
But don't get me wrong - I love that my phone is good enough for photography to have on me all the time.
I haven't used my DSLR in a while -- mostly just using phones due to the convenience. The drop in quality historically is so huge though that I do on occasion consider carrying around the bulky DSLR (but I usually decide not to).
But with the 1020, for the first time, I feel like the gap has been made small enough (although still not small) where I've found this past week that I've never seriously wished to have brought my DSLR.
I'm still on contract, but I think I'll find it hard to go back to any other phone camera.
"This gives a value for x of about 4 µm. In a digital camera, making the pixels of the image sensor smaller than this would not actually increase image resolution."
So, the HTC One, which only has a 4 megapixels is already at that limit: http://www.htc.com/www/zoe/ultrapixel-sensor-size/
(and if the marketing graph below is true, the Nokia sensors are half as big..)
Maybe, but I still find them inadequate and suspect that in a couple years a lot of people are going to look at their smartphone photos the same way modern people look at photos from the 1920s: http://www.marco.org/2012/07/01/the-camera-you-have-with-you.
Screens are finally catching up. A 4k screen has ~8MP of resolution. Modern bayer pattern sensors (1 color per pixel) in SLRs are at 24MP which is actually not a lot more resolution than 8MP at 3 colors per pixel and about the same data (8M*RGB=24M).
Designed around Hubert Nerwin's drop-in, "foolproof" film cassette (a picture of which can be seen here), the Instamatic was both the true descendent of George Eastman's $1 box Brownie of c. 1900 and the transformative consumer camera of its own era. It sold seven and a half million cameras in its first two years and 50 million in the decade of the 1960s. It remains one of the most successful and profitable consumer products in the history of photography; it introduced baby-boomers to picture-taking.
(...)
It was actually an atrocious little camera, the Lomo of its day only without the quirky contriarian charm. The lens was horrible and the easy-to-load negative wasn't big enough. But it was meant to be cheap to buy and easy to use, and it was both those things in spades (the "Flashcube," like the film cartridge, was a stroke of genius in that respect—four small flashbulbs in an automatically rotating clear plastic box). The pictures, unfortunately, were an accurate reflection of what you saw through the minuscule, smeary viewfinder.
A commenter on the blog explains it in context:
I still curse the Kodak Instamatic.
I have restored, documented, digitized, and archived the many hundreds of photographs of my and my wife's families from the 1880s to the present. What was a treasure lode of memories and family histories collapsed, seemingly inspired by the song 'New York Mining Disaster 1941,' with the introduction of the hated Instamatic.
Within just a few years Kodak had convinced most of our family that photography was not a skill worth learning, and lousy, blurry, washed-out pictures were actually good.
Even my oldest brother, a U.S. Army intelligence agent in Europe during the Viet Nam era, reported that most of the agents preferred cheap plastic Polaroid cameras (purchased out of petty cash) as G2's government-issued Leicas were 'too hard to use.'
The result is a real dearth of documentary photographs from the early to mid 1960s until the advent of decent P&S cameras beginning around 1980. If it wasn't for the very few (three out of dozens) who owned Mamiya, Canon, and Pentax SLRs, our family would have very little from that period. On the other hand, it made the collecting and archiving effort a lot smaller than it otherwise might have been....
http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogra...
Hopefully one of the new trends (better smartphone cameras, mirrorless, Sony's wifi sensor+lense combos, etc) will deliver us from crappy smartphone pictures.
When I'm taking pictures, and not just shooting random stuff, I still use an SLR because it is just easier (for me) to get what I want from it. It doesn't really matter which SLR you use, they all produce good images, but the glass is important. I do postprocess my images. In fact I usually shoot with postprocessing in mind. But I never spend much time postprocessing. Typically a couple of minutes per image that I want to use.
I've tried some of the smaller cameras with decent optics that are on the market now, but they just don't feel right for me. They have all these great specs, but they don't feel like tools. They have the buttons in the wrong places and they weren't designed to be held with my hands. The camera just gets in the way of what I'm trying to do.
I don't think it is so much about image quality as it is about the tactile experience, efficiency and habit.
(Some of my pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/borud/)
However, at the professional level I don't see a demise of DSLR. There are certain types of work where, at least with current technologies, it doesn't make any sense. Sports photography you need high burst rates with fast accurate AF. Also large optics, this is more of a feeling, but I would rather be holding a large DSLR body attached to a 500mm super telephoto lens than the equivalent on smaller camera systems, this feeling also applies to large external flash units. Things just feel more sturdy in a larger camera system. Other issue I would have with moving to a mirrorless system is weather sealing, lack of ports like PC Sync and mic input, and flash sync speeds not as fast.
For the bulk of what I do, the Olympus has real advantages over my Nikon D7000. It's much easier to carry round and so gets photos by simple virtue of presence. The ability to shoot waist-level on the screen is a major win, as is the ability to actually see sensor response live. No more guessing dynamic range and chimping, it's automatic.
It's not there yet though, and neither are other mirrorless I've handled - * Many fewer direct controls. Simple things like changing ISO or switching AF off are just fiddly. * I've tried shooting moving subjects - it's just not as good as an SLR, you can't pick up and hold a subject anywhere near as quickly and easily. * System scale. None have a flashgun as good as my Nikon SB800 that I've found. My ultrawide SLR lens is double the price. Only Fuji (well, so far) seems to have really got quality fast glass in any quantity. Nine have significant third-party support currently.
We're at a cross-over. In a few years the scene will look very different and mirrorless will be the way of the future, but none of them are ready to take over from SLRs properly yet, I'd suggest.
The (very well confirmed) rumors are that they will be doing away with the mirror completely, and going full mirrorless. Without the mirror there the extra space should allow for all kinds of fun adapters to other systems.
Their existing mirrorless sytem (NEX) is also moving fast. They are about to announce a SLR-shaped camera and the rumor is they will be moving NEX to full-frame and adding in-body antishake at the same time.
When it comes to high-end mirrorless Sony is the one to watch.
For the alpha the mirror box space being empty is a huge gain for people that want to make adapters. Suddenly a Nikon adapter becomes possible when before it wasn't because there simply wasn't enough space. If I was Sony I would do the alpha mirrorless by keeping the same mount but moving it back, removing the mirror box space. Traditional lenses would be mounted with an extension tube to mimic the mirror box distance and you could build extension tubes that switched the camera mount to Canon/Nikon/Olympus/whatever.
You'll be surprised how quickly that changes. A 900$ Sony Alpha 77 shoots at 12fps, and a 6.000$ Nikon D4 does 10fps. The Nikon has a much more expensive autofocus system and yet that system is disabled anytime you take a shot by the mirror lifting while the Sony has it enabled throughout. Mirrorless is a natural evolution for sports and safari because of this. On-sensor autofocus has already been cracked so we should be seeing amazing mirrorless cameras for sports coming out in the next Alpha refresh.
As soon as it is though, I also expect that mirrorless cameras will rapidly infiltrate the pro sports and wildlife market. Burst mode will become as irrelevant as loading film -- sports photographers will simply record full-resolution RAW video and pick out the frame that they want in post.
The other reason that mirrorless has it easier for autofocus is that the sensors can be always on, unlike a traditional SLR where the mirror is up for the exposure and the autofocus is literally in the dark. Sony's SLT system already solves this by splitting the optical path continuously. Removing the mirror entirely is just the next step. That together with the more precise but slower contrast detection should make autofocus systems much better.
All of the systems currently widely available are what are called hybrid systems, because the on-sensor phase detection alone is not sensitive or accurate enough to work on its own in a wide enough range of conditions. They use the phase detection to get the lens roughly in focus, which then allows the contrast detection to work over a very small range of possible values, and allows the combined focusing to be both fast and accurate. (There are various claims online that the 70D, which uses the new sensor you mention, isn't a hybrid system, but Canon's own specs state it still uses some contrast-detection in live view mode[1], so my understanding is that it's simply doing more phase-detection and less contrast-detection than earlier systems, rather than being 100% phase detection)
As an example of how unsuited these systems currently are to sports or wildlife photography, in the Canon 70D, there is no way to enable proper continuous autofocus when using live view to shoot still images. Tracking is only available in movie mode.[2]
The camera can continuously provide a rough focus[3] (which speeds up final focus acquisition, and is also probably the exact same system used for movie focusing -- see below), but this is not accurate enough for reliably in-focus shooting. (Behind the scenes, this will almost certainly be using the on-sensor phase detection only).
Whichever mode you half-press the shutter in, the camera will then perform a precise focus (behind the scenes, it's almost certainly using the phase detection data combined with contrast detection data), but at that point, regardless of which of the modes you are in, the focus is locked -- if your subject moves closer or further away, you will need to release and re-press the shutter to regain accurate focus. I'm sure you'll appreciate that if you gave this system to anyone other than an extreme amateur sports or wildlife photographer, they wouldn't touch it.
(Note that the 70D does include a 'tracking' mode[4] in live view, but this merely uses face detection to ensure that the focus area is constantly over a face in the image, it doesn't cause the focus to adjust should the camera-to-subject distance alter while the shutter is half-pressed)
When you're shooting movies, of course the camera will track focus, but while it does a pretty good job compared to previous systems, it's very easy to see how bad the system would be for still photos. Take a look at this example footage[5], where it's very easy to see that the autofocus system is not performing anywhere near what would be required for action photography -- even at the default Youtube size and resolution (without needing to view it full-screen), the inaccuracy and big jumps are very easy to see, on a subject that is moving very slowly and predictably. And that's in pretty excellent light, not an indoor stadium or under trees in overcast conditions. (Also remember that that video is very clearly out of focus at times at a resolution of just over 2 megapixels, and when you're shooting stills you're expecting it to be sharp at 20 megapixels)
As I say, I think it's very likely that improvements to the on-sensor phase detection, as well as algorithmic improvements to the blending of the phase-detection and contrast-detection data, will mean that this is the future of action photography, but it's not there yet, and personally I'd say we're probably 2-3 generations away from a system that can track action as well as even a low-end DSLR that uses a separate dedicated phase-detection sensor.
[1] http://gdlp01.c-wss.com/gds/5/0300011965/01/eos70d-im-en.pdf (Page 436)
[2] http://fr.canon.ch/Images/Dual_Pixel_CMOS_AF_Tech_Explained-...
[3] http://gdlp01.c-wss.com/gds/5/0300011965/01/eos70d-im-en.pdf (Page 228)
[4] http://gdlp01.c-wss.com/gds/5/0300011965/01/eos70d-im-en.pdf (Page 233)
Thanks for the detailed post. I haven't tested any of these systems so am going from specs only. It's an exciting time for camera technology indeed.
That's why Sony refers to them as "SLT" cameras and not SLR.
You'd be just as well served by comparing a $900 Nikon (D7[12]00?) or Canon DSLR to the D4. If you can't justify the difference between, let's say, a D600 and a D4, then it's moot anyway. I imagine the D4 compares quite favorably to the HST and Kepler on many axes as well. :-)
As for my example the D7100 you mention has the same 24MP sensor of the A77 and yet can only do 6fps. The point was that a 900$ camera could best a 6000$ one on dimensions that are very important to professional users like fps because of mirrorless technology. Mirrorless will give you some things only the very high-end could do before (or even the high-end couldn't do) at entry-level prices, that's textbook Innovators Dilemma.
The huge drop in prices allowed plenty of people to get one even if they needed a point and shoot, just because they could look more 'professional' (aka those only using automatic mode).
But there are just too many cases where DSLR are superior because of its manual mode (shutter speed, adaptability, wide-angle, ...)
In fact that's the opposite, the article foresees that in a couple of years, even professionals will use mirror-less cameras.
EDIT clarity.
A DSLR usually means a larger, bigger sensor, better accessories, and better/selectable lenses. Using manual modes is a trivial, side value of SLRs (actually not even sure why it is mentioned given that every "P&S" I've had in the past decade has had full manual control as well), but in no way is a requirement to yield value from them.
As a sidenote, one of the burdens of carrying a decent camera -- for those moments that only happen once -- is that someone often makes a snarky quip about being a professional.
i wrote about here, but i am not sure it's very clear http://www.acooke.org/cute/DepthofFie1.html
[edit: and so, for medium format, depth of field is more pronounced...]
Greater dof is actually a big plus for many shooting styles and subjects.
Many wedding and portrait photographers have at least experimented with the Brenizer Method[1], the sole purpose of which is to create an image with a shallower depth of field than is otherwise possible, and replicate the appearance of large-format photography.
I agree that it's very likely to happen, although I'm not sure we're there yet. The VF-4 EVF does finally have what I would call a 'barely-acceptable' resolution, but I think 4K resolution EVFs will be required to really equal the detail someone with good eyesight can see through a good optical viewfinder.
The other issue I've had with all EVFs I've tried (which doesn't include the VF-4) is the input lag is, although small, quite noticeable. Until that's fixed, EVFs are very unlikely to replace optical viewfinders for sports and wildlife photographers.
Similarly, it's hard to beat the speed of the phase-detect autofocus in professional bodies at the moment. Again, that's fixable, probably with a combination of better on-sensor phase detection and more advanced algorithms to mix phase-detect and contrast-detect data together, but I think we're still at least two generations away from a system that can accurately track a fast-moving and erratic object.
Once those issues are resolved though, I can very quickly see the DSLR losing significant market share. There's simply too many advantages to mirrorless cameras -- no heavy, soft, expensive retrofocus wide-angle lenses, no calibration issues between the focus module and the image sensor, no heavy mirror to flip out of the way for every shot, full exposure simulation through the viewfinder (and a host of useful overlays), etc. etc.
Some photographers, of course, don't need focus tracking, and can probably put up with a less-than-stellar viewfinder resolution, which is why a lot of landscape photographers (who also often don't need a narrow depth of field) are already moving towards mirrorless, at least as a second camera.
Personally, apart from the investment I have in SLR glass, I am looking forward to the advantages that mirrorless cameras will bring in a few years time.
... which brings, not least, a drastically increased lifetime. :)
> The elephant in the room is legacy lenses: it’s tough for a DSLR owner to give up his glass collection, because a similar depth of offerings simply does not exist in other smaller formats.
> Even the most mature of the mirrorless formats – Leica M and M4/3 – both lack any sort of perspective correction lenses, other than using a DSLR lens with a tilt or shift adaptor; there are no native solutions despite them being ideally suited to this kind of work because of live view.
Tilt-shift lenses, long working distance macro lenses, wide angle primes, and fast super-telephotos are all hard to find in mirrorless mounts.
Wide angle prime: Samyang/Rokinon/Bower 7.5mm f/3.5 rectangular fisheye, 8mm f/3.5 Panasonic, 12mm f/2.0 Olympus
Long working distance macro: Olympus 60mm f/2.8, working distance 7.5" for 1:1 image
Fast super-telephoto: 100-300mm f/4.0-5.6 Panasonic (yeah, that doesn't sound very fast to me)
Not questioning that there are better DSLR lenses, just interested in comparing them to help me understand the differences between the systems.
Thanks!
The focal lengths are there but the apertures are narrower than the most common full-frame wide-angle primes, e.g. 14mm f/2.8 or 24mm f/1.4. This means less light, and also, as discussed elsewhere, a much wider minimum depth of field on the m4/3 lenses, due to the smaller sensor. (I meant to say 'fast wide-angle primes' in my original post, my mistake).
> Long working distance macro: Olympus 60mm f/2.8, working distance 7.5" for 1:1 image
My understanding was that 7.5" was the MFD (the distance from the film/sensor to the subject), not the MWD (the distance from the front element to the subject), on this lens, but I haven't used it. This review seems to suggest a working distance of 90mm (~3.5 inches) at 1:1, but it may also be wrong:
http://savazzi.freehostia.com/photography/olympus60mm.html
If it does have a working distance of 7.5" at 1:1 that's very respectable -- up there with a 150mm, and not far below a 180mm full-frame macro.
> Fast super-telephoto: 100-300mm f/4.0-5.6 Panasonic
Again, the focal lengths here are good, and it's a zoom (try finding a 200-600mm zoom lens of any aperture for a full-frame camera), but the aperture is again a bit disappointing when compared to something like a 400mm f/2.8, both in terms of the amount of light it lets in and how shallow the depth of field is.
Don't misunderstand me -- there are a great range of lenses for both m4/3 and Sony NEX cameras, which cover the popular focal lengths and produce stunning results. They're also usually a lot cheaper (that Panasonic telephoto is around $600, vs. around $10,000 for a 400mm f/2.8 full-frame lens) and a lot lighter. But if you've already spent $10,000 on a 400mm f/2.8 for your full-frame camera (and are making money from it), you're probably going to want a lens that will give similar results before you go mirrorless, which I think was the author's point.
Yeah, I had the working distances confused on the 60mm macro: I just tested mine and it focuses to about 3.5" from the lens, 7.5" from the focal plane.
I agree completely with your conclusion: it's all about tradeoffs and which works best for your needs. I've sure been delighted with the m4/3 lenses I have, and the size and weight and low cost figure into that. But of course if I needed more light gathering and shallow depth of field and were using it to make money it would be a different story.
The ability to use existing full-frame lenses at the same focal lengths on a mirrorless camera, and gain a stop of light-gathering ability, will be a big draw.
Pros are going to be very reluctant to start buying several thousand dollars of lenses in a new and unproven (longevity-wise) lens mount, but may well buy a $1000 camera if an adapter lets it accept all of their existing lenses, keep the same focal length, and also turn their 16-35mm f/2.8 into a 16-35mm f/1.8.
I have one, and it's pretty impressive.
I bet the OP was talking about the rumored full frame interchangeable lens camera (possibly a full frame NEX) that Sony is supposed to be announcing soon.
I still use my T1i DSLR with "big glass" at places where I need reach (I could get a lens adapter for the EOS M, but if I'm rocking a 100-400mm lens on the camera, the smallness of the mirrorless is insignificant, and I'll generally want an optical viewfinder) or faster autofocus and I plan on buying a 70D real soon to replace the T1i, but the EOS M comes with me everywhere. And the image quality is soooo good for a go-everywhere camera (the sensor is the same size as the one in my DSLR, and even better in a few minor respects since it is basically the T4i sensor)... Image quality is leaps and bounds above the Canon S100 which was my previous attempt at such a take-everywhere solution.
Here's a shot I would never have gotten if the EOS M wasn't small enough that I can carry it everywhere (keep in mind this is just handheld using a bridge railing for stabilization, no tripod). I got this on the way to the parking lot after meeting some friends at the last Culture & Cocktails event at the San Diego Art Museum:
http://www.gmcbay.com/pic/bpark.jpg
There are a few more examples accessible via directory listing here, all from the EOS M for which I've since bought two more lenses (it still all fits in a very small Lowepro Lowepro Compact ILC Courier 70 bag even with the three lenses):
With photography, at least to me, you don't need the latest and greatest thing.
With film it isn't any different and it should be no surprise that digital devices suffer from this too. There has to be some lower limit for medium+device longevity.
I love my lenses because of the photos they give me. And I totally disagree with this article. For every DSLR person that goes mirrorless there are going to be 10 iPhone photographers that go "pro".
Well, if you don't wait too long, you can get a lot of it back. I sold my D700 + glass, and made $3300, which I used to buy a lovely OM-D system (12, 20, 25, 45, 75). I use my camera much more now.
Mirrorless cameras have been stealing some sales from DSLRs, but not as much as anyone thought it would (or hoped). DSLR sales are collapsing on the other hand, in a pretty dramatic way.
People aren't trading the bulky DSLR in for a svelte mirrorless, they're trading it in for their phones. It turns out that a large portion of the amateur DSLR market is dominated by people who are now perfectly happy leaving their gigantor kit at home.
Contrary to what Canonikon et al predicted, the entire low end of the market seems to be collapsing - DSLR, mirrorless, and all.
The Olympus 45mm f/1.8 is damn minuscule, yet renowned for image quality. The Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 is just as sharp and even smaller.