I have a lot of cameras but my X100F sees the most use, only thing I’d like to add to it is weather sealing. It’s really simple. I don’t make Leica money. Ok, maybe if I quit buying old junk of the internet.
I think manufacturers are just reading the market. Photographer isn’t a stand alone job anymore. Outside of the high end art world you’re a social media specialist, video producer and stills taker if you’re doing this for income. Most everyone I know in the pro field is doing a bit of all of these days to varying degrees of depth. Hobbyists often like to dabble in video and what not too. The more complicated demands of what it means to be a photographer these days has transferred to the gear. You see it in lighting too, most new stuff out there is LED for stills and video. There are still nice strobes but they’ve become a niche of a niche. LED has shortcomings as it’s a discrete spectrum and can cause odd color problems even on higher end models and I still prefer strobe for still photos.
Well maybe they will be like using your smartphone soon… if any of the speculation here is true. I feel like there has already been one or two cameras that sort of did this but maybe Sony might make the jump in a more serious way to allow for some improvements as noted in this video… there are certainly limitations with the current setup used in “modern” camera’s…
The Viltrox 27 sounds very appealing! We’ll see what kind of rendering they’re going for, I’m very particular about that.
The Viltrox 23 I bought when it came out, for example, had a swirly bokeh I don’t care for, a noticeable magenta tint, and autofocus problems. So… we’ll see.
Oh, the Northrops. Android on a camera, what silliness. Are they suggesting that we’re going to play games on our phones? Browse the web?
What we’d need for phone-style frame stacking is a global shutter for blackout-free continuous capture, and probably a faster DSP to crunch those numbers. But not Android.
I agree. I treat my smartphone as a necessary nuisance, and I don’t derive much enjoyment out of it. It is a tiny computer over which I have limited control, when it finally croaks (as they do every 2-3 years), I just get the current lower-mid-range model and be done with it.
Besides my laptop (which I use mostly for work), the devices that make my free time more enjoyable are all dedicated to a single purpose: Kindle for reading books, a camera for photography. Each does one thing well.
I found that what I value in a camera most is the viewfinder. It makes or breaks composition for me. When I compose over an LCD, I take more time or do much worse.
Which is not to say that 99% of people need anything else other than a smartphone to take casual pictures. But this does not imply that they can replace the current generation of cameras.
Why is the title saying “Sony’s plan to destroy Canon” when they say “destroy Canon and Nikon” at “00:24”. Because destroying Nikon would be unbelievable?
Did not check the whole video, but their point is that there are functions in a $200 smartphone that you would love to see built-in in a $1000 camera, such as GPS, high-speed WiFi & bluetooth, perhaps NFC, inductive charging, and such like.
If you build your camera on an Android base (core open-source Android, not the whole closed “Google services” you find on all Android phones), these come basically for free.
If you try to add it to your camera line-up with its own OS and processor architecture, it’s a lot harder because you have add all these interfaces in the electronics and write all the drivers.
So the question is to figure out if smartphone processors have eventually become powerful enough to replace specialized image processors. If they are, and since they are likely a lot less expensive than the specialized processors due to the economies of scale, then Sony is right. But then it would take Nikon/Canon about a year to follow suit(*) because a good deal the code is already written. Of course, Sony has an edge because they are already in the Android market with their smartphones, but Canikon can hook up with an Android player to accelerate things.
(*) assuming they aren’t already working on that, because when Sony’s secret plan is expounded on Youtube, it’s no longer really a secret
There have been numerous cameras with an Android OS onboard and they all failed.
And they will fail again, until someone understands that it is not the OS the user wants but the functionality. But most of the functionality from a phone has no place on a dedicated camera. We live with those undeterministic compromise of an UI on our phones because it is better than having to use all those great everyday features with an oldschool Nokia multi-keypress-keyboard or even a Blackberry. On a camera, with popups, slideaways, random layout changes because some designer has to make his|her job relevant and re-invent nothing but annoy everyone? No effin’ way.
Cameras with a dedicated UI are still way ahead of all the phone/computer OS when it comes to practicality in that specific usage domain of “get the picture”.
Now that does not excuse the manufacturers from their aweful crappy apps and the obnoxiously bad interaction between camera and phone.
Hmmm. Each of the cell phones I’ve owned has lasted me about seven years, and I have always gotten new ones because I tired of the old ones, not because they broke.
Now that there a few comments to my original post, an analysis of those comments can be said to support the view that cameras are too complex (as well as being too complicated).
I quite accept that there are different functions for different users - that’s how it should be, surely? But what I do not accept is the necessity to present an inappropriately complicated human interface to the exploitation of those functions. The Lumix G 1, with which I initiated this discussion, continues to impress with its easier usability compared to my other cameras, but I suspect that this is more to do with its limited set of function points compared to those others cameras then it is to do with the qualities of its human factors design.
In this regard I have not yet found a camera manufacturer who provides an elegant, effective, efficient and (above all) straightforward interface to the user. This a failure of imagination by manufacturers.
Not necessarily. Each company does its best to implement functional menus for the users I suppose. Others make it better and others less efficient yet it’s on personal preference mostly.
Key concept is not to dive each and every time in those menus but to have shortcuts that will help you when you need them most.
The principles of photography remain the same whatever mean you use to fulfill the purpose.
Elegant and straightforward(*), I don’t know, but effective and efficient is already done: on a decent camera, eye in the view finder, you can set plenty of things with buttons under your fingers, while still watching your subject.
(*) but can you be straightforward when you leave the all-Auto mode? Users doing this are telling the camera that they wants to handle some of the complexity themselves.
I don’t think there’s any functionality that I’d remove from my camera (well, maybe the video stuff), but companies could do a much better job of organising the functionality in an easy-to-remember way. So IMO the camera is not too complex but the menu system is poorly designed and bad at helping the user to manage the complexity.
I have a few of the more often-used functions in a couple of custom menus (my camera has basically no truly custom buttons) but even then I don’t have to go there often. Between the touch screen and buttons, I can do almost everything I need, almost by touch.
My biggest challenge isn’t how to make the camera do X, it’s when, why and how I want to use X – and exactly what X does, how it interacts with other aspects of the process, etc.
So while having a better physical interface is certainly desirable (no one likes bad design), it’s still less of a challenge for me than just getting my head fully wrapped around everything three camera does, to a thorough depth.
It is lovely to see how they are trying to sell shortcomings of the camera as advantages. Rangefinder-style optical/mechanical focus without AF, all yours for a bit less than 3000 EUR, with Leica M mount, where you can choose between “expensive” and “very expensive” lenses.
I think that a significant part of the firmware is taken up by functionality to make “nice looking” JPEGs (color manipulation, local contrast, various enhancements), so it may be easier to make a firmware without that.
Personally, I would be happy with a camera that just reads the RAW bits writes them to the card, with some trivial processing for preview (eg boost the colors a tiny bit, map with a sigmoid, done). No white balance, no color options, no “scene mode” gimmicks for taking portraits with fireworks.
But I imagine that is a niche market, and a lot of people would be returning the camera to the store, because “the photos look flat”.
Ok, maybe if I quit buying old junk of the internet.
