Nikon Is ending 70 years of camera production in Japan | Hacker News Reader

Nikon Is ending 70 years of camera production in Japan

mirrorlessrumors.com

Oof, that's not a good sign. For me, Japan is the place for the best camera and lens manufacturing. Most of the makers seem to split their manufacturing between Japan for their quality models/lenses and cheaper countries for the consumer stuff, which I think is a valid compromise. But this feels short-sighted on Nikon's part and rather like they have already failed. Perhaps instead of relocating their production they should re-evaluate their business model; my dad ended up swapping to Fuji after ~40 years of Nikon after his last camera failed and they treated him like crap as he tried to get it repaired. In contrast I bought an 11 year-old second-hand Canon DSLR which needed a new shutter mechanism and Canon Japan found an out-of-production replacement in their warehouse and shipped it to my repairer immediately.

I've always found Nikon to be lacking in competitive models with Canon in the places that count. Canon frequently make lenses of the same focal length but for different budgets, e.g. they have 4 70-200mm models. Nikon's range has always been weirdly spotty, with some excellent lenses at the high end but weird gaps elsewhere.

Tangentially, I recently bought a superb Sigma lens and was happy to see that it was actually still made in Japan as well; I thought all the third-party lens makers had moved abroad, but surprisingly a number of them are still there.

I was also very happy to discover that Canon promotes wildlife reserves around its factories and headquarters. It's nice to see a company that reflects some of its customers' interests: https://global.canon/en/environment/bird-branch/index.html

Cameras =!= Lenses.

I always found Nikon cameras more my taste than canon. But that is just taste, in terms of quality, in the sense of the pictures, I never saw a difference. Not back the day when we still developed our black and white pictures ourselves and not now with digital cameras.

Lenses on the other hand a different thing altogether. There I saw defferences between the "cheaper" Sigma and the premium Nikkor ones. Not always but sometimes. I would assume that the new mirrirless cameras are less complex to build, so maybe the Thailand based manufacturing facilities are best suited. After all, it's the lense and the person behind the camera that counts.

I think camera bodies make a much larger difference these days than lenses, actually. Obviously the lens still makes a notable difference, and for certain forms, like wildlife photography, the lens requirements are inescapable. The new models out in the past few years have absolutely incredible low-light performance that completely change the lens landscape, even; you can now ditch the requirement of carrying a hefty f/2.8 400mm lens around and swap it out for a lightweight f/4 with a camera that more than compensates for the light loss.

But with the capabilities of modern cameras the production requirements for them are high and the challenge to make something that works for a variety of consumers even higher. I can't even look at a camera that isn't "weather-proofed" as I live in a place with a 90% chance of rain at any moment, for example. And a lot of these advancements are designed to work in combination with the lenses, such as in-body and in-lens stabilisation working together, weather seals that line up, etc. I think it's pretty important to maintain the same manufacturing quality between the two areas. I'm sure that's possible when moving production to Thailand, but I expect it will take time for them to iron out their processes.

My personal experience of Canon vs Nikon is that I prefer the software of Canon, and historically I preferred the physical ergonomics of Nikon, but the newest Canon models have improved a lot there. On the lens side it was always Canon for me, although I do have a lot of love for Sigma: my 150-600mm Sigma lens has a USB dock where I can actually manually configure the autofocus, among other things, which appeals to my gadget side (and honestly their quality has jumped up massively in the past decade).

Honestly, my active days are over a bit. Back the day, so, I was part of an active group photographers, mostl ynature and outdoor. Like back when we still used film.

Can't agree more on the weather-proof part. I was ather funny to be out taking pictures all day, only to find the camera was sitting in 5 cm of water in its protective bag. Nikon did work better druing that, than. Just an anecdote so, some Nikon's didn't like it that good neither.

Some Sigma lenses were really good back than, some on par with Nikkor. Canon lenses were, if I remember well, mostly on par with Nikkor. Been used to Nikon so, I always to break the lighter Canon camera bodies.

Sigma used to be one of the brands you bought because you didn't have the money for the camera manufacturer's lens. Now, they have unique models in a number of cases. I still have mostly Canon glass but I have a couple Sigma models because Canon doesn't have the equivalent.

Haven't used a sigma lense for years. Are they now comparable quality to NIkon/Canon lenses?

Sigma makes some of the best and highest quality lenses (compared to competitors), at least that's my experience with a Sony E mount aps-c camera...

They're way better than they used to be. I have a few Sigma "Art" lenses that are incredible, at half the price (at least at the time) of the Nikon equivalents.

I have a Sigma 150-600mm Sport, which is a hell of a lens, both in quality/features and uh...weight :D

It's totally hand-holdable, but reviews online make me wonder if everyone else has pipe cleaners for arms; it took a couple of weeks to get used to it but I don't have any trouble now. The image quality is fantastic and extremely competitive. The image-stabilisation works superbly, and the autofocus is very good - much better than their older lenses.

I mostly photograph birds and I'm extremely happy with the quality. All the recent bird photos I've uploaded are taken with it: https://www.flickr.com/photos/robotmay/50528664881/in/datepo...

Thanks, your photos are great.

I'd like to get myself a long lense for those kinds of shots but I really can't afford Nikon prices!

That was exactly my thought process too :D There's pretty much nothing else in the price range of the Sport that does 600mm at less than f/8, and the Contemporary model has 90% of the performance of the Sport but at an even more digestible price. For birds the lens length can never be long enough, and I think the Sigma range is in a great price point where it's expensive enough to be good but you're not paying more for marginal gains. Plus some of their latest lenses can be hooked up to a USB dock to allow you to customise them a bit, such as making micro-focus adjustments, which is really cool.

I belive Sigma realized that they need to up their game and a lot because the Chinese cheapo manufacturers (and partially Samyang) are eating the really low end niche. Of course Samyang has upped their game with the AF-equipped Sony FE -lenses as well, but they are still low end compared to nowadays quite good Sigma mirrorless offerings.

Same happen with Tamron. They new lenses for Sony cameras are great. They newest "super" zoom 28-200 is basically best zoom of this type from any brand.

> I think camera bodies make a much larger difference these days than lenses, actually.

They always have. Yet strangely you can buy an L lens and it may outlast a whole series of bodies. (if we continue to have DSLRs that is).

Oh yeah, that's true! Also worked well between analog and digital SLRs in Nikon's case. After accounting for different film/sensor sizes. My old Sigma is showing its age so, last time I tried.

You can even use the 80-200 2.8 L on even a Sony A7RIV, so certainly! That's what, 30 years?

>I think it's pretty important to maintain the same manufacturing quality between the two areas. I'm sure that's possible when moving production to Thailand, but I expect it will take time for them to iron out their processes.

Nikon have already been making weather-sealed cameras in Thailand for ages (e.g. the D7500). I think your concerns here are overblown. Any quality problems with their Thai manufacturing operation would already be apparent, given that most of their cameras are made there.

There I saw defferences between the "cheaper" Sigma and the premium Nikkor ones

I've always wondered what the difference is between Sigma and a brand like Canon or Nikon.

I used to have both Canon and Sigma lenses. The Sigmas felt different, and the pictures they produced had a different "look" for what was supposed to be an equivalent lens. My eye isn't trained for these sorts of things, so I was never able to quantify it.

What is it that Sigma does that makes its lenses cheaper than the others?

Leaves OSS out of all their lenses. That's what they do. Annoys me that the best fast prime for my sony A6100 (sigma f1.4s) won't work for video because of this. I'm stuck with the far shittier sony f1.8s...

This was what pushed me to get the a6600, the autofocus on the fast Sigma primes is quite adequate, good even, and IBIS means I can do some video off-the-hand if I'm careful. The much larger battery was also a factor.

My use case also involves a fair amount of tripod work, and I even picked up a gimbal just recently.

So I'm glad that Sigma is making lenses which are cheaper / better for the price by leaving out OSS, because there are ways to not need it. If you figure OSS would cost another $200 per lens, which seems a little low but is in the ballpark, then with the Sigma 'trio' of 1.4 primes, the difference between the a6100 and a6600 is just about a wash.

OSS is.... ?

OIS (optical image stabilization) mistyped or "branded".

Sigma tend to do what Canon do; provide a range of similar lenses but with varying features. As an example, I have the 150-600mm Sport lens, which is fantastic; it's weather-sealed, has great autofocus, and full image stabilisation, but it's still ~£1300, which is a lot of money. It also weighs quite a lot. However the image quality is exceptional and by no means worse than anything else on the market in that range; it punches at the same level as the Canon 100-400mm IS II, which is about £800 more.

So they also do a 150-600mm Contemporary model, which has 90% of the performance. It doesn't have full weather-sealing, and it has a different element arrangement which slightly changes the picture quality, but it also drops a huge chunk off the weight and about £400 off the price. It's not quite as solidly built but for a lot of people it's more than enough and provides a good alternative.

In my personal experience Sigma lenses tend to be heavier than Canon for equivalent build quality. ~10 years ago I'd say the picture quality was slightly poorer, but now they compete very well in a variety of ranges.

Traditional lens manufacturing is likely in its last days (which can easily take a decade or two, but ... the end is visible).

Modern lens are made with techniques perfected in semiconductor manufacturing, and use advances in material science (meta materials in particular). I don't know how close this is to mass market, but I've seen superthin flat lens, with a marginal cost of production around ~$2 in a university facility, that work better than some $500 lens -- and the latter are expensive because they are hard to make the traditional way.

There's a couple of lens advancements I've seen recently that I found particularly interesting:

Canon putting Fresnel elements in their lenses to reduce size/weight: https://kenrockwell.com/canon/lenses/400mm-f4-do-is-ii.htm

Canon making an f/11 800mm super telephoto lens that can still autofocus thanks to the new mirrorless camera bodies: https://www.kenrockwell.com/canon/eos-r/lenses/800mm.htm

I think we'll see a big pivot in the market (we're already seeing it, really) with the switch to mirrorless. What I'm hoping we'll see is a total rethink of what's possible in a lens; adapting this new technology to make new designs that exceed what was possible before, rather than just matching it. If they can bring costs down by making use of this new tech then I think it will re-open the market for "I want something that does more than a phone camera". At the moment lens prices are pretty bonkers but I think that Canon f/11 lens is a great indicator; it's basically less than 1/10th of the cost of a traditional 800mm lens and does more than enough for most people.

> At the moment lens prices are pretty bonkers but I think that Canon f/11 lens is a great indicator; it's basically less than 1/10th of the cost of a traditional 800mm lens and does more than enough for most people.

But that tradeoff seems hardly new to me. Consumer 70-300 for ~300 $ vs. Pro 70-200 for 2000+ $. The "only" difference is build quality and the pro lens being 2-3 stops brighter. Price difference: ~10x.

I think you're in agreement with me, but the difference for the pro versions are usually substantial, such as weather proofing and more rugged materials (metal vs plastic) and usually more glass (less distortion at extremes, etc.). The market kinda makes sense: if you care about a few extra stops, and distortion at the extremes, then you are probably an enthusiast or professional who is willing to shell out. Otherwise, you'll have a great deal of fun with the cheap lenses.

You can get the consumer 70-300 for even less refurbished assuming you mean the DX VR Nikon lens. I've had mine almost a year and it works perfectly.

2-3 stops is enormous. Speed of the lens is partially where the additional cost comes from, and professionals are willing to pay for that extra performance - especially sports photographers.

It's been a long time since I paid any attention to pro photographic equipment so I don't know if fast lenses are important with modern sensors performing so well in low light. But back in the analog/early digital days 2-3 stops was a huge advantage.

Also something to consider, the pro lenses also focus faster and more accurately. I was never sure if this was down to the software in the lens, which is proprietary and why 3rd party lenses are never as good as manufacturer. I could easily see Canon or Nikon tweaking the firmware on prosumer lenses to focus a fraction slower.

The focus motors are just flat out better in expensive lenses. By contrast, I have a $200 Panasonic pancake lens with a terrible focus motor in it. It's slow, noisy, and hunty.

Which Panasonic pancake lens do you have that is slow & noisy? How's the image quality despite the low-end motor?

Sounds like the m43 20mm f1.7, which is known for its good IQ, pancake design but annoyingly slow AF :)

I was very disappointed when they bumped it to a version 2 and don't appear to have touched the motors or electronics. I'm very fond of the FOV from this focal length, but I have a hard time springing for a lens that will make... me... wait... so... long... for... focus... lock...

Especially when it doesn't have a nice manual focus ring à la the Olympus m43 lenses.

Yup that's the one. It's fine for streetscape snapshots and taking photos of people who will stay still, but the slow AF makes it hard to use for anything fast-moving or unpredictable.

Used to shoot sports back in uni, circa 2008 (Just amazing how much things have changed since then).

IIRC, the pro lenses (white Canons) focused faster as a result of them letting more light in, as well as having faster motors (USM), though mid-range lenses had these as well.

Around that time, the body also made a big difference since the 1D-series had ~45 AF points, and the lower and mid-range bodes had 9-20 AF points. Not sure if this is still relevant but I think even low end bodies have a ton of AF points these days.

For fine art photography a fast lens is still desirable, but for almost anything else it matters less than it used to. The sensor itself is worth about 2 stops.

As far as optical quality goes, focusing only on f-stops is like focusing on horsepower for cars. Even in f-stops, not all f-stops are equal since some lens transmit more light than others at the same f-stop. This is called t-stops and is used a lot of in pro video lenses.

Another example is if I focus on something and then zoom in and out some lenses have to refocus and others maintain focus. This is an important feature for video and any kind of fast shooting. Many lenses have much more "focus breathing" than others. That is, the change of the effective focal lens as the lens focuses closer and closer. I had a lens that was 200mm but it was really only at infinity. At close focus is was closer to 135mm since the focus breathing was so pronounced.

Bokeh, chromatic/comatic abberations, geometric distortion are other things I can go on and on about.

> the pro lens being 2-3 stops brighter

Is it brighter for the same camera body, aperture and depth of field?

If so, what would one look for in a lens's specifications to describe this difference?

In the above example (consumer 70-300 [often f4.0-5.6], vs pro 70-200 [usually f2.8]), when these lenses are placed on the same cameras, the pro 70-200 will give 4x the light compared to f5.6, or 2x the light compared with f4.0 (consumer zooms are often variable aperture, while pro lenses are more frequently constant aperture). If you were to compare the pro lens on some camera, and the consumer lens on some different sized sensor, the math can get more complicated. Below is an explanation of what f-stops mean, if you're interested.

the maximum f-stop of the lens describes the ratio of sensor length (1D, diagonally is best comparison probably), to the diameter of lens aperture. because the opening and sensor are two dimensional, every sqrt(2) increase in f-stop describes halving the light. for example, a f 1.4 lens can allow ~twice as much light as an f 2.0 lens. Every doubling of light is considered a "stop", like {1.4, 2.0, 2.8, 4.0, 5.6, 8.0}. An important consideration is that this number describes a ratio, not the absolute opening in the lens without respect to sensor size.

One possible conversion method is to consider the sensor size of the system against some popular standard. For example, "aps-c" sized sensors are about 1 stop "slower" than full frame sensors, due to being 1/(2.25) the size of full frame sensors in area, or 1/(1.5) linearly. This means that many lenses can be converted not only on focal length, but also for f-stop, to estimate the total light gathering power of the system, and the output "look" of the image. Full frame sensors (~36mm x 24mm) are most frequently used in the photography world as a standard comparison point. For example, a 50mm 1.4 lens gives 50mm 1.4 on full frame, but that same lens on an aps-c sensor (like a fuji X, sony 6xxx, canon 7d, etc.) would not only give a cropped 75mm [full frame] focal length equivalence, it would also give the depth of field of a 75mm _2.0_ lens [on full frame], not 75mm 1.4. At the same time, the exposure would still benefit from the light gathered at f1.4. This is why many say that smaller sensors give a larger depth of field (more in focus, less out of focus background). In reality, this is due to the lens aperture being measured only as a ratio to the sensor size. Finally, the smaller aps-c sensor will give a larger depth of field at the same f stop, but may also give higher noise at the same ISO (to a similarly advanced full frame sensor). This means that an aps-c camera takes the exact same image when it has ~1 more f stop, ~33% less focal length, ~1 stop lower ISO to the full frame system. A big confusion around any of this "equivalence" discussion is that sometimes people mean equivalence for lens "look", and other times, they mean equivalence for exposure, while others may be talking about absolute image quality and noise. They're actually all related, though much of this discussion isn't important to real world photography.

Certainly not, unless the consumer lens is covered in mud or made from tinted glass!

As for relative aperture adjusted for actual, measured light transmission, that's a T-stop, but these are typically only marked and specified for cine lenses, e.g.,

https://www.zeiss.com/consumer-products/int/cinematography/m...

(IIRC, the Master Primes are geometrically f/1.2 at T1.3)

No, it just has more available aperture. It's common to see a consumer telephoto with a max of 5.6, and a similar length pro version with 2.8, for example.

Which makes it bigger and heavier, harder to manufacture, and smaller market - all of this pushes prices up (an order of magnitude is common)

I recently switched from the mid-range Nikon 24-120 f/4 to the high-end 24-70 f/2.8. Yes the high-end lens is also a stop brighter, but you're missing the point that almost everything about the optics is dramatically improved. The 24-70 is noticeably sharper, even in the corners, has superior bokeh, has much better and more-easily correctable color fringing, super accurate AF (due to the wider aperture), nearly no vignetting, much better blowout characteristics, and much better distortion at wide angles.

More importantly, those things combine to make a certain je nais sai quoi that makes photos taken with it seem to have much higher quality. I took a quick test shot of my dog when I got it and my sister remarked that she could practically feel the dog with her eyes, just looking at the photo. Nobody has ever said that about pictures of the dog that I took with the old lens, even if I spent considerable time trying to get lighting right and the dog to hold still.

My old lens ruined a bunch of shots I took in a forest that required running at the extreme edge of its settings. This new lens doesn't look like it will do that.

build quality and f-stops isn't close to all that is different.

Actual light transfer (e.g. t-stops in cine, but less quantitatively in SLRs, say - some lenses are brighter than others), sharpness, chromatic aberration, spatial aberration, focal speed and accuracy (assuming autofocus), consistency across the telephoto range (not for primes, obviously) - some lenses will have not just differet f-stops at different lengths, but really different characteristics. This doesn't even get into the subjective aspects (e.g. "bokeh") that some people care a lot about.

Wow that lens is bonkers. What a reasonable price. I love it.

Aside, I enjoy that Ken also loves this lens, despite it being mostly plastic, which he usually shits all over. It actually seems like a feature here, for weight purposes.

I have a 70-300mm DO and it is not a lens I like much. The 400 DO is probably light-years better. It is definitely light-years more expensive.

I have the 400 DO. It's not really "light" but it's much much less of a beast than the 400/2.8. I really like it - it feels like it hits a sweet spot for me in the weight/light gathering ability/quality trade off and the quality is indeed excellent. But there's an argument that a 70-200/2.8 plus a 2x TC is very close in quality these days, gets you more flexibility and is a bit less unwieldy for a loss of only half a stop in light gathering ability at 400mm.

Ooh. I'd love to try that lens. I have both the 70-200 2.8L II and the 100-400 II and I love them both. That 70-200 is one of my all time zoom faves but the 100-400 is not too far behind it.

Yes. I have the 70-200/2.8 as well and had the 100-400 mk 1 years ago. The 100-400 mk I isn't a patch on either quality-wise but I gather the mk 2 is significantly better so not sure how it compares.

Where the 400DO perhaps really shines is paired with a 1.4x TC - it's much more handleable than a 600/4 and paired with a decent body gets results as good as bodies 10 years ago would have got with the 600/4.

I have both a ~1999 Mk 1 and 2018 Mk 2 100-400. The Mk 2 is waaay better in almost every way: focus accuracy, no push-pull, better bokeh (marginally) better contrast… just better results with less effort. Also a lot more expensive.

I have three different TCs which I got from a friend who switched to Sony. I haven't really used them much because they seem to drastically change the optic behavior in ways I don't like. Maybe I should give them another chance as they never come out of their cases.

Although a friend of mine tried it out as a rental along with an R5. He was really wowed at first but after using it for a bit he wasn't as impressed with the results. Still, for a birder, at $1K coupled with the R5's eye autofocus it doesn't have any real competitors. Not everyone needs or can pay for the higher end and very heavy lenses. (And, with modern full frame digital cameras, the smaller fixed aperature doesn't matter nearly as much.)

Nikon has been making PF, or Phased Fresnel, lenses for a number of years too. The 300mm f4 is a head-turner due to its tiny size and diminutive weight, while still being as good as the old 300mm in almost every way.

They also have a 500mm 5.6 that's similarly tiny (compared to a non-PF version) and hard to get.

I've had the 300PF for several years and it's my most-used lens. I photograph birds and wildlife and being able to fit an extremely-good setup (a D500 with 300PF) into my smallest camera bag (Lowepro hatchback 16l) encourages me to take it on almost every outing.

That's one reason I do tend to grab my Sony E mount fairly often these days... I just wish there were a lens close to the quality and weight of the PF 300 for the Sony system.

I don't know, the nikon p1000 is ~ 3000 mm equivalent by designing the sensor+lens together.

On the other hand, it doesn't behave like a good canon ultrasonic lens with immediate focus. not at all.

The Nikon P1000 has a 539mm zoom lens with extremely small sensor: 1/2.3". And it's probably a contrast based focus system. I would not expect good results from such camera.

Sensor size comparison: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sensor_sizes_overlai...

I think you’re about 2 or 3 years too late with this comment. The switch to mirrorless is already here, Nikon and Canon have the majority of their core lens lineups out already for these platforms so it’s unlikely they’d replace them again for the next decade or longer.

And yes, they are mostly better than previous generations across the board. Which is pretty cool, that something based on such a simple idea that’s been around hundreds of years still has room for major improvements.

What is the deal with mirrorless? (no mirror, but why does this improve optics?)

Most mirrorless mounts are significantly wider (diameter wise) and closer to the sensors so they are able to develop new lenses that can take advantage of that.

Every element the light interacts before hitting the sensor degrades the quality in some small way. But losing the mirror doesn't really improve optics significantly. It's more about reducing cost and complexity in manufacturing, moving things like autofocus into software. The benefits to the consumer are quieter shooting and a lighter body.

Yes, losing the mirror doesn’t really improve optics, however removing the mirror and related mechanism does allow one to bring the lens closer to the focal plane, which in turn affects the size of the rest of the lens elements. And makes everything smaller and lighter as you allude to.

which in turn affects the size of the rest of the lens elements.

Sort of. The diameter of the front element is predetermined, a function of the sensor size, focal length, and aperture. Mirrorless cannot escape this.

But, the shorter distance from sensor to lens does simplify the design of a good wide angle. Sadly, wide angles were never the big heavy lenses in the first place.

The whole smaller & lighter thing is not a lie but pretty oversold. Some of the RF glass is actually bigger and heavier than the equivalent EF glass.

Heh. You've never carried a body with a Nikon 14-24 f/2.8 or a Canon 11-23 f/2.8. They are beasts! But yes, the teles are generally the heavy ones.

Doesn't a DSLR work by moving the mirror out of the way of the sensor when taking an image?

You are correct. That motion of the mirror itself is responsible for most of the noise, and some wobble of the camera as well.

It's a trade-off, though. Seeing the actual image through the lens, and not a digital representation, which is what you get with a mirrorless system, has its benefits.

> which is what you get with a mirrorless system, has its benefits

I never found those benefits. What would you say they are?

Early on, the problem was mirrorless were slow in autofocus, and they had relatively terrible EV quality. Now they have better autofocus than mirrorless, and more importantly, with the very high resolution EV displays they have now [1], what you see is exactly what you end up getting. You don't have to guess about anything anymore, like what's going to blow out, which is fantastic. What you see in an optical viewfinder with your eye is not what your sensor sees is going to portray. I don't see any benefit to optical viewfinders at this point.

[1] 5.7MP OLED EV!: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1494679-REG/sony_ilce...

The true colors of what you're shooting, the true dynamic range, and the ability to see to edges of the focal plane with greater clarity. What you see in a mirrorless camera has already gone through a great deal of processing to approximate what you'd see naturally with an SLR system.

Which is fine for what it is! If you aren't shooting in a studio, the reduced mass of equivalent lenses with mirrorless systems is a big quality of life upgrade all on its own, for example. But the color representation just isn't there, and it isn't going to be until we get better color in our display systems. It's being worked on, of course, but there's a long way to go.

> The true colors of what you're shooting

I don't understand this. The EV displays are calibrated. It's what you're going to get on your high end monitor when you get home. Eyes do not work like camera sensors, so I don't see how this is a plus. White balance being a great example.

> the true dynamic range,

How can your eye tell you this though? Unless your'e doing HDR/exposure stacking, dynamic range from the perspective of the sensor is all you're going to get. With the EV, you get clipping/black indicators, and even a histogram. I'm never wondering if I'm going to blow out the sky or crush some details in shadows anymore. I can see if I am, without having to snap then preview.

> the ability to see to edges of the focal plane with greater clarity.

I don't understand this at all. The new EVs give you 100% crop (with some slightly reduced zoom so it fits), with complete clarity edge to edge.

I would suggest giving a new high end EV another try.

Perhaps I'm not doing a good job of explaining. Let me try again.

1. The color space of the EV's display (and even the wide-gamut monitors available for desktop use) do no fully encompass the colors we can see. https://i2.wp.com/digital-photography-school.com/wp-content/... for a diagrammatic example of common colorspaces vs. what our eyes are capable of perceiving. In particular, the greens and purples are abbreviated, and I prefer composing with the true colors in my eyepiece.

2. Knowing the condition of the light before it hits the sensor lets me compose more accurately. If I'm looking at the true light, I can tell at a glance if there is detail worth working to preserve in the highlights or shadows (by using a split neutral density filter, for example, to bring the sky brightness down some) or not.

3. I'm not talking about edge-to-edge clarity. I'm referring to the depth of the focal plane, and the rate of falloff. If you're shooting with a very wide aperture before infinity-focus distance, the plane is going to be very narrow, and seeing the rate of the falloff is easier when it isn't pixelated.

Hope that helps.

Yes. With mirrorless, you have the advantage of the image continuously hitting the sensor. So you see in your viewfinder more or less what the sensor is seeing. On a dslr, you are seeing a facsimile of the end result.

Also less moving parts, so this results in a more reliable product.

And smaller. I think the days of a big ‘hero camera’ are behind us. People just don’t want to lug around the weight if they don’t have to, and it’s no longer such a status symbol.

We went through this period where people bought an APS-C DSLR with a relatively cheap kit zoom lens which never came off the camera shooting on (A)utomatic. They weren't "wrong" but a lot of those folks would have been just as happy with a higher end P&S like Canon's G series. And, today, they're just fine with a smartphone.

As well as the comments already made, there's another thing to consider: in a SLR or DSLR, the path used to determine whether or not you're in focus is different from the path light follows to the medium: the autofocus system has a screen that takes light from a mirror, and then adjusts the lens based off that measurement. In manual focus, you're basic it off the path the light takes to the focusing screen, via a mirror.

In either case, when the photo is taken, the mirror whips out of the road (which generates mirror slap, another problem), and the light travels to the film or sensor. Since this path is a different distance to the one used for focusing, it requires only a small calibration error between the body and lens to end up with out-of-focus images. It is very normal to have to tweak the focus (higher end bodies will let you do this), or to have to have a body or lens physically corrected. No matter how exquisite your optics - in fact paradoxically, this effect is worst with high-end optics - the way the light path works here can be a real pain for getting good focus.

Because mirrorless systems focus and capture from the same medium, this literally can't happen with your mirrorless camera.

Does it help with using cameras for video footage, or would it be no problem to hold the mirror out of the way for a long time? (I imagine it being held in some kind of tension that wouldn't like long term force on it).

My DSLR had a hard limit of 30 minutes video time, but I suspect this is because of the software issues, not mirror tension per se.

That probably was a tax/duty thing, the EU treats (treated? not sure) cameras that can record over 30 mins or so as video cameras which have higher fees.

Yeah, that's still going on, dammit -- my new D780 has the 30 min. limit.

If it's a Canon DSLR and is supported by the Magic Lantern firmware modification, it will allow you to circumvent this limit that way. It's possible that you may then need to use an external recorder via HDMI to avoid overheating depending on the model etc.

With mirrorless, you can put the back of the lens closer to the sensor (don't need to flip a mirror out of the way at high speed) which reduces the glass needed for the same effective focal length. Less length = less glass. Less glass = less mass, which means less force required for an electric autofocus motor to push around all that glass.

Modern zoom lenses have anywhere from 11 to 30 elements, in 3-11 groups, that move at different speeds relative to each other. Doing that with a tiny electric motor, precisely, for a decade is a tough task, especially when the mass of the glass starts to exceed 1kg.

With a mirrorless camera, you can reduce the mass of the lens by ~10% for a full frame camera. With an APS-C sensor, mirrorless, you can reduce the mass by 33%. With a "micro four-thirds" sensor, the mass of the lens is less than 50% of a full frame. Rough numbers. As with everything, there are pros and cons to going with smaller sensors than full frame.

The mirror being between the sensor and lens means that there is a dead zone where there can be no lens, which severely restricts lens designs.

For example, for many years fast normal lenses on SLRs were 58mm “Biotar” not 50mm because a a new kind of focusing (retro focus) had to be adapted to work with a mirror in the way.

I think a lot of the replies you’ve gotten focus on the wrong thing.

Mirrorless in practice really just means the camera works more like your phone camera. You view the image on a screen instead of through an optical viewfinder. That brings some nice benefits, none of them are necessarily a game changer on their own but together it makes for a major step forward in the experience. Now the viewfinder shows you the picture more like it will actually look, the processor can see the image as you’re composing it before you take the shot and provide hints and show you that information overlayed on the image, the processor is involved in auto focusing and can do things like use ai models to focus on eyes, plus the physical benefits like there’s a big complex moving piece the camera no longer needs.

Camera makers then used this change to make a bigger platform shift at the same time. Just like a major version bump in software, if you have breaking changes you’ve been waiting to make you might want to make them all at once. They widened the mount diameter of lenses, which combined with the shorter distance to sensor because of the lack of a mirror gives more flexibility in letting in more light to the sensor. And they built a new set of lenses around it, whereas a lot of the lenses in their old lineups were sometimes decades old and not designed for the crazy high megapixel sensors we have now and in the near future. Most of these new lenses released in the past few years have been very high quality, so to answer your question that’s really where the improved image quality comes from, this new generation of lenses.

Oh yes in many respects the mirrorless switch is already done. I don't tend to buy new camera bodies though; my most recent purchase was a 1Ds MKIII from ~10 years ago, as I want the build quality/weather-resistance you get from those pro models. I'm really excited to see what a pro mirrorless camera might look like in a few years (Canon only just released the 1Dx MkIII so it's not arriving just yet).

The switch is quite obvious from the Canon release schedule - I don't think they have a single non-RF (mirrorless mount) lens being released this year.

I wonder how many photographers were put off by the cost & weight of a 800mm lens, and how many just didn't actually need a 800mm lens? The only time I can remember wanting > 200mm was back when I did sports photography.

For landscapes 400-600 mm are in some cases really nice.

Wildlife & nature, architecture, astronomy, any scene that you want to "flatten"...

Yeah wildlife photography, particularly bird photography, can never have enough focal length. I practice stalking techniques to get closer (which has a much better cost/reward ratio to buying bigger lenses) but if you can fill the frame with a bird you can get awesome shots that just aren't possible otherwise. Currently I'm shooting at 600mm, and I definitely want a teleconverter to get up to ~800mm. After that the prices get truly insane so I think I'll just have to find some bigger birds at that point.

I bought a 70-300 Nikon ED VR specifically to take pictures of the moon, and it does a pretty good job. Turns out it's useful for a lot of situations (birds and other wildlife). My vacation setup is normally iPhone + D7100 with the 70-300 attached. That can easily cover most situations w/o changing lenses around too often.

I'm planning on picking up one of the Nikon mirrorless FFs soon.

For what it's worth, I like Bryan Carnathan's reviews a little more for Canon specific stuff: https://www.the-digital-picture.com/Reviews/Canon-RF-800mm-F...

>but I've seen superthin flat lens, with a marginal cost of production around ~$2 in a university facility, that work better than some $500 lens -- and the latter are expensive because they are hard to make the traditional way.

I find this very fascinating because while I enjoy my ever-increasing smartphone camera and use it as a daily driver, I have a about 13 year old Canon DSLR (one of the first one they made now) with a few lenses and that 2007 model Canon D-SLR with the 1" large digital sensor can RUN INSANE LAPS AROUND TOP OF THE LINE SMARTPHONES with respect to the ability to take low light photos, get a lot of good light, and of course zoom on the telephoto, macro on the macro, etc. The autofocus is probably five times faster and the ~10 zones are lightyears ahead of the phone.

There's no comparison. Sure, the 7MP megapixels are bad. Sure, the ISO noise is pretty bad compared to modern smartphone postprocessing. But the telephoto isn't some pitiful "optical zoom", it's instead incredible powerful optics. The low aperture prime lenses produce beautiful shots whose distortion is matched to human preference.

The idea that phones can "catch up" to even 10 years ago on DSLR's would be very cool.

Unfortunately, I'm not holding my breath. Phone sensors are what 10X smaller? Doing great things with 10X less light is impressive, but at some point, you need a big sensor and good quality glass.

Would love to see us get DSLR quality pics from a phone tho.

I was not referring to phone lens, although those things are being applied there too.

It is now possible to build a telephoto lens for your DSLR, that costs $2 to make, is short and flat, yet has better optics than your current kit. When these become common, it will likely cause another seismic shift in the pure-camera market. Perhaps some of them will actually be bonded with the sensors, unlike what we have today.

Regardless, new lens technology -- while likely to make a greater impact on mobile phones -- is largely orthogonal to them.

... can you actually buy this yet?

Metamaterial lenses seem to be the fusion power of photography. Just one breakthrough that might not happen before they're commercially viable.

> It is now possible to build a telephoto lens for your DSLR, that costs $2 to make, is short and flat, yet has better optics than your current kit.

Do you have any references you can share? I'm super interested.

edit: For anyone else interested, the key phrase that worked for me was "metasurface lenses".

I use a little bit newer Nikon DSLR (~2013), which adds another thing (the first generation of DSLRs wasn't really good at this): Color. The color of iPhones is just bleirgh in comparison, which is a little bit weird considering the cargoculting on HN of Apple's "computational photography".

The color of iPhones is just bleirgh in comparison

They're trying to solve two different problems. Nikon want to reproduce colors that are balanced and accurate. Apple want to produced colors that 'pop' and catch peoples eye when scrolling through Instagram.

This is the first comment here on computational photography, which I think is really the reason for traditional camera manufacturers going away. Most high end cellphones this generation can do stellar photography.

My dream is a camera with a nice sensor/lens and an iphone brain. It likely already exists, up there orbiting the earth...

I can't relate to this at all. I have a Canon EOS 450D (Rebel XSi, 2008 model year) with a few lenses that I used to love, but haven't really used for years now. Its low light performance sucks, it's almost impossible to photograph people at night. My phone does a much better job of that. Yes, the DSLR's optics run circles around any phone, but the sensor really does show its age. And since you specifically mention the autofocus, I just want to add that I find it infuriating. It's awful compared to my phone! It reliably focuses on the wrong thing and is really rather slow. At night, it barely works.

To me, the old DSLR is simply not worth the weight of lugging it around any more. It's funny how we have such different perceptions of our old DSLRs.

You're comparing a modern phone to a very old camera in DSLR terms. Much like the nokia you probably had in 2008, things have very much moved on.

Are there DSLRs with image processing features like Google's "Night Shot"? Where you can take a very long hand-held exposure and it will never be blurry?

Not quite but close. My Sony A7ii will take a 2/3s of a second exposure by stacking four shorter exposures and using stabilization.

2/3 of a second with an f/2 or f/2.8 lens means you can take pictures lit by not much more than starlight.

Actually, even without this, with an F/1.4 lens I can take a handheld picture using only light pollution.

To a very old and entry level camera.

Well, the parent was talking about their even older DSLR and their equally modern phone, so I'm not sure what your point is. Nobody is claiming that a 2020 phone is anywhere close to a 2020 (or 2015, for that matter) DSLR or mirrorless camera.

To be fair to other DSLRs, the Rebel XSi's autofocus was considered one of its weakest parts when the camera was new. There are lots of other autofocus systems which are much faster and more accurate.

I kind of straddle both the positives and negatives - recently pulled out my 7D from a while back and the images are fantastic even only JPG.

I don't expect to do low-light without long exposure (ie, no impromptu shots) and I do have an external flash for bounce lighting indoors.

It's still better than my iPhone (which admittedly is a couple of years old), but weight is a huge factor I only use this when intending to get really good shots. Another is the extra time it takes to transfer files, sort through bursts and put into iCloud or smugmug.

I strongly suspect you may be putting everything on auto and hoping the camera will focus on the right thing. It wont, because the camera has a very crappy auto-mode. It will, when you learn how to use manual mode and pick your own focus point. I fully accept that this is not something most people are interested in, but that camera can and does take wonderful images. Here are a few samples (randomly picked by flickr - I hope they're good :P ).

https://www.flickr.com/cameras/canon/eos_digital_rebel_xsi/

The bad low-light performance wasn't universal at that time. I made low-light performance a priority, so I got the Konica Minolta Maxxum 5D.

Contributing factors may be that the pixels on the sensor are physically larger, and that the sensor-shift image stabilization helps with longer exposures.

I have a Sony RX-100 (Mark-IV specifically). Also with a 1" sensor but in a compact body. Even without flexible lenses, I agree with all your points. I make sure to bring it on trips where I expect to be taking lots of pictures. The cellphone is great in the sense that I always have it on me, and the best camera is always the one you have. But the comparative quality is not even close.

But, I mean, it better not be considering both were about the same price!

>Doing great things with 10X less light is impressive, but at some point, you need a big sensor and good quality glass.

This problem is basically solved already by taking multiple exposures and blending them in software. Once we're at the point where stacking 10 exposures works reliably even in challenging conditions (and we're pretty nearly there with the latest phones) then many of the advantages of a larger sensor are moot.

As far as glass "quality" is concerned, smart phone manufacturers benefit hugely from economy of scale. I wouldn't necessarily assume that smart phone lenses are manufactured to lower quality standards just because you're paying less for them.

There are still a great many. First, much greater resolution. Then, being able to take pictures of things going fast, then also being able to take non-blurry pictures in very low light, then there is the dynamic range, and then there is also constant aperture zoom as well as telephoto focal ranges.

Lenses on phones are limited by diffraction. They can never provide the quality of a larger lens because their aperture is so small that their airy disk is often over the size of a pixel.

Phones are already better at taking non-blurry pictures in very low light. They generally have pretty fast shutter speeds available for moving subjects. Dynamic range is not particularly important now that exposure blending works so well.

Diffraction all comes out in the wash. Smaller sensors allow wider apertures (and phones have some room to grow in terms of sensor size).

The resolution advantage is actually quite moderate (people are often mislead by comparing the number of pixels rather than its square root).

If you use multiple exposures for exposure blending you lose sensitivity, and in the case of fast shutter speeds image quality plummets.

Phones are simply not better at taking non-blury pictures in very lowlight. Cameras evolved since the 90s, we have 5 stops of IS, sharp f/1.4 lenses and exposure stacking.

The resolution advantage is not moderate at all. A 12MP phone is around as sharp as a theoretically perfect 8MP sensor with a perfect lens, while current cameras are as sharp as 40+MP perfect sensor with a theoretically perfect lens.

Diffraction absolutely doesn't come out as a wash. What matters is the actual diameter of the aperture, not the ratio. Phones are a tenth of ILCs in this metric, or even less for non-optimal focal lengths.

>Diffraction absolutely doesn't come out as a wash. What matters is the actual diameter of the aperture, not the ratio

It's actually the f stop that matters for diffraction, not the absolute diameter. Roughly, this is because the light spreads more with a longer focal length because it has a longer distance over which to diverge. If you crunch the numbers this exactly compensates for the larger absolute diameter of the aperture. Here is a post with a reference: https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/21428

It's amazing how much enthusiast discussion about cameras is based on basic misconceptions about optics.

I'm not talking about linear resolution. I'm talking about angular resolution.

Here, the airy disk diameter is the image size. At the same magnification, the image height is proportional to the object size.

Since when the f number is smaller, at the same magnification, substituting in the thin lens formula with the magnification, you find that the object size is inversely proportional to the focal length.

From this you come to the conclusion that, at the same focus distance, the smallest object you can image is a function of the absolute diameter of the aperture.

Intuitively, this is because even though the airy disk has the same size, the focal length is much smaller, therefore the field of view is much wider for the same sensor size, therefore the angular confusion is much bigger, therefore for the same FoV at the same f number detail goes down.

Or put another way, yes the light spreads more, but the sensor on a camera is bigger, so in the end you have much more detail anyways.

This is why, for example, spy satellites despite operating at f/11 or so can resolve much more detail than a cellphone :)

This is a standard exam question if you ever take a Wave Optics class, by the way. But as you say, enthusiast discussion, such as on DPReview, is often based on basic misconceptions about optics :)

Apologies for the snark. This would probably be a fun discussion in person. In my experience, most apparent disagreements like this just come down to confusion over which factors are being held constant out of field of view, sensor size, focal length, total amount of light gathered, etc. etc.

If the phone was using a slice of a DSLR sensor, then yes, the absolute aperture would be what was relevant, as you obviously cannot improve the resolution of an image merely by cropping it (if you imagine a ultra ultra wide DSLR lens which becomes a normal phone lens after the crop).

But two points:

First, you're then comparing resolution at a focal length that's irrelevant to DSLRs, so in practical terms it's not a like for like comparison.

Second, phones are using sensors with higher pixel density. The question is just whether the phone can use a wide enough fixed aperture to avoid being limited by diffraction at the desired resolution. A fixed aperture of e.g. f1.6 is practical at phone focal lengths but not (as a fixed aperture) at full frame focal lengths. If you calculate the theoretical linear resolution limit imposed by phone camera f-numbers, it's approaching 1000 lp/mm for the better models (e.g. an iPhone with an f1.6 aperture and a ~10mm sensor). I'm sure the real limits are lens aberrations and noise at the moment.

It's not an either-or. Diffraction makes things a lot harder, and some phone lenses are indeed essentially diffraction limted

Secondly, I'm actually comparing resolution at fixed FoV, not a fixed focal length.

Again, the sensor size doesn't matter, what matters is the focal length. The focal length of an iPhone main lens isn't 10mm, the sensor size is 8.5mm but the focal length is actually around 5mm. You find the theoretical maximum linear resolution is more around 300-400 lp/mm. If you run the numbers, at f/1.6 the airy disk diameter is already bigger than the pixel pitch (2.11 microns airy disk and 1.7 micron pixel pitch). The resolution is already being seriously degraded by diffraction, although it's not completely diffraction yet. Lens aberrations make it even worse, of course. All in all, realistically the resolution is pretty much at its limit.

If you work at this regime where the linear resolution is close to equal to the airy disk, you start having a type of abberation where changing the wavelength of the system causes a change in the resolution, which can't be fixed. So pretty much in practice you can't really exceed the resolution we see now even in perfect light with a perfect lens, because you start having unavoidable abberrations that are very significant to the image.

>Again, the sensor size doesn't matter, what matters is the focal length.

Well, yes, but the two are obviously tightly linked if we're comparing a DSLR to a phone camera.

I'm going by the calculation in the 'Cameras' section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airy_disk It explains why only the f-number is relevant. If you plug values for an iPhone into the 'x =' equation, you'll see that an iPhone camera is not really close to being limited by diffraction. The minimum separation distance at 500nm wavelength at f1.6 comes out to 976nm. Along an 8mm sensor dimension that's 8188 line pairs. Now sure, that's by the Rayleigh criterion, so you're not resolving 8188 perfectly sharp line pairs. But that's a still a good margin over the sensor resolution, and it's an open question how good sharpening algorithms can get.

I'm afraid that the radius, not the diameter. The diameter of the airy disk at f1.6 for 500nn is of 2 microns, and for a line pair you'd need double that, not a single, so a line pair would fit on 4 microns. Over an 8mm sensor that's 4000 lines, 2000 line pairs. Note that even here contrast is reduced by diffraction as we are operating from the first null. If you use the Rayleigh criterion and relax your standard for resolution you're at 4000 barely distinguishable line pairs. IIRC that would 4000LP at MTF15, so at MTF50 you might be at around 2500-2600?

And this is of course the very best you can do at 26mm equivalent focal lengths, if you want a tighter or wider shot your image quality degrades because once again the optics don't fit and you'll have to reduce your f number.

2000 line pairs in perfect conditions is quite low. Better is expected from cheap DSLR zoom lenses.

>I'm afraid that the radius, not the diameter

Yes: the quantity calculated is the smallest separation two objects can have before they blur together (by the Raleigh criterion).

According to the standard notion of lp/mm, there is no need to halve the reciprocal of this quantity to get lp/mm. See e.g. the table on p.14 here: https://zenodo.org/record/3518178/files/Verhoeven%202019%20-... An airy disc of ~2um radius translates to ~500 lp/mm. The following page also agrees with this usage, as does every other source I can find at the moment. http://www.normankoren.com/Tutorials/MTF1A.html

I think you are basically out by a factor of 4 by using the diameter instead of the radius and requiring line quads rather than line pairs. I believe the lp/mm value obtained is for ~9% MTF, so it's a fairly generous estimate of the available resolution, but not excessively so.

Regardless of the correct definition of lp/mm, the iPhone has plenty of room to increase the sensor resolution at f1.6. And phone cameras could certainly move to somewhat wider apertures and somewhat larger sensors.

Phone cameras are already at the limit of the space they can occupy. You would have to trade off the number of cameras.

As for the rest, lp/mm only makes sense at a given MTF rating. MTF50 is the standard. MTF9 is very, very, very generous. Incredibly so.

But anyways, sure, let's take 900lp/mm on the short edge for 4590lp/mm MTF9 - maybe I misremembered. A 5DSr with a real world zoom lens, the 24-70mm F2.8L, gets 7700lp/mm in the real world, and that's the MTF lens-sensor system, not just the lens. And that's not even close to the maximum possible resolution, nor to the maximum you can actually get in real life as you can. If you take the sharpest full-frame lens I know of whose MTF9 is limited to 400lp/mm because no testing apparatus was available that could go higher, the actual maximum is around 9600lp/mm. In any case, even the highest theoretical resolution of a phone is far lower than the practical resolutions of ILCs in use today, and is actually less than the sharpness of a 90$ lens on the very cheapest full-frame body you can find.

Indeed, take the Canon 50mm EF II, with an MTF50 yielding ~2000-2400lp/mm on the short edge of FF sensor. According to this source (https://www2.uned.es/personal/rosuna/resources/photography/D...), at around f/1.6 we should get around 420lp/mm, on the short edge that's 2142lp on the short edge, which is less than the cheapest EF lens in production right now. I don't know about you, but the best possible performance in theoretically perfect conditions being under the performance of the cheapest EF lens in the real world says something.

In real life, of course, the lens-sensor system will barely get close to the theoretically perfect result, and you will peak at the best possible result being around half the linear resolution of the cheapest production Canon lens.

Keep in mind, if you were to go for a larger sensor, you'd have to increase the focal length to compensate too. So 20% increase in sensor size length would need a 20% increase in focal length and at the same f number you'd need a 20% wider aperture too. And again, you'd be fixed at around 25mm FF eq. focal lengths, if you try more practical focal lengths like 50mm FF eq. you would see a drop in quality. They're already pretty much at their optical limits and have been for a while, actually f/1.6 isn't even the fastest phone lens - but those had smaller sensors still.

> This problem is basically solved already by taking multiple exposures and blending them in software.

Here's the problem.

Doing "things in software" is akin to saying ultraprocessed food is gourmet "food".

Image stacking is extremely common in low-light photography, especially astrophotography (where it is essentially the only way to get the 30min+ long exposures needed to image some deep-space objects). This need is somewhat mitigated by a sky tracker, which moves your camera together with the sky, but these are expensive and will slowly drift, making it still require multiple exposures (though you can get to several minutes before you get trailing, while without one you can only really get to a few seconds).

Basically, it's a pretty common technique for increasing SNR, it's a very different kind of "doing things in software" than, say, an iPhone's fake bokeh. It's no surprise that phones are starting to use it.

I would love smartphone postprocessing over DSLR raw images.

I feel that phones usually make better decisions for contrast, white balance, exposure than DSLRs do. With a DSLR, reaching the same finished product usually requires a ton of manual work editing photos.

Of course, the DSLR has far better detail on the pixel level, and if you need to zoom in at all, it wins in a landslide. I wish I could combine the strengths of both platforms.

DSLRs (and other high-end cameras) typically have a ton of JPEG options too. Though I usually just shoot raw and let Lightroom apply presets.

That said, the traditional camera manufacturers are pretty much laggards with respect to software so their better hardware isn't really used to full advantage a lot of the time.

I can't find it now, but I remember reading about something with what seems a lot more boring than the articles I find about "metamaterial lenses". Maybe someone has a pointer for what it's actually called.

It was something reproducing a sort of "solar furnace" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_furnace) at a micro scale, coordinated with electronics. Think creating a dynamic lens by redirecting light from many micro lenses (mirrors?).

The upside being dynamic focal lengths using extremely short lens (the whole thing being microscopic).

Am I day dreaming? I can swear I read something or saw a documentary somewhere.

Or is what I'm describing just another name for metamaterial lenses? Based on what I've read about metamaterials, right now, I don't think it is, but I can very easily be wrong.

Edit:

Ah, maybe microlenses? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microlens

Does anyone know if they're applicable to camera lenses?

Microlenses are used already in most modern camera sensors to absorb more light or used for dual-pixel autofocus.

The cine lens and professional photographer lens market is big and irreplaceable until they figure out how, for example, to make an f4 600mm prime without a 150mm front element. Many problems to solve until we see the last days of optical professional lenses. Price points for these start at $2000, the cine lenses are around $4500 for primes and that 600mm I mentioned is a Canon lens, has a front element grown from fluorite crystal and runs about $12,000 and is currently on version 4.

A 600mm F/4 lens gathers a lot of light per-unit sensor-area, and there are many reasons why professional nature photographers have historically needed such a large lens

(1) Older digital sensors weren't good at all with high-iso (high read-noise, low photon-electron conversion efficiency, etc)

(2) An off-sensor DSLR AutoFocus array has a very small effective-aperture, making the lens aperture very important in low-light situations for autofocus (which a lot of nature photography is)

(3) Bokeh - Ofcource nothing beats large aperture bokeh, but this can be tackled perhaps through computation?

For (1) and (2) Modern imaging sensors perform beautifully in high-iso scenarios. Also, with mirrorless, there are cameras that can AF down to F/22 - something unimaginable (and impossible) with DSLRs.

While the demand for 600mm F/4 is there from a professional standpoint, there is an even larger demand for cheaper options - and.. this point is important, you can produce award-worthy images using those cheaper potions. In fact if you look at any nature competition a lot of the awards go to images made with cheap/budget gear.

Or Cooke cine lens primes start at about 20,000eur, a zoom lens up to 60,000eur - just to comprehend where the lens top end is.

Pick up an $11k Canon 200-400 L lens and it is this super solid, beautifully made thing.

Pick up a Canon CN-E 30-300 cinema lens and it is this exquisite, jewel-like thing that seems as though it is made by NASA. And it's $45K.

Does that mean we might be nearing the end of camera bumps on phones?

On a tangent are 'liquid lenses' anywhere near making an impact in consumer imaging products?

Do you have a link? Most likely that $2 lens only works well at a single frequency.

This is so laughably wrong it's not even funny. We're not talking about individual lens elements but entire camera lenses.

There's a ton of engineering that goes into designing eg; a zoom lens that can cover a focal range while retaining sharpness, minimal color fringing, etc. And that's assuming you can use software to correct for distortion... in the past that was a dealbreaker. The result is a lens that requires 10-20 (or sometimes even more) individual elements. No matter how you cut it that will be expensive.

There's no cheating physics sadly.

I switched from Nikon to Panasonic as well aflet my grip liquified and Nikon service said it's a consumable and not covered by warranty. Panasonic make smaller and lighter cameras, smaller and ligher glass, sometimes better glass due to the fact that aspherical elements are smaller and easier to manufacture, has interoperability with Olympus lenses and also ability to use Leica M43 lenses.

Well, comparing m43 cameras with full frame is like comparing Phase 645 sensor with FF cameras. M43 cameras are really nice and lightweight but have their own limitations.

All the Leica m43 glass are so called Pana-Leica glass: Panasonic designed and manufactured but Leica rubber stamped. They still are really nice glass, though :)

Disclaimer: used Olympus 4/3 and m43 for reaally long time but the mirrorless full frame gear feels so much better in the closely same sized package.

I agree but do not care nevertheless. Still using a small sensor Ricoh GR Digital III most of the time. If I ever want background separation I just pick up the m43. It's good enough. Most people are happy with a phone camera. All of them have really obvious distortion. It's great that there are so many choices to choose from.

Nikon have slowly been moving their camera body manufacturing to Thailand for 20+ years, starting at the bottom and moving to the top.

Agreed on customer service.

Nikon still make many of their top tier lenses in Japan as well. I don’t see that changing any time soon.

I wonder if Apple is considering them as an acquisition target. At their current market cap, the dilution be a rounding error for AAPL shareholders.

Apple’s cross functional business org makes them really effective at transferring expertise across product lines. Just subsidizing the high end camera line might be worth it to transfer technology and expertise to iPhone cameras.

(Plus slapping an Apple logo on Nikon cameras would probably boost sales overnight)

As a Nikon shooter with pro-level gear, replacing the Nikon logo with the Apple one would be the fastest way to get me to ditch their ecosystem.

Not that I doubt your story, but Nikon support is usually pretty good, IME.

Last year I cracked the lens mount on my d810, and I took it to the shop where I bought it, and they sent it off and had it repaired no questions asked for a reasonable price (it's out of warranty). It took longer than I would have liked, but other than that a good experience.

I'm really sad to see this happen as well. I've been a Nikon user for 3 decades myself. Canon has always historically had better lenses and Nikon has had better bodies but lots of third party support. I do have some Nikon primes, but most of my lenses are made in Japan by Sigma or made in Japan or Germany by Zeiss. I have had exactly two lenses made outside of Japan by Nikon from their consumer line, and both were subpar optically compared to the Japanese made lenses in their pro line-up. It's such a stark difference, in fact, that I have taken to mostly buying used consumer lenses from the earlier auto-focus days (1973 - 1998) because these lenses are on par with the optical clarity of current generation pro lenses if cleaned professionally. You can usually acquire one for a significant cost reduction compared to buying a new pro lense and have it cleaned locally by the camera shop and get something really quite good. That's how I acquired my 600mm, 500mm, 400mm, and 300mm telephotos for birding, as well as my 50mm f/1.2 prime for general use.

Seems if I add any lenses to my collection I'll be buying used or new from Sigma/Zeiss. I saw the shift happening already and had mostly already been doing that. I will say the new PF series pro lenses with fresnel lens elements are really great though. While I still have my older 300mm, I also got the new pro series 300mm prime from Nikon as it's significantly smaller and lighter weight, doesn't even require a lens foot and can be shot hand-held if you have a steady grip. I suppose I should start budgeting to acquire the 500mm version of the PF lens before they move production out of Japan as I find it unlikely I'd buy anything else that's Nikon branded for lenses. For shorter focal length stuff Zeiss is far far superior.

> I've always found Nikon to be lacking in competitive models with Canon

Over at Fred Miranda and DPR, canon shooters always lament about the lack of competitiveness Canon was regarding Nikon glass.

I feel like Canon shooters have been a little smug about glass; but wisty eyed looking at Sony/Nikon body's/sensors. There's... 2? Nikon lenses I'd love on my Canon FF. There's... 6? I'm aware of with no quality-price equivalent on Nikon.

Typically Nikon has had the best glass. And there's a collector's market for much of the nikon vintage glass out there.

I really would like to have the 13mm Rectilinear lens if only it isn't worth several tens of thousands of dollars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikkor_13mm_f/5.6#:~:text=The%....

> Tangentially, I recently bought a superb Sigma lens and was happy to see that it was actually still made in Japan as well; I thought all the third-party lens makers had moved abroad, but surprisingly a number of them are still there.

Sigma is probably the best of the third-party lens manufacturers. I have a first-generation Sigma 50mm f/1.4 with Nikon mount (purchased around ~2011) — the build quality is great, and the bokeh is fabulous.

I can't say the same for Tamron.

As an old Nikon customer I agree with your sentiments. When I got into DSLR cameras about 15 years ago it seemed like Nikon and Canon were evenly matched with each company having a set group of fans. It seems like since then Canon has really pulled away and Nikon seems to be falling behind especially in terms of lenses(quality and variety). If I were to start getting into cameras now I would not look to Nikon, and it makes me somewhat sad to say that.

Nikon is the worst performing of the big 4 and has been on a death spiral for years at this point. I wouldn't be surprised if they will stop photographer camera & lens production 5 years from now.

Heartbreaking, but they are a "survivor" company. They have lasted over 100 years, through a world war (including firestorm bombing), earthquakes, fires and tsunamis.

They had never been particularly big, until the 1990s, with the advent of point-and-shoot digital cameras.

That gravy train ended when the iPhone came out. They are probably contracting to their more traditional role, of Big Black Cameras, as well as some very good scientific optics.

They have some of the finest scientists and engineers in the world, as well as a gigantic portfolio of patents. They aren't going away.

From what I hear, the Thai do a great job, but it's still a big psychological shock to leave Japan. Their Japanese plants were considered the "top shelf" production facilities.

At least for the Japanese market, not ‘made in Japan’ is a big downgrade in perception.

I wonder if they will do the "Apple" thing: "Designed in California."

This is already super-popular among large Japanese companies. Uniqlo was built on that tactic.

I think there are a lot of "first-world" companies that have copied this approach. See also "Design and Quality: IKEA of Sweden. Made in [insert cheap-manufacturing country here]."

I've never met anyone who equated 'quality' with IKEA. Cheap, yes. Practical, maybe. Convenient, certainly.

But quality? Sorry but haha. No.

Ikea has a few higher quality items, but not many.

It's only when you are confronted with really crappy furniture that you start to appreciate "IKEA quality". You shouldn't of course confuse "quality" with "luxury", but for the price you pay, you (usually) get stuff that looks Ok and will do its job reasonably well for a pretty long time. Also, everyone likes to complain about how difficult IKEA furniture is to assemble and how bad the instructions are. We recently ordered a custom-made bed from a smaller company, and the quality was undeniably better than IKEA (OTOH it also cost about 5x as much as the average IKEA bed), but still the instructions skipped about half of the information required...

OnePlus had funny one: "Designed by OnePlus. Assembled in China."

...as it somehow tries to imply that it is not designed in China (but it is).

I see this all the time now. My Kitchenaid kettle has a similar "designed in X" note on it.

To me that kind of messaging just exudes arrogance.

That ship has mostly sailed, and people seem to be OK with ‘made by a Japanese company’

For instance Sony products are not seen as ‘made in China’, just ‘made by Sony’

I can only speak to my own experience, but that isn’t necessarily be true.

There’s a scale, and ‘made in Japan’ seems to so far be better than not.

That said, if they can halve their prices by building in Thailand, maybe customers will forgive them.

Since the only thing left is the high end market though, I’m not sure cutting prices is most relevant now though.

Their shift to Thailand has happened over many years, since around 2015 the only camera bodies they have made in Japan were their flagship digital (and one film) models.

Same for lenses — I have a couple dozen, including a handful of the pro-series “gold ring” lenses. The latter are made in Japan, all others (consumer grade) were made in Thailand, other than some of the older 80s-era manual lenses.

Japanese designs(or should I say "our") are always flimsier for same size, heavier for a set volume, has 10x more M2.5 screws, and priced 2.5x for same or less overall utility, are my experiences. There would be a lot to be said about mechanical designs and mechanical reliability, but I don't always need something super fancy to hold pieces of paper on a desk.

They're not cutting prices, they're trying to save on costs, ie., they're spiraling.

Big downgrade in quality too, in most cases. When I moved here and had to furnish a house / stock a kitchen, I was amazed at the diversity and quality of basic cheap home goods here.

"Here" being Japan? Most of those cheap home goods (Muji etc) are made in China now.

Even Daiso has tons of made-in-Japan dollar store goods of superb quality.

Daiso is the canonical example of a Japanese company that makes virtually everything in China.

Mujin / Daiso can have questionable quality so I avoid them for items I know will get a lot of use. I'm talking about places like Shimachu or the kitchen stores in Kappabashi. Tons of "made in Japan" products for about half the cost of what I remember paying for cheap Chinese wares in USA.

And, when I do buy an expensive item "made in Japan", I can generally trust that it is of high quality. Compare this to shopping for appliances in the USA, where brands like KitchenAid and CuisinArt are perpetually cheapening the quality of their products while keeping the price the same and coasting on the reputation they built in the 1970s and 1980s.

> They have some of the finest scientists and engineers in the world, as well as a gigantic portfolio of patents. They aren't going away.

Kodak would like to have a word.

> Kodak would like to have a word

They will have to join the queue behind a lot of Swiss watchmakers.

Why/which watchmakers?

The ones who used to make clockwork watches just before digital watches appeared in the 1970s. They failed to invest in time and lost a lot of market share. To be fair, unlike Kodak and cameras, they weren't completely wiped out, and the high-end precision Swiss watch is still a thing.

Incidentally, recent sales have apparently been massively affected by COVID, as many of them are sold in bricks-and-mortar boutiques that customers are no longer visiting.

[Edit] - this is the queue of companies who failed to consider a rival disruptive technology.

I have been seeing a lot of Apple Watches on wrists, lately.

Lots of AirPods, too.

But that is anecdotal, from a limited geographic perspective.

Completely different markets: good Swiss watches start at $2-3k and go up, way, way up. Apple watches are sub-$1k for the majority of models.

Yeah, but those manufacturers are not a huge market.

For a time, a fair number of people didn't wear watches at all, and used their phones.

Those are the people that I'm seeing with Apple Watches (and other devices, like FitBits).

Not a different market at all. I hate that phrase.

Apple watches are updated every few years. Swiss watches last a lot longer. Price might not be that different over 10 to 20 years.

Sure, but since getting an Apple Watch, I haven’t felt the need to wear a mechanical watch anymore.

They are good enough looking, and I need to close my rings, damnit! They just do so much more...

> They just do so much more...

That's a bug, not a feature! My Gshock is indestructible and tells the time, and that's about it. Perfect for me.

> Incidentally, recent sales have apparently been massively affected by COVID, as many of them are sold in bricks-and-mortar boutiques that customers are no longer visiting.

I'd argue not having to go into an office and "dress up" has impacted the watch market as well. If I'm at home all day, I don't really need a clock on my wrist.

Is there really that many watchmakers on their deathbeds? Every couple of months I'll spend several hours wasting time looking for watch styles I like and I'm amazed at how many traditional watchmakers are still out there, some with 0 smartwatch offerings.

I'm amazed at how many traditional watchmakers are still out there

There has been massive consolidation in that market and most of those brands you see are all owned by one of maybe three conglomerates.

Most watches are identified by their movement (guts), as opposed to the branding you see on the face.

The people who make movements are a much smaller bunch.

Exactly what I've been thinking this entire thread. The market for quality optics is getting smaller, more specialized, and further from the consumer. The scientific, arts, and entertainment industries will likely be able to support no more than two or three top-tier manufacturers, and the consumer market is so far away from that that expertise in top-tier equipment will have no bearing on consumer products, and vice-versa.

Nikon sees this happening and choose which side of the divide to service. It's probably the safer bet, too, as some of the top-tier manufacturers are going to have to either coalesce or dissolve in the next decade or two regardless of strategy. At least in the consumer market strategy, such as partnering with a cellphone manufacturer, could open new opportunities.

Nikon sells much more than just cameras. I only know their excellent microscope product line (https://www.nikon.com/products/business/biomedical/), but it looks like they are also in the lithography business https://www.nikon.com/products/#ps-biz Kodak had what, printers?

Kodak made scientific and technical optics and imaging equipment too, for years. Not to mention film for just about everything. They've made X-ray machines and other medical imaging devices. They had huge chemical plants and research facilities that didn't just make photographic chemicals. They even made hand grenades during WWII.

Kodak had what, printers?

Kodak pioneered digital photography (they literally invented the first digital still camera). All through the 80s and 90s they had the best digital camera sensors on the market and where first to release a commercially available DSLR. In the mid 90s they owned the pro DSLR space.

But they didn't want to cannibalize their film market, and after much infighting between senior managers they ended up not investing in the digital lead they had. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Nikon was mom&dad operation compared to Kodak in its prime DJIA-listed days.

I should have also mentioned that they are very fiscally conservative. They barely carry any debt. A lot of their cost-cutting is proactive, as opposed to reactive.

That's a philosophy that I have followed, myself, and I find it is quite effective.

And some long-forgotten German manufacturers as well.

I have a great Junghans watch.

I also have a couple of Japan-only Casio/Oceanus watches.

I haven't worn any of them in quite some time.

Kodak stubbornly refused to embrace the digital transformation, they kept making film cameras and film for them well after everybody else had a digital camera lineup for years.

No amount of valuable patents and top-notch engineers can help a failed strategic bet like this.

Or Xerox.

> They have some of the finest scientists and engineers in the world, as well as a gigantic portfolio of patents. They aren't going away.

Those are exactly quickly going away. Engineers and scientists need to get paid and want job stability, while patents have a 20-year lifespan.

Nikon was on top of the world in 2008 with the D300 and the D90, but the technologies that made those possible were patented years prior. Right now, the curve is with mirrorless where Sony, Panasonic, and (now defunct) Olympus have a 10-year lead on patents. It's also with smartphones, and those technologies bubbling up. In the deep learning/ML battle, Nikon is bringing a knife to a gunfight.

On the other side, they're having massive layoffs right now. When companies have layoffs, usually they let go the bottom end of the workforce, while the top end leave voluntarily.

Nikon is continuing to patent new lens designs, but so is its competition. Nikon has excellent optics, but so does Olympus, Canon, Fuji, or Sony; they aren't exactly ahead of the pack here.

Sigma has really been pushing the edge on optics.

Nikon needs a new D3/D700-tier body to get back into the game. Right now their bodies are just 'competitive' with Canon and Sony FF bodies... back when the D3 sensor came out, it put the final nail in the coffin for most analog film shooters.

Nikon needs a buyer. It converted into a camera company during the DSLR boom when phones and compact cameras couldn't take good enough pictures.

Now phones have eaten both compact cameras and hobbyist DSLR markets. Prosumer and professional DSLRs/ILCs are a niche market and Nikon is becoming a niche company.

If your hobby is shooting sports, wildlife or stars (big balls of gas), buy an ILC. If all you need is a travel camera, an iPhone is a damn good one and it's smart enough to beat 9 out of 10 humans fiddling arround in Lightroom.

Nikon buys sensors from Sony. It can't get ahead in any meaningful way there. Plus, sensor tech has plateaued a bit.

Nikon, if it were to survive, would need to move into new markets. dSLRs are dying, but imaging is exploding. Nikon and Canon ran into the innovator's dilemma: they didn't want to eat into their core market, so they released crippled products like the Nikon 1 or Canon M-mount. By the time they got into the game, their market was collapsing, they lost a lot of credibility, and Sony had a huge lead. It's probably too late, but we'll see.

Drones, industrial, teleconferencing, and hundreds of other markets are popping up, but Canon and Nikon are conspicuously absent.

This is a side related question, but I have always been curious about the process by which say, a Nikon team, decides to create a new lens.

I'd love to know things like what they trade off in terms of $, weight, complexity, aberrations, performance. And do they have to retire an old lens line to make room for a new one?

And this is way too much to ask here (I'm sure I need to read an optics intro), but how in the world do they solve that they need 12 elements, etc. to make some aberration go away, by combining 3 different index of refraction glasses in a certain order, etc! Amazingly complicated.

I imagine now there are ray tracing solvers for it, but I wonder how they did it in the early days of lens design!

I fear for Nikon, even though I suspect they have lifelines, given Bank of Japan’s quantitative easing. They’re the least diversified of the big camera companies.

Sony has…a lot, from semiconductors to financial instruments. Canon has high-end video, scanners, and enterprise printing and copying. Nikon has photography-oriented cameras, some medical optics, and semiconductor equipment, and that’s about it. They’re just not the sprawling conglomerate that can absorb losses as easily as Sony.

Sigh. I’m a camera nerd, and I hate to see the market shrink further. I know it’s going to—cell phone cameras accomplish the actual job to be done that most people have, which is snapshots of kids and cats. And, interchangeable lens cameras are getting to the point they’re over-serving the high-end market with ever-fancier lenses and marginal sensor improvements, with no real workflow improvements.

Do more boutique camera companies like Leica just survive on their (what I assume to be) large margins?

I imagine so.

At the risk of angering Leica fans: they’re shipping not exactly state of the art technology at very high prices, with a lot of the R&D actually being done by Panasonic. (Or, in the case of their Lux compact cameras, they’re literally shipping Panasonic cameras with a different sticker on them.)

Look at the Leica Q2: it costs $5000. The Fuji X100V costs $1300. I know there’s a bigger sensor in the Q2, but, c’mon, there’s not $2000 worth of magic hiding in there.

> they’re shipping not exactly state of the art technology at very high prices

I think that misses the point: when you buy Leica, you're not buying technology. It's not a technology company, it's a luxury brand. You buy Leica over Canon, Fuji or Panasonic for the same reason you buy Rolex over Casio, Swatch or Seiko.

Oh I am fully aware of “Leica as jewelry”, I just didn’t want to immediately wallop that straw man.

There's an interesting relationship between Leica, Sinar, and Panasonic for sure - Panasonic is seems to be behind the firmware in even the older Leica M series cameras, which are definitely made by Leica. The SL2 is essentially a Panasonic SR1 with a nicer body. The Leica S series medium format cameras use similiar looking firmware, and the the internals of the newest S3 power the Sinar S30|45 digital back. The Lux Cameras where just a different sticker though. The Q2, while also probably built by Panasonic, has no actual equal in terms of lenses. The lens they put on that body is stellar.

Having used an M camera briefly, they aren't worth the price new, but used they are really great values that are built like nothing else. When you tire of them, you can sell them back for what you paid, sometimes more!

Agree on M models not being worth the money new. I've always bought gently used bodies 2 years after release. Still, the M-system is capable of nothing that any other non-rangefinder can do: which is to capture the decisive moment. There's no blackout period and you see what's beyond the framelines, such that you can anticipate the composition. The Fuji X100 comes close.

Fuji X-Pro line is direct Leica competitor. I never owned Leica, but I love my X-Pro cameras. Rangefinders are so interesting to use and X-Pros give you variability - you can use optical rangefinder, mix of optical/digital rangefinder with focus peaking, fully digital view finder or back screen, if desired. This gives you a lot of flexibility as different things works best for different lenses. Physically, camera is very nicely built and joy to handle, because all important settings can be set mechanically.

Ehhhh... I've owned a bunch of digital Leica gear, and I'll flatly say that the M lenses produce some of the best images you'll see from a raw optical pipeline. A 50mm APO Summicron is an exceptional lens for its optical characteristics; same goes for most of their 'cron and 'lux models.

By contrast, Leica's digital M bodies have always been at least a generation behind... at their time of release. The way you deal with this is correct exposure discipline, such that there's less to deal with in post. Newer M bodies have gotten much better, however.

The Q is a really interesting line, since I assume it's a collaborative project between Panasonic, Tower Jazz, and Leica. Frankly, the images for both the Q and Q2 are outstanding, and I'd throw down another $5k for a 50mm Q2. If you seriously think an X100V can compete with a Q2 for full pipeline imaging (capture to print), you're nuts. I've personally seen large prints come out of my Epson P800 from an XE-3 + 23/1.4 and my Q2 and the noise reduction artifacts inherent to the X-trans filter are noticeable on paper. If all you're doing is posting to IG or Flickr, Fuji is amazing for the money.

You can just use M lenses on other bodies. With autofocus, even.

> By contrast, Leica's digital M bodies have always been at least a generation behind... at their time of release

The M9 was revolutionary in 2009, an 18MP full-frame sensor in a peer-comparatively tiny body. The M Monochrom in 2012 is the only major first-party camera to release w/o a Bayer filter with massive increases in resolution and sensitivity. They've been riding the "classic rangefinder experience" for some time since with incremental improvements, but the early digital M bodies were anything but behind. The recent M10-R and M10-M are also competitive sensor-wise.

Leica also makes microscopes (I use one of them regularly).

Nikon also has a well respected sports-optics division (binoculars, spotting scopes), although they are also seeing a ton of competition in that marketplace as well.

Yup, I totally forgot about that.

Though that still gets to my point that they make optics, and pretty much just optics. Makes it hard to pivot (ugh, sorry) to anything else, from a corporate mentality standpoint.

If I'm mistaken, Nikon existed the scope business earlier this year.

I wasn't aware of that, but you appear to be right [0]. The spotting scopes I mentioned are more like telescopes meant for viewing terrestrial objects such as wildlife, shooting targets, etc.

[0] https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/gun-control-nikon-wi...

I've been around photography for a while. This is sad news but not surprising. Mobile phones have gotten good enough that you don't need a DSLR anymore to take "nice pictures." All the computational photography to create fake bokeh, good low-light photos, etc. pretty much ate up all the demand for DSLR.

If you look at the photos on a big monitor, you can spot the difference between a DSLR and smartphone. But on a smartphone screen, where 95% of the photos are viewed these days, the difference is negligible. Heck my wife recently printed out 4x6 prints of her smartphone photos and they looked pretty good too.

I've recently got a iPhone 12 Pro, and it's good enough that I'm thinking of selling my Fuji X100V. DSLRs used to be accessible for amateurs. But unless you need specific capabilities (strobe usage, fast sport shooting, ultra-telephoto, etc), most people don't need to buy a DSLR if you have a decent smart phones these days.

I said the same thing about the iphone 12 pro here a few days ago

as predicted, enthusiasts wanted to argue the point instead of acknowledge what the market can bear

photography enthusiasts have to realize that “the market” is more concerned about their shoes being in the photo than how the bokeh looks, and in that respect AI depth of field that comes with a nondestructive parallel full focus image, with smart HDR on by default, also available in a derivative of RAW format is more than good enough!

All in a much more portable form factor.

The potential for a 5-10% optimizations in a larger traditional form factor just isn't good enough of a distinction.

It is pretty wild to think that, like, 20 years ago digital camera had relatively nice little screens on them and relatively good processing, while phones had those silly little green-and-black LCDs. I wonder if there's an alternate universe where people are saying "Nokia seems to be really doomed. This is sad but not surprising -- smartcamera antennas have gotten good enough that you can get reception almost anywhere that a cellphone can. If you play a smartcamera call through a high fidelity audiophile setup you can kinda tell the difference, but if you are just using the NokiaBuds that came with the thing, they are basically indistinguishable."

I read your comment and felt like I was doing magic mushrooms

The camera manufacturers seem to be set in their ways. Wouldn't it be cool if you could load a sim card into your smart-camera & use android apps for cool features, like proper HDR (not the manual bracketing stuff), maybe apply some casual third-party filters, or instant streaming and sharing on social platforms. But maybe the target market, the professional photographers, are also the older generation that care more about a tiny amount of lens diffraction than the possibilities of new tech. There could also be the aspect of job security, since new tech could lower the barrier for newcomers.

I suspect another aspect to it is that camera manufacturers didn't even really want to go digital at all. They had a nice revenue stream in the form of "selling rolls of film" that would have kept them happy indefinitely. It isn't easy to obsolete your main lifeline.

If I’m not mistaken Canon, Nikon, etc. only ever sold camera’s, not film. And photographers changed camera’s a lot less often in the analogue days. With digital the customers suddenly got on an upgrade schedule similar to that of computers. So from a commercial standpoint the move to digital must have been pretty attractive for the manufacturers.

Huh. Today I learned.

Not only that, but the Big Three in film (Kodak, Fuji and AGFA) were at the forefront of digital photography when it was still barely a thing. Of them, only Fuji was making "serious" cameras for general photography (medium format rangefinders and the studio beast GX680, along with Fujinon optics for large format and enlargers).

This discussion crops up every so often: "Wouldn't it be nice if a camera had a full OS behind it".

Personally, I'm very pleased that my camera (a Nikon D850) boots instantly (approx 0.2 seconds) and has a shutter lag of 0.05 seconds (when pre-focused). It essentially never unexpectedly hangs when I need to take a shot. For my preferred subjects (wildlife) a consistently instant response is far more important than arbitrary functionality. If I want to share pictures or do other things, I can use the built-in wi-fi or Bluetooth to shunt pictures to my SmartPhone.

Exactly! Consider how incredibly slow it is to take a photo on a phone. And how short the battery life is. And how few capabilities the phone photo editing has compared to desktop photo processing where CPU, RAM and battery life are not constraints.

Why would I ever want any of that in a DSLR?

A DSLR can go from sitting on the shelf to having taken a focused photo in less than a second. The battery life is measured in weeks (unless using built-in flash). No comparison how much better experience it is.

The reason phones have those issues is because they have to compensate. I have a FF camera that runs android, and it lasts on standby for a month, takes a picture in 0.023 seconds, and so on. It's just that phone cameras are not optimized for latency and phones in general are not designed to be cameras.

Your camera doesn't actually boot in 0.2 seconds, it just wakes up from sleep.

My Sony runs Android and never hangs nor has an shutter lag. Instant response in everything. It can be done.

How did you measure the shutter lag? .05s is like a couple hummingbird wing flaps.

Using test equipment, I'd imagine the way to do it would be to sync a microphone and a logic analyzer and then short the shutter button. For the Sony A7 Mark I it's around 0.023 seconds : https://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/sony-a7/sony-a7A6.HTM

Granted, it's not "no shutter lag", but 2.3ms might as well not exist.

> How did you measure the shutter lag? .05s

I looked at the camera specs online.

I disagree. I think Samsung tried to do a "smart camera" with one of their mirrorless lines. It didn't really sell well. Besides, most pros will still want to use Photoshop, Capture One, Lightroom, or whatever to edit their photos, not apps. The utility of apps is to upload quick to your social media photo sharing sites.

Also, what you're asking for is already available in most flagship smartphone these days. Instead of moving apps to cameras, they moved a good enough camera to a phone where all your apps are available.

IMHO, no. What would be a great would be even better live integration with phones and other devices (although you can do quite a bit with tethering etc with many modern cameras). They're better devices for editing-like things from an UI perspective, have independent battery and heat budgets (already an issue with cameras with the move to mirrorless), have ecosystems better designed for regular updates, ... whereas in a camera, for me this is all an add-on. I want the core of the camera to be simple and fast, and only move whats necessary for efficient capture in them (e.g. accelerometers for stabilization in post-processing would be something that would need to be added to the camera). And for pros, the reliability etc is even more important, and for the majority of their use cases, capturing and editing are clearly split. You're not going to sit down at a wedding, conference or in the wilderness and try tweak a picture on the back of the camera - and for doing it later a tablet or computer is better suited. And in the studio they tether to a full-size computer with larger screen etc, again the more powerful option.

Oh god please no. The fewer "smart" things to deal with the better. Smartphones have already massively overstepped their calling.

There have been a bunch of those but none of them caught on, because their target market already has a smartphone.

The idea I really liked was Sony that made "smart lenses" that was basically a decent sensor and a decent lens that you clipped onto your phone and connected via Bluetooth/WiFi and used the phone as a display and storage

> I'm thinking of selling my Fuji X100V

Didn't those just come out?

Oddly enough, I just picked up an X100T from eBay and I haven't been using my phone nearly as much. I don't know if the novelty will wear off or not, but I've been really enjoying it

The X100 series is a cool camera. I had one since the first version of X100. But I found it more convenient to pull my phone out instead of carrying that camera. I do have a X-T2 if I want to take more "serious" photos.

I have an x-t30 and my phone can't even compare. It's an entry level Samsung and those have really bad and slow cameras, esp in low light. A flagship might be a different story. Tbh, I wasn't that impressed with the fuji camera with the included 15-45 kit lens, which is rather mediocre. But after getting the 35mm f2 I can really appreciate the difference in the quality of photos. The other part is doing a course on photography and learning the manual settings. Without that, there is really no reason to use anything but a smartphone.

> The other part is doing a course on photography and learning the manual settings.

I will concede that I'm not the average consumer and already had "manual mode" camera experience

> Without that, there is really no reason to use anything but a smartphone.

I would disagree with that sentiment, but I'm on the other side of the fence of knowledge, so it's hard for me to say

This was an introduction course for digital photography with practical training, so we would get out once a week to shoot with our cameras. A lot of my colleagues had either older second-hand or borrowed cameras. Of course, we would hang around before and after the lessons to chitchat. And I could notice a sentiment from some that they couldn't see the benefits of these cameras, since they could get better results with their phones thanks to built-in processing algorithms (at least what you could see on the little screens). Their cameras were complicated and the automatic settings wouldn't return great results without post-processing. And none of them were really excited by the idea of sitting in front of the computer, editing raw files. But this seems like a must for getting the most out of the camera's sensor, since most cameras aren't doing much or any processing by themselves.

I shoot manual with my X-T2 most of the time, especially during portrait shooting. But shooting manual on a DSLR is not the panacea. You only need manual mode in certain situations. Heck, I read pros like David Alan Harvey uses full auto setting on his camera sometimes (probably a lot of other pros too). On my iPhone 12, I have exposure compensation on the main camera app. And that is good enough as well.

Sure, I don't use full manual either, but after being forced to practice I can say that it made me more aware of what the camera is doing. I can track the settings and if the camera chose a slow shutter speed, I can understand that stuff can become blurry. Then I can adjust manually to compensate. Or when the sun is harsh, I will dial down the exposure comp. In general, I adjust either the aperture or speed, but let the ISO work automatically. I can now notice mistakes earlier, when the auto wb or the meter are wrong. I also have a better sense of where each setting should be to get a good result.

Oh I wish this AI photo craze died out. I see that it may appeal to some people as a kind of "nicerising" effect, but without the context a casual viewer may take the picture as unaltered snapshot of the world. Of course the alterations are rather minute in the grand scheme of things, but if we continue looking at these taking them without context, I wonder how our perception of the world will get detached from reality? I think pictures computed by AI should be specially marked to let viewer know they don't look at the real thing.

There's no "real thing". All photos are processed, through the lens, by the software on the device, and by the photographers' workflows. When you shoot JPG, there's already a lot of processing that happens, and when you shoot RAW, you need to process that yourself from a dull, flat image.

Photographers rarely post un-processed images. Even before all of that, settings are chosen which alter the exposure, depth of field, focus point, color temperature of the image which alter the "real thing". It's common to think "editing" a photo is some cheating magic, but it should be considered the norm, and how people share their vision of what they want it to look like.

The AI can just automate a lot of the workflow or need to buy extra equipment, still up the human to decide how they want the image to come out.

I understand that all images are processed, but AI for me is crossing the line as it is adding things that come from the trained model rather than derived from the image itself - these elements otherwise wouldn't be there regardless of lens, colour grading and so on.

You hit the nail on the head, the set of images that can only be taken with a DSLR/MILC is getting smaller and smaller.

To counter that a bit I'd like to add that there is a rise of video/youtuber folks wanting smooth 4k video with tracking auto-focus, and real bokeh which is making cameras, or hybrid cameras relevant again. I don't think phones do fake bokeh in video mode or do low-light video w/o looking like ass.

not yet.

The Lidar and infrared and AI will help with the low light. They fill in colors instead of take the result of the lens and sensor physical limitations.

There are apps that do what the default cameras don’t do yet, and we’ll continue to see rapid optimizations on this front.

what you mentioned is not outside of the realm of what can be done. If there is a need, making an app that does it will give you a brief advantage.

Strong disagree here.

I'm not sure what's going on, but this craze about computational photography is ruining cellphone photography for me.

Try to take a selfie with the iPhone 12 Pro. It's awful. If you use the regular camera, it generates an HDR selfie exaggerating every imperfection on your face. And if you use portrait, it applies a fake looking blur and softness to your skin and is incredibly strict on framing.

Camera photography is moving further from realism and I don't want a part of it.

Turn the camera around and you get similar problems. From detail-less low-light images, to sun-saturated indoor shots. It's like everyone took the Samsung model and ran with it.

My DSLR is the only lens I have that can produce a realistic photo nowadays and give me access to the raw sensor data.

> My DSLR is the only lens I have that can produce a realistic photo nowadays and give me access to the raw sensor data.

Every iPhone currently for sale and I presume most high-end Androids support shooting in RAW, you just have to use a third-party app.

I recall reading years ago (after the Sendai earthquake) about the stoppage at the Nikon factory there. In the article the author mentioned that the pro and consumer camera division of Nikon was responsible for so little of their overall revenue (equipment for photolithography was the money-maker for Nikon) that board members were, at that time, advocating selling off Nikon's camera business. If that ever happens I hope Sony is the buyer... the idea of Nikon's ergonomics and color science married to the autofocus system on Sony's Alpha line would be incredible. Granted, its more wishful thinking than anything else (based on the small bit of logic that Nikon uses Sony sensors in most/all of their cameras) but it would be a powerful combination.

News article describing latest financial results for Nikon, https://fstoppers.com/business/nikon-reports-better-expected...

I shoot a lot of pictures. I have Nikon gear due to a chance decision back in the film days after my Pentax K-1000 was stolen and I replaced it with a Nikon FE. With product lock-in, I'm still a Nikon user, although both dSLR bodies I have are a decade old.

Outside of macro and wildlife photography (basically, extreme closeup and extreme telephoto), I tend to use my phone more than my dSLRs. It's smaller, more convenient, and the pictures it takes are 70-80% as good as I'd get on my heavier gear. Well, there's also an annual parade I shoot where I want to be able to control depth of field and trigger some strobes, and I use the dSLRs for that too.

I've been eying a body upgrade, but I can't really justify it. Having one crop sensor body and one full frame, I'd rather spend the money on new, fancy lenses. And the computer-designed lenses really are incredible. I have an 28-300 lens with vibration reduction that is frighteningly good for the range it covers. It has some distortion, but nothing that's not easily corrected in production. And it's very nearly as sharp as some of my pre-autofocus primes.

It seems one of the problems that Nikon (and the other manufacturers are facing) is that the quality of camera gear is just incredibly high across the board. I could spend a few grand to get a body with an extra stop or two, and a bunch more pixels. But I can hand-hold a modern vibration-compensating lens at 400mm down to somewhere around 1/100th of a second and get good results. I don't print large, so I don't need more pixels. Why spend the money?

Incredible article from 2018 about Nikon's factory dedicated to lens glass.

https://www.imaging-resource.com/news/2018/04/17/glass-for-g...

The nikor lenses I have, are items I own that have gone down in price the least over the years. One actually seems to have increased a little.

meanwhile the old highest-end pro bodies go for very little. (it's tempting to just get them to play)

Yeah I'd love to play with my 2019 F-Mount lenses on a top-grade 90's film body.

Huh, that doesn't sound like news. I'm pretty sure that my D70s, over 15 years old by now, was produced in Thailand too. Maybe they always built the cheaper models over there?

Yes. Only the upper-end cameras were produced in Japan, as well as the top-tier lenses.

Yep, I have a Nikon D300 from 2008ish, that was Nikon's pro-sumer model at the time. It's very well made and still works well but made in Thailand rather than Japan.

Yeah, I wonder which ones they are still manufacturing in the country. Could this mean the last guy who was assembling film F6 in a repair facility somewhere is finally retiring?

I had a D70 -- my first digital SLR! -- and I recall the giddiness of getting my first "Made in Japan" Nikon dSLR (the D200 iirc). There was always a sense of "Yes, the stuff from Thai factory is still equal to being a Nikon, but 'Made in Japan Nikon' was more equal" but that was mainly because the professional bodies and best glass were only made in Japan.

Apple could obliterate the pro video and DSLR market with all it has learned about sensors and image processing in the past decade. It would only need to release a pro body like Red, Black Magic, etc, supporting different mounts (Nikon F, etc) and an integrated workflow with Final Cut.

It has already done that for the consumer market and part of the enthusiast market...

My guess as to why Apple hasn't done it yet is because the the pro market is peanuts (for them). It also wouldn't look too good. It's one thing to compete with Samsung, and another too put many beloved brands (Arri, etc) out of business with the snap of a finger.

Maybe buying Arri and bringing them in house would be their play.

While an Apple Camera would be interesting to see (and why not, given that they've just entered the headphones market, at the risk of cannibalizing Beats), I think it's more likely that they'd want iPhones to remain the all-in-one digital camera kit.

Maybe introduce a way to attach extra lens as MagSafe accessories some day.

Apple released one of the very first digital cameras back in the day - The Apple Quick Take (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Qu). Somewhere deep in their R&D facility I wouldn't be surprised if they are quietly working on a full speced ILC camera system - they could just license the Nikon Z mount (which is the most advanced and future proof mount of any other vendors - Nikon's real ace in the hole) or - as people have said here just outright buy Nikon - and apply all of their silicon / imaging knowlege to it.I wouldn't put it past Apple.

Jony Ive made an Apple themed Leica camera. One of a kind in the world.

https://www.wired.com/2013/10/this-jony-ive-designed-camera-...

I’d love to have a pro camera that has a high-speed connection to an iOS device, with an extensive API for programmability.

But I don’t think Apple would do it, because it’s such an ecosystem to build out. Lenses, flashes, adapters, it’s all so much. It’s Nikon’s core business to build such an ecosystem, and they’re not great at it. Never did get a fully fleshed-out set of DX lenses.

Here’s my pipe dream: Apple transitions all iOS devices to USB-C, they cook up a low-latency fast protocol to connect to cameras, and they give the camera manufacturers documentation and support to build out a way to use an interchangeable lens camera that immediately lets you pipe photos and video off the camera into iOS apps for immediate processing and offloading.

Can you explain the contribution of Apple here? I believe they simply buy the sensor tech from Sony. Sony currently makes the the best (or close to the best) consumer grade sensors for a wide variety of markets from dinky sensors for smartphones to full-frame and medium-format sensors for professional applications.

Also, I don't think Apple (as of today) has the capability to "obliterate" the pro market. Are you simply talking about buying other companies, or making new home-grown products?

AFAIK Nikon is also licensing the sensors from Sony.

Apple buys the CMOS from Sony but I'd be surprised if it wasn't considering building it themselves just like the 5G modems, the ARM processors, etc.

But it goes well beyond that. Apple has been investing for decades into video editing and post production software, codecs, image processing, AI, and electronics manufacturing. Plus, it's a brand already trusted by the video and photography industry which has been using their hardware and software products for decades.

They could indeed buy other companies, but I was referring to creating new products.

Yes, Apple can and does design chips. But as you can imagine - "Designing chips" can mean anything.

With respect to CMOS chips you can go from from calling up Sony and ordering one off the menu with your custom requirements, to designing the NAND/pixel interconnects, microlenses, downstream dual-gain architectures, to working on the bonding chemistry, masked pixels, CFAs etc, etc. However, all this stuff is patented up the wazoo, and companies like Sony, Samsung, Aptina, OmniVision etc do not simply hand-over world-class tech like this.

Apple is very good at supply chain logistics, overall packaging and design, UX, Software, etc. However, I don't see them challenging the established players on core technology.

> supporting different mounts (Nikon F, etc)

I might not be super plugged in to how Apple does things, but I genuinely cannot see them being able to help themselves from making a proprietary mount, then being the only people licensed to sell mount adapters...

I bought a new SLR body probably every 5 years for the last 40. My newest smartphones are so good I've given up. Yes if you want crisp incredible detail, or if its your wedding you need an SLR, but no other reason.

I only sorta joke that the amount I use a camera is inversely proportional to how much the body and the system cost. I use my iPhone a bunch, my Fujifilm X series a fair bit when traveling, and my Canon 5Diii mostly only if I'm going on a particularly photography-oriented trip or some other specialized purpose. I'm honestly not sure if I'll ever upgrade my Canon body at this point.

I’m not even close to a serious photographer nor have a trained eye, but phone cameras have such terrible dynamic range and artifacting (the impressionistic watercolor look), they’re still not even close to a real camera. Maybe in very specific conditions and never viewed zoomed in or bigger than Instagram sized, they’ll do.

I sync my camera photos to my Photos library along side phone pictures and whenever I’m flipping through to share something with a friend, they always notice and comment, “You took those on your phone!?” The difference is still huge.

Also, few phones produce good raw files which are essential for archiving. I can get better results from 15-year-old raw images shot with an EOS 30D than I get out of my flagship smartphone.

I do see a big difference but it is another expensive ecosystem to maintain, it is difficult to justify for a thing that can only take pictures and I have no hope of making a buck with to offset costs.

I think people can get sucked into buying what they don't need, but buying a good body and a lens or two every few years can be worth it even if you're just an amateur trying out different types of photography.

Where in the world is Sony and Canon cameras produced?

I bought a sony android phone (which after a lot of research seems to be produced in Japan) to my father because he refuses to use anything produced in China and I am also very hesitant to buy stuff that is produced in countries that don't generally care about quality, the environment etc. I have thought about buying a Nikon for a long time but this maybe will make me reevaluate that pick.

LOL

Let's guess where your father's mask is made during this pandemic. Given that China has provided 200 billion masks, the answer is almost obvious. Please throw away all your masks made in China, right away!

I'm also curious how long it will take you to find a country that is both willing and able to sell you masks during this pandemic.

I, like my father, of course use some stuff made in China since for several things there are literally no other choice.

But regarding masks, I live in Sweden and basically no one here wears a mask, including my father. Both me and my father have been isolated of course but there is really no need for him to wear a mask. We shop online and otherwise only meet people from our own family.

I work from home and he closed his company and went retired this year. I guess the joke is on you my friend.

> I live in Sweden and basically no one here wears a mask > there is really no need for him to wear a mask.

Can't believe we're 10+ months in and people still think like that. Didn't the Swedish gov and even the king declared they fucked up big time like last week ?

Sweden's covid handling is a total failure:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/norway/

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/finland/

Didn't the Swedish gov and even the king declared they fucked up big time like last week?

That was related to how they handled old people and care homes. The Swedish government still firmly believes that general mask use is at best unnecessary.

Yes and I agree with the king. A note here is that neither me or my father meet other people. We both use hand sanitizers when we absolutely have to go out and we both live in houses with no other people nearby.

Sweden is not like your typical big american city, a lot of swedes live in houses with gardens and of course a lot of us also live in apartments in a city but that is not me and it is not my father.

If it were, we would both be wearing masks.

I believe your description is quite typical in Sweden, which explains why the fight against covid-19 there is a total failure. Wearing masks is not only about protecting yourself, but also about protecting people you meet. I think wearing masks are nearly all about protecting other people, unless you have N95 and replace them regularly. It seems that I had made a wrong guess from this common sense, which obvious doesn't hold true in Sweden.

If it were a joke, it's not funny.

Well I think people should wear a mask, but neither me or my father meet other people. We cancelled christmas and for me it's just me and my gf with no other people, not even the closest family.

Don't worry, we're taking it more serious than most of the country.

> Given that China has provided 200 billion masks,

They also provided the pandemic to start with. Great way to do business !

Thailand is already a bit of a hot spot for camera and lense manufacturing. Sony has an absolute monster factory here.

Fujifilm has a HQ there too

Quite a milestone for sure but let’s not paint it as if it was an unexpected shock. Only the high-end equipment were still made or assembled in Japan. A big part of Nikon products have been made in Thailand and China for years if not decades.

Cost savings, factories needed a revamp for new product lines, and Nikon is in a financial slump (an understatement at the moment. It was inevitable.

So far, it hasn't impacted a lot of their product line that was already being manufactured outside of Japan. But it does create a stain in the minds of those who know to look or have been on the Nikon train for years. Everyone always looked at their products with a level of quality that's going to be questioned now.

Nikon has made some great strides in products recently. The mirrorless race has been progressing fast, and optically Nikon is in good shape. Their biggest issues are financials, professional markets to an AF system that's not as good as the competition, and really really bad marketing orders from their Japan office.

Sony and Canon have managed to pickup so much momentum with great marketing and Nikon is moving the other direction.

But the "death of Nikon" warnings have been going on since I first picked up a camera in the early 2000's. They've always been behind the curve the in digital, and caught up when it was just too late and Sony had already dominated the mirrorless market while everyone else was still on DSLRs.

Disclaimer: I shoot on a Nikon D850 and Z6II.

Between my father and I we have 11 Nikon DSLRs starting from 2005. I think 8 of them were made in Thailand and 3 were made in Japan. They all work fine. One of the Thailand cameras had a shutter issue after 2 years and I had it repaired. All of the other cameras have been flawless. Even my D70 from 2005 was made in Thailand and still works today although I converted it to infrared use.

I loved the old D70. It's still a useful camera for me for the electronic shutter which handily means you can sync the with flash at any speed.

Reminds me that Nikon somewhat recently ended production of their rifle scope line https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/gun-control-nikon-wi...

I wonder if that's related at all.

Has only Leica been able to kind of pivot into smartphone devices? Or is this also just a branding thing and the cameras and lenses are in fact made by the normal device manufacturers?

The article states:

> Don’t think this is enough to make them stay in the business. Troubling times for Nikon :(

Is there some context on this? Is Nikon facing trouble, and if yes, why?

Mobile phones have devoured the camera market. It’s 1/100th of the size it was a decade ago. On the professional DSLR front, they’re having their lunch regularly eaten by Sony, Canon and Fujifilm.

Sony yes, but Canon? I thought it was faring worse than Nikon, or am I mistaken?

Canon is frequently used in film for smaller productions. Nikon isn't used at all in that market.

Which is stupid, it’s just because you can’t. Most Nikon models don’t have a clean hdmi output and limit video recording to twenty minutes.

The twenty minute thing is because of device classification.

If a device records twenty minutes or more of continuous video, it is classified as a video device, which changes the regulatory structure.

If you watch movies, these days, it's almost unheard of for a single shot to be more than a minute or two in length. Even films like 1917 are really digitally-stitched montages.

I think the real reason is that Canon is ferociously dedicated to video, and they market that aggressively. It's a very different market from still images.

Are you sure about the clasification? From what I heard the main issue is often cooling. Cameras and sensors are often not engineered as video capturing devices, so recording time needs to be limited to prevent overheating. Often you cannot just stop and re-start the recording after the recording limit, because the camera is still too hot, it will stop recording after a few seconds.

At least this is how it works for Fujifilm X-series cameras (which have higher recording limits though and are frequently used as hybrid cameras for video recording jobs).

Well, it was what was explained to me by a marketing manager.

The cooling thing hasn't been an issue for many years, since they changed their sensor design.

Might also be a power-consumption thing, as the shutter needs to be kept open (I don't think they are using virtual shutters, yet), as well as (for DSLRs) the mirror.

I don't know much about the topic, but I noticed this the other day:

https://www.diyphotography.net/this-guy-liquid-cooled-his-ca...

There's definitely an issue with any kind of electronics and heat. "Hasn't been an issue" doesn't mean "won't blow up when overclocked."

That said, astrophotographers like to cool their sensors, because it reduces noise.

> Are you sure about the clasification? From what I heard the main issue is often cooling.

It is a tax issue - specifically a 2007 EU decision. (https://www.dpreview.com/articles/6779714320/cipaeustatement).

I have a Sony A7S2 which can do, after the jailbreak, over two hours without breaking a sweat (never went above that because I didn't need it). The exception is anything involving sunlight - there the A7S2 runs into cooling issues without a sunshade.

I looked it up, it’s a european terriff which adds several percent tax to video cameras, with a time limit for what is classified as a video camera. So it’s just about money for one market. One source claimed it was going to be eliminated a year ago.

As for shot length, sure what makes it into films rarely gets 20 minutes but that is quite different than what you want to do while shooting. Much more, we’re not all shooting videos for a feature film.

> If you watch movies, these days, it's almost unheard of for a single shot to be more than a minute or two in length.

Ironically, the low end of the market seems more interested in lengthy shots.

You're right that lengthy shots are unusual in pro film - but people streaming on twitch/youtube routinely record a 4-hour video in a single take. If you're a youtuber shooting an interview with a single camera and no crew, you want it to keep recording and you can edit it down later. Action cameras will keep recording no matter how long your ski run is. Someone recording a sports match or school play or band concert or lecture will want continuous recording. Drone videographers don't want to worry that if they're delayed taking off, the recording will end mid-flight.

Of course, how many people really need or will watch a full length video of little bobby's soccer match? Or need a DSLR to video it rather than a cell phone? Those are different questions...

Canon and Nikon are the top players.

Canon is pretty much even with them, on the DSLR front.

Canon kind of "owns" the DSLR video camera market, but gets regularly beaten in still images for pros.

What Canon has, is diversification. It's a much bigger company, with many different markets.

Canon is much larger and more diverse company than Nikon. I don't know who is doing better in the DSLR space, but Canon is almost certainly doing better overall.

Isn't Nikon still a pretty big player in semiconductor (and OLED/LCD) lithography equipment? I don't know what percentage of the business that is though compared to cameras.

I can imagine, I also just switched from a Canon DSLR to a mirrorless Fujifilm. Even apart from smartphones, purely in the photography space, mirrorless cameras are becoming more popular (and I'm not aware of a significant offering by Nikon in that area).

Nikon has a nice mirrorless series of cameras (the Z-series). Both Canon and Nikon have gotten more serious on that front over the last few years. Especially their full frame mirrorless offerings are pretty nice and competitive. Sony is still considered quite good in this space but it is a lot closer than it was a few years ago.

I also bought a Fuji this year (X-T30), upgrading from an old Canon Rebel. I'm so far really liking it. For me it's as much about the form-factor as it is about the image quality.

Regarding phone cameras; they are quite nice these days but it's a different market. You can pick up a decent mirrorless camera for the price of a top range smart phone and it will give you a much wider range of options in terms of quality, focal length, stabilization, etc. That matters to only some people but those people still exist.

I switched from an old Nikon DSLR to Fuji X-T3 this year as well, and it's great.

From the form factor to ergonomics, plus I use it as a webcam with incredible bokeh. Mirrorless is the future, and I don't even miss full frame.

Phone cameras would seem to jump out as the logical reason to me. Yes, everyone knows that DSLRs are way better than phone cameras and give way more control, but... the best camera is the one that’s with you.

I can understand how it eats into the compact camera market (I wanted to buy a compact camera a year ago, and essentially all models on the market today are from 2005-2010 and usually vastly inferior in quality to a high-end phone). However, while a lot of photographers use something like an iPhone in addition to a regular camera, good cameras are still needed.

Nikon was the second biggest camera manufacturer until recently when Sony ate their market.

Even in the early 2010s Nikon was thought as the innovator and techically better than Canon but Sony stole that title. Nikon fumbled with the mirrorless market quite spectacularly and nowadays its mirrorless cameras like Z6 and Z7 are basically copies of what Sony published year or two earlier but with quite bad native lens line-up.

The funny thing here is that Nikon outsourced the sensor development to Sony in the 2000s.

Plus they compounded their misstep by not publishing the spec for the new Z mount, so third-party manufacturers can't make lenses for it without reverse engineering. So the result is now not only are they behind on body tech, but you can only buy a dozen or so native lenses for Z, meanwhile the are ~150 for Sony. You can guess which system I chose to buy into.

In the short term: The pandemic.

"Camera Sales in 2020 Have Plummeted As Much As 54%"

https://petapixel.com/2020/11/06/camera-sales-in-2020-have-p...

Weird. With people stuck at home, and less time spent commuting and socialising, I'd have imagined hobbies like photography to take off.

Most people buying new DSLRs are either professionals or freelancers who need it for their jobs (which they no longer have) or serious amateurs looking to upgrade, often in conjunction with a big event or trip (which are no longer happening). People who decide to take up photography as a hobby will in almost every case start with their smartphone.

Cameras are _really_ expensive and a lot of photo opportunities, such as travel and events, have vanished. Even landscape photography is hard when you're discouraged from driving to the interesting landscapes and your local area is probably not that interesting for photo opportunities (at least for yourself).

It's hard to take photos when you're not allowed to leave your home... I just put my tripod inside my backpack and pretend I'm an essential worker.

They are slow to move and have a hard time to keep up with the world moving on.

That leads to a world of trouble for them:

- mobile phones eating the “good enough”/ “well integrated” spectrum

- Sony eating the “best value”/“modern camera” spectrum

- Fuji eating the “different form factor” spectrum

- Panasonic still hanging on the 3/4 side

They’ll survive, and keep making good camera that pros are waiting for, but it will be rough.

You left out Canon, their main competitor for pro cameras.

I kind of see Nikon and Canon as frenemies, together in the tranches trying to survive in an hostile world.

A bit like how Vim and Emacs’ future is not bound to how they do against each other. It would more about securing a place in their user’s life in the first place.

As a former Nikon user, that writing has been on the wall for a long time now. At lease 3 years when they first reported "catastrophic losses" They didn't have enough diversity to weather the rise of the smartphone, whereas Canon, Fujifilm, Sony, all have other lines of business to keep them afloat.

Really sad since they made such a great camera line. Perhaps a buyout is still possible.

Oh this is too bad. Can someone knowledgeble about comment on whether there may be a second-order impact on lens-making for e.g. astronomy?

(I got a tour of the Mirror Lab at the University of Arizona a couple years back; many large telescope mirrors are made here. Pretty cool. As I recall, one of the key steps involved getting raw material for glass from Japan.)

If you were on that tour, what you were probably seeing was the spinning mirror furnaces where they get their glass (in jagged chunks by the way!) directly from a Schott or Asahi, and I don't believe Nikon for example would have any middleman role there.

And yet I fully expect them to still not bother actually innovating but just making the same kind of thing in different form factors because no one is willing to make a product that might break the market wide open. Better let Sony keep eroding that market, even when Sony isn't reaching for the stars either.

For anyone curious, here is some footage of the process from 1998.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jNgEHCd5XKo

I just remembered that I watched this the other day, and it feels strange that it's about to end for good.

Is it possible to capture raw photons using a digital sensor, right before they would have entered a lens front element. Then simulate lens refraction through multiple elements in software? This would allow you to change out lenses in post production. Anyone done any work on this?

Are you referring to a Light Field Camera?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-field_camera

If so, Lytro made a camera based on that tech.

Nikon hasn’t really made an amazing camera since the days of the F5 (the weapon of choice for greats such as Peter Lindbergh).

I really feel that Japan Inc. needs a version of that Stephen Elop “burning platform” rant.

> Nikon hasn’t really made an amazing camera since the days of the F5

The F5 appeared in 1996. Are you really saying that Nikon haven't produced a great camera in 25 years? I personally think the D3s (2009) was a pretty amazing camera for sport / low-light work, although obviously it has been superseded since then.

There is a difference between “that’s a nice camera” and “wow.” The F5 was a “wow.”

It is the “wow” factor that ultimately makes or breaks the internal psychology that drives greatness at companies.

Between my Dad and I we have owned the D70, D200, D90, D40X, D2X, D3, D7100, D7500, D800, D850

I like all of them. Are any of them amazing? Sure, why not?

The D70 was just $1000 which was great. The D2X and D3 are built like tanks. I think my D850 is the best DSLR ever made.

The D1 was a legendary and revolutionary camera: a WHOPPING 2MP digital sensor that allowed photographers for the news services to submit photos "only two hours after an event" (via dialup). I recall reading that the first two major events being shot all-digital by the AP were the 1996 Super Bowl and the RNC/DNC national conventions. Until it was pointed out that nobody could tell it wasn't film nobody knew. From there the age of film for journalism was over.

Strongly disagree - the D850 is probably the best all-around DSLR ever made, certainly for landscape shooters.

Bah. The F3 was their last great camera. After that it's been nothing but pointless 'hi tech' bells and whistles /s

The F3 is an amazing camera. The F5 great is you want to have to bother with electronics (I'm faster without the electronics, but to each his own). Digital SLRs are an example of entrenched technology that doesn't make sense.

DSLR don't make sense. The mirror in film SLRs was always a compromise [1] that doesn't exist once you have a digital sensor. It was a compromise that became popular, at least in 35mm. The DSLR was a legacy format that was "professional" only because camera manufacturers would put things like big focus motors on mirrorless cameras. Market forces slowed the adoption of mirrorless and gave the SLR a reprieve to their inescapable demise.

So in a sense, ya, the F5 is greater than any D-SLR. The F5 is the pinnacle of the SLR, an excellent solution in the film domain. Digital SLRs are compromised format for a solution no longer needed.

[1] The SLR lets you see what the film will actually see. +1. The SLR has mirror shake -1, and a film plane that's far from the last lens element -1. For small "sensors" like 35mm, it (usually) wasn't that big a problem (lightweight mirrors, geometrically smaller distances between lens and focal plane). For medium format, SLRs (like Hassleblad) were neck in neck with other solutions (Rollei, Fujifilm). For large format, I don't think there was any SLR made.

I have never “loved” my Nikon dslr quite as much as my film camera, f3. They are just so big.

Good thing with Nikon was that I could just use my old glass without adapters.

Nowadays, I just use film and my phone.

Film and phone is where I am too. Film is to take picture when I have the time. The phone is to capture moments as I always have it with me.

We need more articles like this. Just get to the point, no fluff.

Niko i never forget. When there ia ghost bubustle@somewhere.com serch out and hand in on the lamppoll in the street to show this isnwhat happen when u like to greed

As a Nikon user for decades, I hope they pull through. I've always wondered why they have SO many bodies – why not simplify the line-up?

This isn’t exactly a sudden move. All their camera bodies except flagships have already been produced in Thailand for some time.

I think cameras are done. And not because of cellphones. I think Lytro did them in.

First a cop out to what I'm about to say. My arguments are specifically for geometric optics as used in photography. Also, my argument is in the limit that (non-optical) technology gets better. Also, while I took (and loved) many optics classes at university a lifetime ago, I ultimately did not become an optical engineer. I'm sure there are many nuances in my arguments bellow.

But largely they should be correct.

The Lytro camera is a camera that records the angle of incidence of light rays. If you have the angle of incidence of rays then the entire problem of (geometric) lens design is finished. Everything a lens can do can be done in software. Think of Lytro as software defined radio.

With a light field camera you can design the physical lens with a single objective: f-stop. Gather as much light as possible. You can adjust everything else in software. This is like SDR where (I guess) you optimize the antenna for bandwidth and noise.

By adjust I don't mean "adjust" as in apply AI or heuristic to make it appear as if you've achieved a goal. This is what your cellphone does. I actually change the lens. Since you have the ray's angle of incidence you can roll the rays back to before they reached the camera lens, and then put your own, software defined, lenses. This is probably not how you would implement the algorithm, but it illustrates the point.

Therefore you can change focal length, aperture, break physical limits (ridiculous index of refractions with no dispersion. infinitely thin lens).

Back to reality, what does it take to achieve all of this? Optically the Lytro all ready did all of this. It failed, but for the reasons that an Apple product would hit it out of the ballpark - implementation. With better software/computer power the product would be easier more convenient to use. With bigger, better sensors (to better capture the ray's angle) the camera would be able to emulate more lenses.

Therefore, 20th century type photography is dead. A modern photographer could just take a camera out, really take a shot without minding much about aiming it [1], completely ignore light and focus, and everything else could be done in software.

Frankly I think this will kill photography - but honestly, I think cell phones have killed most non-art, non-professional photography already. Amateurs are far worse (i.e. boring) photographers today then 30 years ago. That's a judgement call, sure, but that's what I enjoy.

[1] As long as the subject is captured, it won't really matter. You can pan in post processing. You can even adjust for perspective [2]! Just roll the rays outside the physical lens, and move your software lens to where you want it.

[2] Perspective - the size of elements of the scene wrt to each other - is strictly about where the camera is wrt to the subject. It has nothing to do with the lens. Lazy photographers make the mistake of "zooming" into the subject to get close - but the subject is as flat. In software, you can move the lens, and therefore even change perspective.

I remember Lytro. Being able to adjust focus in post was an exciting feature, but the cameras themselves were expensive and had lower quality sensors than the cameras of that time (ca 2012).

As you say, the implementation failed but it demonstrated that the technology was feasible. Now the IP is with Google. I'm just waiting for the day when someone perfects light-field technology for cell phone cameras.

Lytro failed, I assume, for the same reasons that companies like Apple makes winners out of failed ideas. When it came out, I nerded out and wanted one so badly. Luckily I couldn't afford one.

From what I read was that the software was slow, and it was a pain in the butt to go back and re-frame or refocus a shot. People don't do post-processing for mere white balance [1], why would they bother for focus, focal length, depth of field, pan, and perspective?

On the other hand, it means that high end gear is done. Once a well executed light field camera comes to market professionals will flock to it. They have to do post-processing anyway so they'll adopt the camera that is smaller, lighter, single insanely fast lens. Most importantly perhaps, a camera where they don't have to wrestle the bloody auto-focus (the kid! focus of the running kid on the edge of the shot!).

Better sensors and faster CPUs and digital cameras as we know them are dead.

[1] That's why I like film, preferably B&W. Take the time to do the right shot. Accept the results.

I do some optics design. The Lytro was exciting. Reinforcing what you say, when a light ray hits a pixel on a conventional sensor, the sensor only knows where the pixel is located on the sensor. Ensuring that each pixel corresponds to a specific location in the scene being photographed is the lens design problem in a nutshell.

But a ray has both a position and a direction vector. If you can measure the complete ray vector -- its position and direction at the same time, then you can compute where it came from, even if the lens is not perfectly designed. The light field sensor relaxes the lens design problem considerably.

An earlier technology called a Shack-Hartmann sensor, similarly measures the full light field at once. It's used for things like measuring the wavefront quality of lasers.

There is still a problem, which is that you have to assign a physical sensor pixel to each point in a 4-d space (2 position and 2 direction coordinates), which means that you have to give up some of the spatial resolution of the sensor. This makes it hard to compete in a market that is clamoring for more and more megapixels. Instead, the sales pitch has to be more nuanced, as in comparing the actual image quality of the pictures, which is a harder sell when the quality of pictures from cell phone cameras is pretty damn good.

"There is still a problem, which is that you have to assign a physical sensor pixel to each point in a 4-d space (2 position and 2 direction coordinates), which means that you have to give up some of the spatial resolution of the sensor."

I agree, if I remember correctly Lytro had 1M pixles (??) during the 10Mpxl era. But as larger sensor appear (to my surprise - a sensor is a fixed area of Si!) to become cheaper to make I think this problem will go away.

Also, these are problems that companies like Apple excel at smashing. Apple disdains what the consumer thinks they want and they have a legion of fan boys to become early adopters and proselytize the masses. Incidentally, I think the founder of Lytro now works for Apple.

Charging Japan costs for Thai labor and pocketing the difference ?

Nikon is my favorite type of camera. I hope they survive.

Bythom seems to indicate nikon is fine. Hence it is not about survival but long term viability. But leaving japan totally behind ... does not make sense from Japanese industrial point of view. Is this real?

It's a race to the bottom...

The race is over, much like in CPU design. It's the end of the road and without the drastic fast improvements of the past merely being mediocre in production quality is enough to keep up.

Can we get the link changed to an actual article?

No more Lord Nikon. Say hello to Lord iPhone.

#Awesome pictures camera I always new

It's kind of scary, especially when you've invested some sum of money in lenses for their cameras.

Aww. I love them!

Aww.. I love them

Wait until AI hits camera, like DLSS. It will be all over then.

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