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What Happened To the Photography Industry In 2014?
Iddo Genuth writes 2013 was the worst year for the photography industry in decades — but what happened in 2014 and will the upcoming blitz of cameras (including the super resolution Canon 5D S with 50MP sensor to be announced tomorrow) change everything in 2015? The official numbers published by CIPA (the Camera & Imaging Products Association) are out and they tell a story of a struggling photography industry trying to stay afloat in a sea of smartphones. Will it survive? This is the big question all of the photography manufacturers are facing over the past two years, and eventually what does it all mean for us as consumers? One thing that tiny phones lack, no matter their megapixel count, is the space for heavy glass or large sensors, which seems to leave a lot of room in the market even for small(ish) but dedicated cameras.
Eyes didn't get better. I still use my crappy Canon S3, terrible low-light performance and crappy image stabilization and all.
Mostly random stuff.
I expect that the camera-equipped smartphone is decimating the market for cameras that can only do what smartphone cameras can already do.
I also expect that it is decimating the market for that slightly-better cameras that people would have bought if it wasn't included "free" in the phone they already own.
I would be surprised if it is putting a big dent the $700+ market. Heck, with everyone carrying a camera around, there are probably some people who find they enjoy photography and want to upgrade to a DSLR that otherwise would not have.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Really, the only thing my SLR does better than my phone is Optics, which makes distance & low-light photos possible. Taking a snap of what you had for lunch? My phone does that just as well as the SLR.
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
Phones do not and cannot (without making them thick) have quality optics. They are inferior to even the cheapest dedicated cameras. High megapixels is meaningless when the noise floor is higher.
There may no longer be any market for cheap-ass digital cameras (the kind people carried around before smartphones were common), but there always be a market for medium and high-end cameras, because phones simply cannot compare in terms of quality.
It could get close though if you can attach a better lens to a phone. I think there are some accessories for things like this.
Get me an affordable light field imaging camera and I might spend as much as I did on my phone. Otherwise, it's still just pictures and I dont see the point in carrying another device which doesn't offer significant advantages to what my phone provides.
Camera size has always been a big factor in photography. Smartphone cameras have that locked down solid. There's simply no competition to always having a decent small camera in your pocket all the time. The camera market has reverted back to only being for true hobbyists that want something better than what their phone gives them.
The iPhone camera quality already surpasses many lower end dedicated cameras, and is so convenient it surpasses many mid range cameras too.
Don't forget that a smartphone is also an infinite number of possible cameras in terms of interface, with connectivity literally no camera made yet can match (not aware of any cameras yet shipping that include cellular connections).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Most people don't understand photography. The amount of people who know what F numbers, exposure time, and ISO mean are insufficient to support a camera market. Most people just want to mash a button and get a picture. Phones give them that. They aren't going to make prints, they aren't going to adjust color and contrast after the fact. They'll probably just slap a filter on it and tweet it. You ever been to the zoo or an aquarium? How many people turn off the flash when taking a picture of something through glass? Not many...
Meanwhile people who fancy themselves photographers buy the most expensive DSLR they can with the biggest lens and push people aside to get their prize photos, which they get with the automatic shooting mode... The demand for professional photos is dropping. Quantity is making quality less important. If you have 100 people with iPhones that can take print quality pictures at your wedding, out of the thousands of pictures that will be taken some are bound to be great. Sure a wedding photographer will get better ones, higher quality ones, closer ones. But is it worth the expense? First you have to pay the photographer, then you have to pay for the rights to the photo (assuming you can even obtain copyright ownership), then you probably have to pay for prints. When all most people will do is save it on their computer for posterity and post a bunch of pics on Facebook.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Those of us interested in DSLR cameras are at the point of diminishing returns. I didn't buy a new DSLR or any new glass in 2014, and hardly got anything new in 2013. Why? Because the longevity of the equipment keeps increasing. I'm currently shooting with a 5D Mark II, and all but the most absolute extreme conditions does this camera perform nearly perfectly. The same goes for the lens collection in my bag, they cover more than 99% of the conditions that I'm shooting it. It is very rare where I'm feeling like the equipment is the limiting factor to the point where I want to invest the money to replace it.
These are tools. They don't follow the same mindset as other consumer electronics that work on annual cycles. When was the last time you thought about replacing your hammer because there is a newer model built with a slightly different design? That's exactly how many of us feel in the photography world right now.
For everyday use, cell phones have gutted the compact camera market. Not much more to say. That leaves the mid to high end market of amateur photographers looking at DSLR's and such. Even that market has a few hurdles, though. First, photography is the kind of hobby that sounds really interesting and great but has not only a high learning curve but also requires a ton of dedication, which leads to a high burnout rate among amateurs. Second, and more importantly, GoPro type recorders are way more interesting and easier to use for most people looking to get into a visual hobby. They can mount one on whatever they have (bike, helmet, drone, car, whatever) and immediately start sharing fun and interesting stuff to their circle of friends.
There will always be a market for professionals and prosumers, but the problem is that their products are generally priced high enough that they form a barrier to entry for more casual users. Casual users are generally happy with their smartphone cameras, and they're not going to make the jump to a dedicated camera unless they can get something that is a significant improvement at a reasonable price. DSLRs are generally still $400ish, and mirrorless are typically even more than that. That's just not enough to convert people with a casual interest. If they sold something like the Rebel SL1/EOS 100D for $200, they might get people who are curious, but they're not.
What's the cost to make one of these things really like? Because it would seem that advancements in manufacturing technology should have driven the cost down dramatically over time, and it doesn't seem like that's happened. Are the camera manufacturers just unwilling to undercut themselves, to accept lower margins? The problem is that the effective cost of a smartphone camera is $0 for most people, and that's definitely undercutting standalone cameras...
The photography industry is what happened to the photography industry.
Once photographers stopped being able to make a living with the tools, then the tools became little more than toys for meta-photographers and gear fetishists.
Pick up any photography magazine and you'll find it little more than advertorial for how some new lens, camera, plug-in or lighting control mod will elevate your photography to a new level.
Meanwhile, no one pays for photography and either steals it outright or requires photographers to work for free or worse "exposure"
Sure, the phone beats out the camera for convenience. But if you need to take two pictures in less than 10 seconds? Forget it, most phones do a truly awful job of that - if they can do it at all. Camera makers need to sell more cameras that can take pictures FAST. When the camera can go from off to having taken a picture in less than 10 seconds, and take another in less than that amount of time, it is faster than any phone out there.
A lot of people say it's all about the optics, which is true when comparing cameras to cameras. But people who take lots of pictures on their phones aren't concerned about high quality optics and spectacular zoom, they are concerned about ease of use. Make the digital camera FAST and the consumers will come back. A lot of cameras out there can't do what I just described. Even better is a camera that can do both of those in half the time.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
People discovered that paying thousands to have a photographer take pics of your wedding (or event), then finding out that you'll need to pay him extra for every single print of a picture from his reel is actually a huge scam. Photographers gave themselves a terrible name as scam artists doing this and as such once cameras for the rest of us sucked less we took our own pictures.
Digital photography just made the scam obvious when you took your own wedding photos to Walmart and they told you they couldn't print them unless the (long out of business) photographer sold you the rights.
This also applies to family photos at your local department store (years ago, I know) and so on.
Yes, photographers can take a better picture than me. They can also scam me. I paid for your time, why don't I own the product you made while you were working on my dime?
I just dropped off a couple of rolls of 120 at the lab.
Have gnu, will travel.
Is the one you have with you at the time you need to take a picture.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
Since I am keen and current collector and analogue photographer, I could see similar thing happening, that is happening to vinyl records. There is surprisingly lot of buzz going on. Now most of action, however, shifted towards places like Flickr and eBay: good lenses are on sale for big money, good analogue cameras of the past do interest collectors in large numbers, and in all their variety, toy camera movement is noticeable and many outstanding plastic cameras are made again either with improvements or with more playful rebranding.
Thus, it shifted slightly, it may moved away from where traditional photo industry was, it may be unnoticed by everybody with a phone as camera in place of cameras for the masses, but it is thriving. Actually some analogue film manufacturing facilities are about to be restored (www.filmferrania.it). Everything became so much more accessible, and this fuels interests in photography, with a lot of pleasure along. Digital did not kill the film, I could only recommend anybody to rediscover joy of film shooting. Of course, for some digital may be covering their needs - here again stuff like lenses and such is still applicable too.
Servant of karma
Yes, the optics are better on DSLR, and there are more bells and whistles, but...
Here are just a few features that can be done quickly and with relative ease on a phone, and are a lot more hassle on a DSLR.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
The smartphone market is consuming the point & shoot customer. The P&S market existed primarily because there were no other options in years prior for casual photography, they simply replicated the same model that existed for film P&S with digital sensors.
The mirrorless market is consuming large parts of the DSLR market. That's because the dslr market used to be made up of a lot of people who didn't want to carry a DSLR in the first place, but had no other option for interchangable lenses.
Now that viable options are avaiable, the markets are going to shift. It's funny that the DSLR makers were the last ones to realize the shift was occuring. The Canon mirorless was horribly late to the market, and they were caught with their pants down. The minor or struggling camera makers like Sony, Ricoh, Fuji and Olympus are capitalizing on it.
The DSLR market will continue to exist, but they've run out of innovation for a while now. The one area they haven't addressed, portability, is why the market is being ripped into new segments.
smaller cameras
maybe they can adopt some sort of cloud streaming model...
Ergonomics and stability.
software anti-jitter is great but a stable photography platform is better
I am quite fond of the 42X optical zoom on my camera, my Note 3 can't compete with that just yet..
Wouldn't Camera shake for cameras mean a need for faster image acquisition? Same sensor improvement should help in low light conditions.
I think a good source of information on the camera sales problem is on the web site of bythom.
http://www.dslrbodies.com/newsviews/panic-is-setting-in.html "The primary complaint was much simpler: fast, fun, and convenient. Instant imaging (hey, where have we heard those words before?). "
Posting as Anon since Slashdot is refusing to keep me logged in on the article pages.
Its going great and Nikon and Canon are getting ready to be replaced by Olympus, Panasonic, Sony and the new heavy weight Samsung. Samsung has updated the NX1 with probably the biggest firmware update from any manufacturer ever and basically gave the users 90% of what they complained about in the original firmware. http://www.dpreview.com/articles/0346523989/samsung-nx1-shooting-experience-published
Olympus just introduced a new OM-D E-M5 II with a new feature which can take 40MP pictures from a 16mb sensor http://www.dpreview.com/articles/5451301082/olympus-om-d-e-m5-ii-first-impressions-review-posted
Before you start spewing about the new sensor feature it might not be for you, well its new, it will grow and just like almost every new feature that's been introduced by Oly. 2 years down the road all the manufacturers are using it. People laughed about 4/3 and Micro 4/3, Live view, SSWF (who needs one I got a flowers and swabs to clean my sensor, I love sensor cleaning), in body stabilization and mirror less cameras.
This could be interesting with an open API http://www.dpreview.com/articles/0442746241/olympus-air-clip-on-camera-for-smartphones-coming-to-japan
I think Samsung is going to wipe the floor with Nikon and Canon in the next few years. They already got very high quality lenses (Although obviously not many) and they have the juggernaut behind them to make it.
The megapixel count has already been irrelevant for 5 years or more, even on actual digital CAMERAS! Any astute consumer will note that the higher-end cameras by each manufacturer have FEWER megapixels than the entry level models in the series. For the entry-level, megapixel count is a dick-measuring contest to attract naive and ignorant shoppers.
It's interesting to see all the comments of iPhone owners and their over-inflated ego. Sure, iPhone with Apple marketing is a lot better than a Canon 5D.
Whenever any one asked me about cameras, I always thought that whatever you have is best. One of my favorite photogs is Brassai. He ran around Paris, with I think the equivalent of 100 or 200 ISO film, and came out with some of the best b/w pics. I have an old IXUS i picked up on vacation (read: Elph series here in the US) and it's probably technically better than anything Brassai had. But I can't take anything like he took.
I HATEHATEHATE them. They don't do what I want, impose their own priorities, and make it impossible for me to tell them (quickly, or at all) what *I* want to do. When I hit the shutter button, that's not a suggestion; I want the shutter to trip at that exact moment, not dick around trying to focus on what it thinks I want. I know what I want; I often shoot in "M" mode on DSLRs, and I can judge exposure by the "sunny 16" rule -- if it's sunny, the exposure is f 16 at 1/ISO speed.
If they had a camera phone which let me set ISO, f stop and shutter speed easily, and allowed for easy manual focus and *instant* shutter release, I might feel differently.
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Because the photography market is strong as ever from my viewpoint, both for professional photographers that don't feel the need to upgrade kit that's good enough to do what they're doing and the same for hobbyists. It's those pesky home users that just want to feel like they're saving memories by snapping with their cell phones you're not going to entice to buy a separate camera. It's just one more thing left in the closet after you get sick of lugging it around.
Not completely dead, but a brand new set of batteries would last for about 10 pics. Because they used crap components. Granted, these weren't high-end cameras, but when you drop $150 on a camera it's not unreasonable to expect it to work if you take decent care of it. My phone takes decent pictures and, more importantly, still works, so I'm done with buying cameras until I'm ready for an SLR.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Yes, this. No smartphone on earth could wean me away from my Canon 6D.
Because I can do things like this with it.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
As a person who just got back from an awesome overseas trip, I took about 1900 photos on my Nikon. I took 200 on my smartphone.
I'm certainly far more proud of the ones coming from my Nikon, but there is an important catch. I had to wait until I was home to really dive into them and put them on the net.
For the life of my, I can't understand why Canon, Nikon and others are not fully embracing this connected world. All $500+ cameras should come with Bluetooth/Direct Wifi and GPS built in. All photos should be geotagged, in a timely manner, and be able to be linked through an open API to a smartphone app that transfers the original RAW files into a JPEG and uploaded instantly to social media.
Smartphones will not be competing with sensor size or quality anytime soon, but they sure make sharing photos a lot easier. That is what people really care about.
The article intermingles two completely different industries, the production of cameras with photography services. ("...the photography industry for 2014....the real story behind the big fall of the camera industry market in 2013...."). That is, camera makers versus photographers.
There has been a change in the photography industry recently, with new photojournalism graduates unable to earn a living in photography (a NY times profile on this trend was published last year). Established photographers are leaving the field due to loss of revenue. Just sayin', that's the photography industry and this article is about camera manufacturing. Both changes are interesting and significant.
www.cgstock.com
I'll tell you what happened from my perspective:
Year 2013:
Have lots of (expensive) Canon glass - been Canon since 1986. Have 1DsII (old, but very good 16MP full frame). Been waiting for a reasonably priced upgrade (that actually provides new features) from Canon for 5+ years. And NO, the 5Dx is not in the same league as the 1Dx series.
Finally, I became so fed up that I went and bought Nikon (D800E) and started my Nikon glass collection. Fuck Canon.
2014:
Still waiting for Canon to give us something with reasoable value/features. Meanwhile Nikon D800E exceeding all expectations. Didn't buy a single damn thing from/for Canon system.
2015:
If Canon doesn't deliver, will start building Nikon glass. Fuck Canon permanently, sell Canon glass and move on.
A take some pictures with my smartphone because that's often the only thing on me. If I unlock it and fiddle with it long enough, I can eventually get it into a mode where it will take a reasonable crappy snapshot with very high pixel resolution. Although, "snap" is a bit of an exaggeration. More like "eventual" shot. I still carry a DSLR if I'm going into any situation where I expect to take irreplaceable pictures, such as a family re-union, vacation or even to take inventory. It's not for the extra megapixels. It's because my smartphone isn't purpose built for the task and difficult to control because it has too much connectivity, too much security and makes too many assumptions. I don't even know where to begin. My dedicated camera has a lot of interchangeable lenses. Those lens are clean and unscratched. My dedicated camera has a rubber eye-cup that shields the view finder so I can compose the shot in bright sunlight. My dedicated camera "snaps" the picture without delay. While looking at a moving subject, I can find the shutter button instinctively, instead of needing to re-look at a touch screen and remembering where I need to touch the screen to take a shot. --Only to find the button "moved" because the "smart" phone re-positioned the button on the glass as it switched from portrait mode to landscape because I moved the camera back into shooting position. My dedicated camera won't change modes and ask me to answer a phone call in the middle of a critical shot.
I think of smartphone photography as like the $39.99 portable CD/radio/mp3 boom-box. Great for portable casual use with friends, but not for anything serious.
The reason I haven't bought new DSLRs recently is that my current DSLR already feels perfect. I'm NOT looking for more megapixels or more connectivity, I'm looking for better shooting angles and control of lighting sources. That will come from my brain and not my camera.
Its best claim was that since smartphone cameras are better than ever, that "camera you always have with you" has replaced most sales of small point-and-shoots. But the claim that mirrorless cameras are unpopular - why? What technical reason would cause photographes to prefer mirror slap over the near-silent operation of a mirrorless? Or did the article confuse mirrorless with small format? If so, then this was a comparison of apple.jpg shot with a micro four thirds with orange.jpg shot with a full-frame Canon.
And yet, with a "quality surpassing many lower end dedicated cameras", all of those cameras were 110 film cameras from the 80's. Seriously, yes, it has a very good imager to compensate for a rather shitty optics train. It's a very good optics train for what little real estate they have, but you can't wave your hand and get more light into a small aperture. It's perfect for taking selfies that nobody else wants to see. It's not a "good camera" for anyone who has intentionally used any setting on a camera beyond the flash inhibit mode. I use my phone all the time for documenting shit, but I don't use it for anything vaguely resembling art, sports, or after sunset.
I think what's happened is that general consume expectations have changed. Consumers have been trained to want snaps and short videos of what's happening in the moment, and cell phones fill that need admirably. They're not high quality -- the lenses on most phones are atrocious, and it really is not all about the pixel count [1], but it's the camera that you always have on you, and you can share in seconds, so it's no surprise at all that it's filled a need that, really, hardly existed before. I get paid to take pictures with professional gear, yet I still take snaps with my camera phone. I understand that the two platforms fill different needs.
Is conventional photography dead? Hardly. There are things you can do with more conventional camera/lens/lighting combinations that phones and tablets just can't match. I think what we're seeing is a shift where people previously fumbling with cameras found their needs met with their phone camera, and the pros continue to use pro equipment.
Of course, pro equipment is changing too. 4/3, video in-camera, (with external modules to capture pcm stereo sound and sync it with the video), VR in-camera (Sony Alpha) or in-lens (Canon and Nikon), and a host of new post-processing capabilities, are changing the face of photography. But there will always be things high end equipment can do that can only be done by high end equipment, and there will always be a market for that somewhere.
During these shifts, I'd expect perfectly capable products to be left by the wayside. I would expect pocket cameras to have a hard time of it, as there is a lot of overlap with what current cell cameras can do. But wait a few years, and people may realize that shooting with a fixed plastic lens and zooming in software doesn't give good enough results, and midrange dedicated cameras may make a comeback. But they'll probably have some type of sharing built in. (We're already seeing dedicated cameras with wifi dongles, and more lately, wifi built in.)
[1] Pixel count is the MIPS of this century. Past a certain point, (which in my opinion has already passed in consumer gear) most users will not notice. Just as most generic consumer PCs have more CPU than most consumers need, most modern camera sensors have way more pixels than most consumers will ever notice. Also like MIPS, there isn't a 1:1 correspondence between pixel count and performance. Things like color depth, color pallet, different types of distortion, moire, in-camera post processing, and several other factors have as much or more to do with how well the photo turns out than mere resolution. And the hard fact is, the more pixels you have, the longer it takes to write to storage (other things being equal), the more space it takes up, and the longer it takes to load into and export out of editors. As a pro, I saw a moderate but constantly irritating slowdown in my workflow just going from a 12 Mpixel camera to a 24 Mpixel camera. (Nikon pro bodies.) Every operation that involved reading or writing a file was taking noticeably longer. Bigger isn't necessarily better. There has to be a *reason* to go to higher resolution, else you're probably fooling yourself.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
So where are the consumer SLRs that bluetooth images over to your smartphone? One of the barriers to using my SLR more is that the pics end up stuck on a silly SD card. This seems like obvious niche for SLRs but noone is milking it.
My understanding is that the DSLR auto-focus technology is VERY mature and works astoundingly well by redirecting ALL the light from the lens up into an entirely separate focusing system right up until the time when the shutter is tripped and the image is captured - mirrorless cameras have to figure out how to focus based on what's analyzed through the live view sensor, and they just haven't been able to get it to work as well... yet. That, and I suspect the mirrorless cameras eat batteries faster while running their electronics constantly (electronic view finder or 'live view' screen) while a DSLR is just idling, letting a mirror do all the work. Otherwise they seem like a great idea.
which is expense. The last 30 years hasn't been kind to people's disposable income, and that makes saving money on photos very attractive.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The only camera that matters is the one you have with you.
Who wants to carry around a clunky legacy camera when my phone takes pictures and is much more likely to actually be in my pocket. Sure the quality is nowhere near as good but see my first sentence.
Personally I think the next big thing in photography will be digital 4x5 medium-format cameras for the 'serious amateurs'. It's already taking hold with the high-end pros, but current tech for a digital MF system is $50,000+ (Phase One / Mamiya, Hasselblad - especially the 'full' 4x5 sensors) - well beyond what any sane 99%er would pay for a 'hobby'. It looks like some low-end digital backs have already dropped to the $15k range (Pentax, low-end Hasselblad?, older, refurbed Phase One gear) - within a few years (I'm hoping anyway) they'll be into the $6k-$8k range to match higher end current DSLR cameras, but with even better low-light sensitivity, dynamic range and color gamut. Until then it'll take a LOT to get me to spend real money to upgrade my Nikon D800e - I'm just not a good enough photographer to need a better camera (yet).
Until they figure out how to make the entire screen on an iPhone Plus act as an image sensor I don't see cell phones competing in that market.
Unfortunately too many of the camera makers do an either or situation with the lower end cameras being dumbed down to fully automatic. I want a very compact (shirt pocket), dust proof (no moving lens), splash proof (rain, light water) camera that has full manual controls. The old Casio Ex-V8 has this but it has not been updated in closing in on a decade. The camera makers seem bound and determined to offer either a high end camera which is bulky and too expensive to carry around in my pocket or a low end environmental resistant camera that lacks manual controls. They're killing their own market by not offering what we want. So of course people just use the 'other' camera they have in their smart phone or ipod touch.
The DSLR taught me the technical side of photography and how to appreciate it. I'm a fair-to-middling amateur, who bought a Nikon D40 and loved it so much that I taught myself the basics of photography. My D40 allowed me to take some beautifully-staged photos that have won small-time photo contests and generated enough demand that I sold some prints. All the manual controls at my fingertips taught me how to stage a photo. That, IMHO, is the power of DSLRs and why they should never go away. There is a great deal of art and beauty in taking the time and effort to put knowledge of photography into effect to capture the beating of a hummingbird's wings, or the exact refraction of light through the dew on a flower. But the work I love the most are my "catch the moment" photos, where the power and beauty come from all the independent factors like outside lighting, people, animals--all the stuff that cannot be controlled for. My iPhone is more than good enough to catch those moments. I have taken photos with my iPhone that, while technically inferior, manage to catch the moment of light and tone and mood and people that I perceived. It is my generation's polaroid, and I enjoy trying to compensate for the technical inferiority by taking compelling photos. It's fun, I fail A LOT which is to be expected, but my few successes are pretty amazing. The market adjustment isn't a bad thing, it is just once again separating those who value technical prowness in staging a good photo, versus those who just want to take a photo.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Nearly two grand for a days work? Get the fuck out of here. No wonder nobody is hiring them.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
"Cameras don't take pictures, photographers take pictures."
The camera is simply the medium used to record the data that contains the picture.
The original article is weak tea and other than presenting a few numbers basically tells us nothing.
The trend is there however, and there is no arguing that point: the current camera industry is in decline.
Most people never have wanted a truly GREAT camera, or even a really good one. Most folks want easy to use. That means a smartphone for most folks nowadays. I am an enthusiast/hobbyist and have some serious camera gear but I still use my phone sometimes. And it does quite well for some things. And phones are unquestionably the cause of the decline of point and shoots: I used to carry one or another of them all the time so I could always at least TRY to get a shot whenever opportunity arose. Now its just the phone, which is better 90% of the time (motion being the exception.)
The enthusiast rarely buys a new camera right now because the recent ones are so good. (If my D90 had not been stolen I would not have upgraded my own self.) Same with lenses- my 80-400 is better than the 80-200 and 50-500 it replaced.... but I wouldn't have it if the others were still with me.
Old gear: already had it and it did well.
New gear: $4000 of insurance money and while it IS better it is NOT $4000 worth of better.
The fact is that I was good enough with the old stuff that the great shots I took with it are every bit as good as the newer shots, even when printed out on a large-format printer or commerically at poster size.
And mirrorless is NOT the answer either.. not yet.
It is generally too "mid-range" at a "top-tier" price point. (slower focus, viewfinder response lag, etc.)
The camera INDUSTRY will survive, and likely the biggest players will remain a part, but it is going to get smaller, and evolve a lot.
Compare the 70s camera industry to NOW and that is likely to be the kind of change we'll see in 10-15 years.
For the most part I use my cell phone for pictures, but also an old casio point and shoot for the timer features (try resting a cell phone on a flat surface for group "selfies")
Lately I have gotten into Instax cameras, an updated version of the old polaroid instant film camera. The immediacy of having a print to hold and share is worth the cost.
Everyone with a camera is a pedophile. Deal with it.
I have a Canon PowerShot SX130IS 12.1 megapixel mid-range point & shoot camera (well it was mid range when it came out). Its got a bigger sensor, bigger lens and higher optical zoom level (12x) than any smartphone camera I have ever seen, including the one on my Nokia N900.
For photographing LEGO creations (and getting right in there for close-ups, the macro mode and bigger/better sensor beats any smartphone hands down.
And for photographing when out and about (e.g. buildings, buses, trains, planes etc) where you want to be able to zoom in on things further away the 12x optical zoom easily beats the 0x optical zoom on all the smartphone cameras.
Monitors did get a lot better, and with higher resolution, though. With 4k (3840 x 2160 or 4096 x 2160), or even 8k (7680×4320) you don't have to zoom out to a fraction of the original size any more. In fact, with your S3 of some 6 MP, you can see the picture in 100%. It means details like noise, camera shake will be more apparent.
I don't care much about more resolution. Give me Adobe RGB everywhere! Give me ProPhoto RGB Give me full CIE 1931!
The way I see people using smartphone cameras these days is almost entirely for consumable pictures... pictures you take and gawk at for a few seconds, maybe post, and then are forgotten in the pile of tens of thousands of similar pictures. Only a very few are good enough to be memories and with the extremely narrow sweet spot of a smartphone camera or even a modern point-and-shoot, it is relatively difficult to create something that distinguishes itself. The medium and high-end DSLR camera vendors shouldn't try to go after that market.
But there is a market. Any vacation or long trip that you might want to create a memory with. You don't have to be a professional photographer. But if you want to create something memorable from that sort of trip and make a little (or big) book about it, a smartphone or point-and-shoot camera ain't gonna do it. You won't get something like this with a smartphone:
http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~...
For anyone with an interest in travel, or even modestly-sized vacations closer to home, bringing along a decent camera (something bigger than a point and shoot) is what gives you that permanency after you've returned home.
Probably the younger crowd doesn't understand so much because you simply haven't taken enough pictures in your lives yet (even with a smartphone and social media). But you will understand once you get to the point where you are overflowing with crap in your photo archive to the point where you don't even bother to look at it any more.
-Matt
Only an idiot these days carries around an expensive bulky digital camera. Phones can do it all. Take the picture, email the picture, post process it, etc. Try doing that on your canon or nikon piece of crap.
Now sure, you may think you have lens options, but I just bought a fisheye, zoom, and wide angle attachment for 16.99 on ebay, and its soo tiny! good luck going anywhere with your $1200 zoom lens, moron!
Now people say, it's all about the megapixel count when print, but come on, who PRINTS things anymore. When is the last time you actually PRINTED a photo? Thats what facebook is for, photo sharing. Good luck sharing your dead-tree prints.
Canon, Nikon, Pentax et all should just accept their fate and pack up, or just die like Polariod and other film camera makers. Camera phones are where it's at. Never mind about having to hold the phone a certain way to take a picture, or not having a tripod mount, or an extra flash, or stabilization, or a proper zoom, or good optics.
Sorry, but cellphone cameras will always remain the special olympics of photography. If your goal is just to take pictures, a cell phone is probably enough. If your goal is to take great pictures, you really should own a dedicated camera because what is provided in the phone industry is garbage by comparison.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
My daughter is presently in India and was in Africa before that. She has been using her iPhone 5s to take pictures and basically it looks like she is just scanning them from NatGeo.(She isn't a natgeo photog) They are completely stunning. She also has a DLSR with her but she hasn't sent any photos because that is a pain. With the iPhone all she has to do is find Wifi and up they go.
The key test here is that she doesn't have a SIM card in that phone. So she is literally using it primarily for its camera and using it in preference to a hard core DLSR that she is very familiar with.
So while I am not a fan of stupid features in a camera(I'm looking at you sepia tone) I think that the critical thing that the camera companies need to do is to make sure that they are focusing on a few key features. One is to make it way way easier to get the pictures off the camera. I don't want this to be a dedicated software thing or some kind of crap where they have an online service where they try to have a value add but something where I can walk into a wifi hotspot and start sending them wherever the hell I want.
The next feature set I want will take advantage of the larger lenses. So night vision from hell. Maybe thermal vision would be cool. Super duper slow mo and I am talking like 200 fps minimum and ideally reaching out to 1000 frames. These are things that a tiny lens camera just can't do.
The last thing to keep in mind is that the number of professionals using almost any given camera is pretty much zero. So have a pro mode that is off by default. I will never set the ISO, I will never pretty much set anything like that. So keep those features hidden. A great example of this stupid catering to professionals with a camera that isn't professional is a Sony Cybershot that I have. It will record mov(or something common) up to around 720 but at 1080 it goes to some stupid DVD ready format. Who the hell uses DVDs? Basically it just means that to use the HD format I then have to upload the videos and convert the mess to mp4 or something from the last decade. What a pain. I would not have purchased the camera had I known that the 1080 format was stupid. On top of that I need to have a charger to charge the battery. No USB plug. It does have some uber-proprietary Sony plug for something. So basically did the Sony designers even know about the Home PC when they made this camera?
Here is a winning feature: The real camera's photographs show up on your phone's built in photo album when it is nearby so that you can then do what you want with them. Not just what the MBAs at the camera company will allow you to do. Everyone has a phone that they know how to use well. So take the awesome pictures on the camera and do the rest with the phone. Probably way better than trying to put android on the camera and just making a crappy android interface. I don't need crappy version of instagram on my camera.
A dedicated autofocus sensor uses two sets of pixels to detect phase differences. Canon's new DSLRs have what they call "dual-pixel" sensors that essentially have two different photosites for each microlens. In other words, each pixel is split into two, allowing phase detection at each pixel!
This means that even with the mirror up (viewfinder blacked out) in live view (or shooting video), the camera can autofocus nearly as well as with the dedicated sensor (with the mirror down).
dom
Smartphones do shallow depth of field algorithmically (taking multiple shots at different focal lengths and calculating the depth). The tradeoff is that its slower. However the next generation of smartphones have multiple lenses, so this problem will go too.
Qwak for "intel realsense 3d"
How many camera enthusiasts complain about computer calculated bokeh also use Lightroom to blur the backgrounds? Many I think.
The real issue comes down to light sensitivity, and 6mm backlit stacked sensors are good enough for most shots these days, with the inch sized sensors covering all the range and then some.
Panasonic just stuck a 1 inch sensor in a smartphone.
Qwak for "Lumix DMC-CM1"
Lots of crap photos with crap filters.
Many posters feel that the technical superiority of their DSLR and the relative technical weakness of smart phone cameras means that smart phone pictures are a lesser entity. True enough if we all shoot subjects that play to the strengths of DSLRs and always have our dedicated camera equipment in hand and ready to go. But in the real world, the truth is that I too often do not have my far superior professional cameras anywhere near me, but I have my cell phone on my person or within 2 feet of me near 24/7/365, and I have got far more really good shots with a smart phone than with all my wonderful and much loved high and medium end cameras and accompanying great lenses combined. All, just because I have it handy all the time and I've figured out what will and won't work on a teeeny little camera. The images won't blow up very far, aren't terribly sharp... you name it, but they are way better than the image I didn't get. And funny thing, all told, my track record is better with the dumb camera in the smart phone than the good cameras. All my photographic training with everything from DSLRs to studio 8x10" view cameras and lighting and some professional work etc, etc, etc, taught me enough to make very good use of a handy little crappy camera. In many ways, I'm a better photographer with a little crappy camera such as I at one time much derided.
Don't step on the baby.
WANT greater depth of field. You want LESS.
That's what the non-photographer public senses when they talk about the difference between "professional photos" and "snapshots."
In a snapshot (small camera), everything in the picture is in sharp focus, which makes the photo about the "scene" and distracts eyes from any one particular subject.
Shooting at f/2 on a tiny sensor, you get only snapshots.
Shooting at f/2 on a DSLR, only the subject (the person, the face, the rock feature, whatever) is in focus, and everything else is slightly blurred, which brings attention to the subject of the image, and at the same time blurs out distracting, unimportant details in the background.
Here's a good example from Google Images: http://ns12.sovdns.com/~nich61...
On a small camera or a smartphone, only the photo on the left is possible. In fact, on the smallest phones/cameras, you won't even get that much blur in the background; nearly everything can be razor sharp.
Generally, that's not good for subject work—only for scene work.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I've been shooting with four thirds since it was released, and I have the same great lenses that remain perfect as they day I bought them.
This year I finally upgraded my body (to an E-3) for the first time in years. Logged over 150k actuations on my E-1 previously.
So I bought one body and zero lenses in a decade.
Once all of the pros and semi-pros and serious shooters have made the switch from film to digital, and are fully satisfied with the quality they're getting, and once all of the snapshot shooters have a camera that is automatically included and upgraded each time they get a phone (which everyone has), there's just not a lot of growth market left.
The switch from digital to film was a one-time boom until parity was reached in quality, and now it's done.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
DSLR manufactures could try manufacturing cameras that weren't defective.
Leica had problems with IR filtering.
Canon had problems with light leaks.
Nikon had problems with grease splatters and flares.
Pentax had problems with banding.
BTW, it's time for a common full-frame mount, so lenses could be interchangeable from brand to brand. There is no value added from having custom mounts.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
You know the iPhone 6can shoot at 240 fps at 720p right?
The products you want exists on multiple DSLRs already from Nikon, Canon, and Olympus and I'm sure others as well. Where they don't exist they can often be bought aftermarket. Where you don't want to buy them aftermarket they can often be bought some other way. For instance my EM-1 acts as a wifi hotspot and automatically transfers to the phone, and the Olympus app for it isn't even that bad. My D800 didn't have that feature and I wasn't prepared to pay for the WiFi Grip so i have an eyefi SD Card with a built in wifi hotspot. Yes they exist and they work rather well. I can automatically transfer photos to any device. Oh and the real kicker is that Samsung already has a point and shoot camera with android on it :-)
Your lenses comment is ignorant of how sensors work. Larger lenses letting in more light has nasty effects on things like focus and depth of field. For a fun example look up images taken with Leicas f/0.95 lens. You can shoot handheld at night but your focal plane in so incredibly narrow that the lens is useless for anything other than art. Thermal vision requires specific optics, and a very VERY specific sensor which is also bloody expensive. These are often cooled to incredible temperatures and really low resolutions (think 640x480 for a good one). Frame rate is another trade-off. You can only process so much data, and you can only do it so quickly before you get quality issues. The faster you read out the sensor the more noise is introduced, the faster you do it the more bandwidth and processing is required. As someone into Astronomy with a dedicated low noise astronomy camera even a modern camera looks fast compared to the 25seconds or so it takes to read a single image from the sensor.
Also while the number of professionals is diminished, the number of amateurs who care about things like aperture and ISO is actually steadily climbing so while you may not appreciate those settings there are plenty of people who aren't professionals who do.
Your forgetting that DOF is dependent not only on the lens, but also sensor size
This is not correct. DOF is dependent on the optics, and has nothing to do with sensor size.
The source of this commonly shared myth is the association of smaller sensors with shorter focal length lenses. It is the shorter lens that increases DOF, not the sensor.
Place nail here >+
What technical reason would cause photographes to prefer mirror slap over the near-silent operation of a mirrorless?
My DSLR's are very well developed for very fast focus in very low light ( Nikon D700, D800). The optical viewfinder has zero lag, and works under all light conditions.
My mirrorless cameras (Nikon V1, Sony A6000) have electronic viewfinders (EVF) that have a lot of lag in dark conditions, making the camera almost useless at times. The Nikon V1 has the best on-sensor AF I've seen, and is the closest to a DSLR of any mirrorless camera. But it and the Sony A6000 simply struggle under low light conditions.
EVF's are fantastic for video, and (with "focus peaking") great for use with manual focus lenses. DSLR optical viewfinders are blind when shooting video. But EVFs are not up to the level of a DSLR for stills. That's why I shoot both.
Place nail here >+
No matter how good your "live view" screen is, it won't be of resolution comparable to a matte glass screen. This may eventually become indistinguishable. However, there will always be a little bit of latency and flicker, no matter how good it gets. The "latency" of a mirror box is and always has been well below detection thresholds for humans.
The only "mirrorless" I'd be interested in at this pint is more accurately a half-silvered mirror. Some of the light goes to the detector, some of it to the focusing screen, and nothing moves. Unfortunately, you sacrifice half your light sensitivity (one stop) for this.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Regardless of how many megapixels they claim the physics of lens size limits the resolution for the cameras in smartphones. High resolution sensors have been pushing the limits for full size 35 mm lenses for a while now. Camera phones can resort to a number of tricks to increase the apparent resolution. However all that resolution needs memory. Lots of memory. My old D300 Nikon uses 35 MB per shot but a handful of 38 GB memory cards can cover several vacations. and the quality beats my old F4 except for Kodachrome 25, but that slow ASA created limitations. If you are a serious photographer, Amateur, or Pro the new high end Prosumer, or pro cameras will give full frame 20 X 24, (and larger), sharp images without resorting to software prevention of pixelization. The capabilities of these new super resolution cameras is fantastic. Were I not retired, I'd have a whole new setup with backup. But therein lies the problem. Most shooters and camera owners are not photographers just because they have a camera or smartphone. How many ever heard of "Theme, form, rhythm, and repletion, or rule of thirds?" How many ever strive for full frame utilization? I'll be one of the first to admit the "point and shoot" cameras and smartphones are great for catching shots that the larger, more bulky, and heavier cameras would have missed. Still, there is a huge difference in the quality of the result. Many, if not most pros carry one. Like most anything, quality costs and the really good cameras are expensive! The question becomes one of cost and convenience. Top end cameras have always been expensive and inconvenient to haul around for the casual shooter even if they could afford one. So the question becomes, can the market support quality over quantity. Not without quality costing even more due to low numbers.
Once upon a time it was large format or nothing with in the world of print. Then National Geographic shocked the pros by accepting 35mm Kodachrome slides. Gradually the standards slipped and until the interwebz pretty much killed print media since people demanded online content. Then microstock happened and companies realized that they didn't need such high quality images for ads that had the longevity of a fart in a tornado. Cheap rules.
Professional photographers have been fighting this since the first digital and throwaway film cameras came into being. With Facebook et.al. brides no longer cared about wedding albums - they simply post online. Prints and albums were the mainstay of the pros and they have been bombarded with demands from brides for the photos on DVD as cheap as possible. Cameras abound and a lot of amateurs fancy themselves as photographers because they can push the shutter button and then slap it out in Lightroom with some preset edits. Quality has simply vanished in the face of camera ubiquity. I love getting an invite to a wedding - I work as an unpaid photographer and then post the watermarked photos for them to see. I get a lot of orders that way because the quality difference is obvious.
and that's fine as long as that meets her requirements. But if you need a print the quality simply isn't there.
Now this indeed may become possible, thanks to the current boost in sensitivity in DSLRs 8-)
Herve S.
The worst photo is the one you did not take.
Cell phone cameras cover this convenience factor
very well. Al lot better than the early box point and shoot
film cameras.
Camera vendors will need to look a lot harder at
the user interface, form factor, low light performance,
automatic bracketing,
The good news is the mirrorless cameras are grabbing
a lot of attention and have made astounding moves
forward. They allow quality glass and are also well
suited for home video...
Megapixels are no longer a challenge. With ten
times the pixels needed to display on FleaseBlock
and wanting quality issues on home computer displays
the camera side of this consumer producer equation
will remain unbalanced and the camera market
will continue to shrink. The sensor side has already
consolidated behind the shutter. Sensor upgrades
are pixel depth limited enough that HDR will continue
to be an interesting tool. Automatic bracketing and
on demand HDR is possible on almost all systems today.
Bigger faster lenses with more dynamics will do better
than cell phones.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
My answer to this is WRONG!!!!
http://appleinsider.com/articl...
I am not saying that you can throw your DLSR away but quite simply when phones are good enough for what this guy says then they are good enough for 99% of people who take pictures. That doesn't leave much audience left except for snobs and a few pros. Thus if they want to get any of that 99% they can't only be screwing around with ISO type features and need to find some wins for the average person even if it somehow involves ISO in the background.
A simple test would be to walk around grabbing everyone in a 10 block radius and asking them to define ISO as it relates to a camera. That will then be the true test of what features are important.
I too would like to see a digital Pellix. This would allow the sensor chamber to be completely sealed, and would reduce vibration somewhat.
SLR viewfinders have been very bright for 20 years or so. It's OK to let 75% of the light go to the sensor.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Geez, Now I'm really sure this is just a bot auto-replying to anything with 'iPhone' in it.