Nikon Had No Choice

[Dallas]

1 hour ago, fredazinger said:

They are so many years behind in this technology by now that one can only wish them good luck in playing catch-up before they can claim to be "leading innovators" again.

 

So sad this crowd can not stop bashing cameras with a mirror.

The MIRROR, or lack there of, contributes NOTHING to advancing the state of the art of imaging.

 

 

One voice is not a crowd, Fred. 

 

However, many former users of the Nikon and Canon brands are vocal about how they have slipped behind the technology curve by ignoring the advantages that a mirrorless architecture brings to the game. It isn't unusual for people to express this disappointment in posts on forums like FZ. You'll find the same conversation all over the web, not just here. I don't think that interpreting that commentary as "brand bashing" is fair. It is observational. If it gets personal then that's different and it will be dealt with. 

[Alan7140]

36 minutes ago, fredazinger said:

They are so many years behind in this technology by now that one can only wish them good luck in playing catch-up before they can claim to be "leading innovators" again.

 

So sad this crowd can not stop bashing cameras with a mirror.

The MIRROR, or lack there of, contributes NOTHING to advancing the state of the art of imaging.

 

 

Who said anything about a mirror?

 

By simply pointing out the fact a certain manufacturer which decided to ignore advancements in technology for years is now suddenly joining the fray and claiming to be "leading innovators", I was only making a valid observation on a corporation's management and apparent hubris, not on the technology per se. We all know that things are changing, just some manufacturers seem to be a bit slow on the uptake.

 

SLR technology is still absolutely current if you're using film (as I have been increasingly doing of late), and there is no use for any of the modern digital image capture technology when using film. As a technology the Nikon F4 I used between 1993 and 2005 was pretty much the ant's pants - even the last in the line F5 lent little improvement to what that F4 was capable of.

 

The SLR system was honed to perfection with film cameras. Compare it with the cameras in use in the 19th and much of the first part of the 20th Century and its easy to see just what a fantastic product the film camera had developed into by the 1990s - instant return mirrors, superbly designed viewfinders using the capture lens image instead of some separate lens to view the image and so enabling accurate framing with a bright clear image that accurately showed the focus point (the F4 is still the best non-digital viewfinder system I ever used), inbuilt meters again using the taking lens as their source, auto focus, auto exposure - just some things that spring to mind (having frequently been a user of older technologies such as view cameras, rangefinders and twin lens reflex cameras myself in the past).

 

Unfortunately I think the popular and commercial era of still photography using dedicated equipment is nearing an end, but were it to survive for another century or so, I would be equally certain that DSLR cameras will be regarded by historians as being the equivalent stepping stones that those earlier film cameras were between the Daguerreotype, Tintype, Ambrotype and collodion plate apparatus compared to the ultimate expression of SLR cameras, should they even bother to compare DSLRs to whatever pure digital capture devices eventually wind up as.

 

Should I be right in theorising that popular still photography has a life measured in a decade or two rather than centuries, the whole thing becomes pointless anyway as to the gear involved. While it may persist as a hobby or art form, it's not hard to imagine that as soon as a hand-held device that captures a holographic/VR movie clip that can be instantly streamed of any subject, popular and commercial interest in the still photograph will evaporate along with whatever the latest still capture device of the day might be.