Chris Dodkin
West Coast Correspondent
Ming Thein, a well established photographer and blogger, has just published an iterating post outlining his feelings on the rise of compact mirror-less camera systems, and as he sees it, the beginning of the end for the DSLR.
Five years ago, while I was writing for a local photo magazine, I was mostly in charge of the ‘big’ cameras – DSLRs and the like. There was no mirrorless category, with the exception of Leica; compacts meant serious image quality or lens quality compromises, and every serious photographer was typically also on first name terms with their chiropractor. You could still get film with relative ease, and better still, develop it. Not long ago, my desk had three cameras for review/ testing on it (the Olympus E-P5, Leica X Vario and Sigma DP3M – none of them were DSLRs. I now routinely travel without one; in fact, most of the time I do a lot of personal photography with compacts. And pretty much the only time my D800E comes out is when I’ve got a commercial job to shoot.
How things change.
He makes some interesting points, and also looks at the economic reasons that might eventually prevail, and push the simpler and cheaper to build mirror-less cameras to the fore.
Once the camera companies run out of natural evolutionary upgrades – more pixels, more ISO, more fps – all of the things that marketing people can easily hock – we’re going to see forced changes to survive; hopefully with some innovation rolled in. It will be painful, but necessary to move away from legacy lens systems; it’s clear that new lenses designed for digital significantly outperform legacy optics anyway – even Zeiss is redesigning its F and EF mount lenses to deal with increased resolution and corner demands.
Well worth a read, and good food for thought - The demise of the DSLR
Personally, I concur with his views. I'm traditionally an early adopter, I get in at the earlier stages in a product's life-cycle.
I've already made my switch to mirror-less.
Five years ago, while I was writing for a local photo magazine, I was mostly in charge of the ‘big’ cameras – DSLRs and the like. There was no mirrorless category, with the exception of Leica; compacts meant serious image quality or lens quality compromises, and every serious photographer was typically also on first name terms with their chiropractor. You could still get film with relative ease, and better still, develop it. Not long ago, my desk had three cameras for review/ testing on it (the Olympus E-P5, Leica X Vario and Sigma DP3M – none of them were DSLRs. I now routinely travel without one; in fact, most of the time I do a lot of personal photography with compacts. And pretty much the only time my D800E comes out is when I’ve got a commercial job to shoot.
How things change.
He makes some interesting points, and also looks at the economic reasons that might eventually prevail, and push the simpler and cheaper to build mirror-less cameras to the fore.
Once the camera companies run out of natural evolutionary upgrades – more pixels, more ISO, more fps – all of the things that marketing people can easily hock – we’re going to see forced changes to survive; hopefully with some innovation rolled in. It will be painful, but necessary to move away from legacy lens systems; it’s clear that new lenses designed for digital significantly outperform legacy optics anyway – even Zeiss is redesigning its F and EF mount lenses to deal with increased resolution and corner demands.
Well worth a read, and good food for thought - The demise of the DSLR
Personally, I concur with his views. I'm traditionally an early adopter, I get in at the earlier stages in a product's life-cycle.
I've already made my switch to mirror-less.
