Today i officially felt left behind with being a Canon shooter

[3kramd5]

Eye Controlled Focus is an obsolete technology that Canon used two decades ago. For cameras with three or five focus points it worked pretty well, but I'm sure it would be chaotic on modern systems. If it could work properly with modern spread of focus points then you'd bet that at least one of the manufacturers out there would implement it - especially as the initial patents must have expired by now.

I never thought it worked well with the few points on my Elan7NE, personally.

 

[tron]

Why no confidence in the 1.4TC on the 400DOII? I can't even notice an AF or IQ difference using mine....with the 2xTC I also get amazing IQ and only a slight drop in AF effectiveness....curious to know what problems you are having with the 1.4 on your DOII?

Which camera do you use?

 

[NancyP]

I don't feel left behind at all concerning mirrorless.

I want sensor improvements - another stop of dynamic range, still keeping the low pattern noise of the 6D and 7D2, and no funny-biz compression factors as used by Sony. (This has to do with processing of night photography, for which Canon has been quite good, no star eating or odd artifact as Sony had had).

Having said that, IF a full frame mirrorless Canon with sensor improvements became available, and IF I get the hang of the tilt-shift thing with my first TS lens, I could see my way to getting a Cambo rig allowing rear (sensor) rise-fall-tilt-swing view camera movements on the mirrorless unit - and expand my lens collection with more TS lenses and the odd film-era (affordable) medium format lens such as all those Hasselblad lenses out there. (Many modern MF (large-image-circle) lenses can be extraordinarily good, but also extraordinarily expensive - USD 2K to &K).

 

[NancyP]

PS. I LIKE optical viewfinders, well implemented (Canon, I am looking at you - why did you change the exposure scale from the bottom to the side in the 7D2? The 6D style is SO much easier to see in brighter light).

 

[AlanF]

The focus is not locked, only the exposure...still it sucks compared to my A9....but nothing will touch the A9 for a long time...likely never as an A9II will come out for the Olympics and CaNikon may not even want to target that market of sports/action/wildlife for a long while (if ever)....

Good to see you back in CR. It is odd that AE is locked on the first frame and not AF - with the first Olympus AF was locked. It's not easy to find the info on the Sony site and I wonder if DPR is entirely correct.

 

[Loswr]

yes. Had customers been given free choice between mirrorfree and mirrorslapper from the time when first Sony A7 appeared [2013] also by Canon and Nikon, then mirrorslappers would already be a thing of the past, except maybe a final goodbye round of Nikon D5 / Canon 1DX successors. But Nikon and Canon managed to block and stall things and sell 3 more marginal iterations of mirrorslappers to customers.

Canon was selling the EOS M when the first Sony A7 appeared. In fact, the EOS M is probably part of the reason for the a7 – Sony again running away from a market where they couldn’t compete. But the simple fact of the EOS M renders your statement that DSLRs would already be a thing of the past as nonsensical, asinine and ridiculous.

Less and less customers have been willing to fall for it. Most are smarter than Canon and Nikon together and switched to Sony or just have held off buying slappers and legacy lenses.

Sure, that’s why Canon’s ILC market share has grown to 50%. Keep living in your fantasy world, and say hello to the Lizard Men for us. Oh, wait...they’re the ones buying all the MILCs, aren’t they? They’re smart enough to be our overlords, so of course they only buy MILCs.

Report away...if you keep posting ridicuous statements, you’re going to keep getting ridiculed.

 

[fullstop]

IBIS has nothing to do with mirrorless, that's a red herring, it can be in any camera.

Yes it does. At least in viewfinder operation. And instead of LiveView better a *real mirrorfree* camera.

Short flangeback distances cause big light fall off issues at the edges of the sensor that is difficult to correct.

Problem solved long ago. Leica pioneered some of it. Just a matter of proper lens mount dmensions and adequately designed/off-set microlenses. No more real-life issue these days.

Canon DSLR's have silent shooting if you know how to use it.

unfortunately not. At least not in viewfinder mode. And LiveView mode is only good on tripod, but not handheld (no EVF).

I suspect that the percentage of people using older manual focus and manual aperture lenses on a high mp camera will be few, particularly if they are aware of the poor resolution performance.
totally agree. for whatever reasons, those "old skoolers who still believe their old F-shards or 1987 EF L lens are still top notch today on a 50MP digital sensor" are over-represented on many forums.

Nikon proved this with the failed DF.

In my opinion, Nikon Df failure was due to 1. price/value and 2. very poor implementation of "semi-retro" User Interface. It fell right in the middle ... neither fish (film SLR) nor flesh (digital camera), clearly less than desirable in real use and 3. actual product (Df) fell far short of high expectations created by excellent teaser campaign. All 3 Nikon's own fault.

 

[fullstop]

Canon was selling the EOS M when the first Sony A7 appeared. In fact, the EOS M is probably part of the reason for the a7 – Sony again running away from a market where they couldn’t compete. But the simple fact of the EOS M renders your statement that DSLRs would already be a thing of the past as nonsensical, asinine and ridiculous.

YOu know what? I find your comparison of underspecced and overpriced APS-C EOS M 1st gen vs. first FF-sensored MILC Sony A7 ... "nonsensical and ridiculous".

And that's how the entire market saw it as well. It resulted in Sony saving teir ass from the unmitigated SLT desaster and Canon having to firesale the EOS M at USD 299 including kit lens and having to work their way through 3 more generations of M cameras until they finally got it about right (M5/6, and now M50).

 

[Loswr]

And LiveView mode is only good on tripod, but not handheld (no EVF).

Huh? Did I miss the live view activation switch built into the tripod socket? Perhaps you’ve not seen all the cameras with neither OVF nor EVF. Have you not taken a single picture with your EOS M, without the external EVF attached? So again...huh??

 

[Loswr]

YOu know what? I find your comparison of underspecced and overpriced APS-C EOS M 1st gen vs. first FF-sensored MILC Sony A7 ... "nonsensical and ridiculous".

And that's how the entire market saw it as well. It resulted in Sony saving teir ass from the unmitigated SLT desaster and Canon having to firesale the EOS M at USD 299 including kit lens

Really? The original EOS M was the second best-selling MILC in Japan without a discount, outsold only by a 2-gen-old and deeply discounted Sony NEX model. At that time, the MILC market in the US was nearly nonexistent anyway, the Asian MILC market was an order of magnitude larger, and there the EOS M was a smashing success.

Maybe the Lizard Men can fix your intellectual myopia. You should ask them.

 

[jolyonralph]

Time from launch of consumer-level DSLRs to the end of Kodachrome – 9 years. Time since the launch of popular MILCs – 10 years.

The prediction was that time would be up for the DSLR in 5 years...back in 2012. I guess we missed it.

Let's not forget that mirrorless digital consumer cameras have been around for way longer than DSLRs - if you look at all digital cameras and don't fixate on those that have fixed lenses vs those that have removable lenses. Mirrorless isn't a technology that's developed over the last ten years. It's a technology that's developed over the last 25 years or so - more or less starting at the same time as the Digital SLR was first emerging, but reaching the consumer market (with the Apple Quicktake 100) over a decade before the first truly affordable DSLR (Canon 300D).

While the DSLR has taken over the entire market for SLR cameras, mirrorless cameras of all kinds have overtaken them and outsell by several orders of magnitude simply because they can now be reduced in size to the point they fit inside a cellphone.

The average person no longer needs a camera. Their cellphone takes fantastic photos. And part of the reason for this is the intelligence of the software behind it, both in terms of focus (eye tracking etc) and post-processing. Apple alone have 800 engineers working on the cameras and associated software for their iPhones.

And now the DSLR is stuck. Without a full live reading of the digital sensor for the camera CPU to interpret the DSLR has to do its best from the limited view of the image it gets from the low resolution PDAF sensor behind the mirror. It's quite incredible how far they've pushed this technology and how well and how fast a modern DSLR such as the 5D Mark IV can focus, but the DSLR is hindered. It can't do proper eye autofocus, realtime histograms, focus peaking and all the other things that we take for granted with the modern generation of mirrorless cameras. When people realise their phone camera has a more intelligent focus and tracking system than their $3000 DSLR they start to wonder if they made a mistake.

Now, I'm sure many of you will start saying that your DSLR is perfectly capable of taking the photos that you want to take today - and that's true. And that's why I also still use a DSLR.

I'm not saying the DSLR is useless. I'm simply stating the economic case for why camera companies will inevitably drop them.

 

[Dylan777]

I wanted to give my view on all of this Z, mirrorless, DSLR...etc...

My fairly unbiased experience is based on this transition through the various systems....diehard Canon shooter from 2009 till 2015....still own some big glass...at one point had 6 Canon bodies in my house and even more big whites....bought a D500/200-500 in 2015 to try it out and shot it off and on alongside my Canon kit. I believe the D500 is far superior to the 7D2...but I continued to use my 5D4, 1DX, 1DX2 a lot while owning the D500 for the first year. In 2017 I started selling off more of my Canon kit and started to slowly expand my Nikon kit as I just found AF for fast, small BIF to be superior and was getting shots easier than with my Canon stuff. Bought 300PF, bought D850, downsized Canon eventually to just 1DX2 and 400DOII, 600II, 100-400II (and kept my normal/wide zooms..see sig). Then I got to try the A9 and A7R3 in April in Florida with my buddy who brought them on the trip and let me shoot them as much as I wanted...we rented the 500/4 Sigma and MC-11 and used the 100-400GM with both TCs as needed. I was very impressed by the A9...especially the e-shutter, blackout free, lag free, distortion free, and dead silence if you so choose....also very impressed with the AF and found it probably at least as good as Nikon and maybe better. Wasn't sure if I wanted to invest in the rather expensive A9/100-400GM when I returned home but just then found a local selling the whole kit (A9/100-400Gm/1.4TC) for a very reasonable price. Jumped on it and after more and more time found the A9 AF was a superior system in most situations to the Nikon and surely all situations to my Canons. I also could not get on with the A7R3's EVF experience with lag, blackout and difficult to track a BIF. Added a 500/4 E FL Nikon and sold my last Canon body and the 100-400II.

There are a lot of great systems out there and Canon is not totally lost...the 1DX/1DX2 is still an amazing piece of kit....actual AF speed is still faster on the Canon bodies but unfortunately the AF consistency is not up to Nikon or especially Sony A9 levels (the A9 is uncanny how many tack sharp shots you get....way too many if you shoot 20FPS...which is why I mainly keep it at 10FPS). Ergonomics is an issue with the A9...my fingers don't get pinched by the GM lens as they are rather long and on the skinny side but an unsupported pinky requires the battery grip but once the grip is on the ergo is really good for this small of a camera and I'm comfortable for an entire day. Without the grip or a plate I get finger/hand cramping fairly quickly with the big lens and also with smaller Canon adapted lenses. The Eye-Af on Sony is really amazing and I only use it with adapted 24-70/4IS and 16-35/4IS Canon lenses and still it grabs my nephews and nieces in tack sharp shots all the time. Adapted 400DOII works well for static shots and even for flight against sky but if you are way out of intended focus range it isn't pretty to get back to focus...prefocus in the range is needed. However once in the range it can track a bird bouncing around on a branch and nail tack sharp shot after shot just like the native 100-400GM.

These Nikon Z cameras are not for my intended use...they have some pros over Sony A7 series like ergo in the grip and availability of the F-mount lineup but they are of course more akin to the A7 and not A9 (as I always expected before release). However, they are lacking stuff compared to the Sony A7 already like Eye-AF, buffer, battery life (still to be determined and surprising since they take the D500/D850 battery), and AF at higher FPS has limitations...also in early FW the buttons aren't very customizable...unlike the D500/D850/D5 you can't have other AF modes/AF-On on other back buttons (like joystick push)...that is disappointing.

Unfortunately I had much higher expectation for the Z release and I really don't have much hope that Canon is even going to match the Z release and surely not come anywhere near the A7 series or of course the A9.

Therefore I'm buying a Nikon 500 f/5.6 PF as I love my 300PF but always have TCs stuck on it....I'm going to hold onto my 400DOII/600II and my zooms to see what may come out but my patience is running thin and if more cool gear comes out from Nikon and/or Sony I may start selling the Canon big guns to fund other stuff....PLEASE CANON...wake up and make us proud to be Canon shooters as I was back in 2012 when I got my 600II....

Sell the remaining Canon gear. Use that money to fund up coming Sony FE 400f2.8, 500 and 600. Current FE 400f2.8 has more elements and more glass and 2lbs lighter.

 

[FramerMCB]

Please pardon what is likely to be a stupid question, but I"m still trying to learn the mirrorless jargon....I've seen it referred to here twice....

What is "EYE-AF"?

That's a new term for me....

TIA,

cayenne

"EYE - AF" refers to the camera's autofocus sensor (capability) of recognizing there are "EYEs" in the photo and the autofocus will track/focus on the eyes. I believe that Sony has darn near perfected this in the A7 III and perhaps the A9 and/or A99. And I think that it is a setting you have to choose. Like, "One Shot", "AI-F", or "AF". But don't know that with certainty...check any spec sheet and/or review of the Sony A7 III or any of their recent (within the last 2 years) offerings.

 

[NancyP]

“There’s nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” – Ansel Adams
“The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it.” – Ansel Adams

People (hobbyists and pros) will use cameras they like to use, and lenses they like to use. Few photographers (as opposed to snapshot takers) really like cell phones as their main camera, and I expect the hobbyists will still be buying regular cameras, whether mirrorless or SLR or whatever (yes, there are film and "alternate processes" enthusiasts out there) and lenses (from Otus to replicas of 19th century Petzval lenses). Remember, there is more to photography than performance on wall charts.

 

[NancyP]

Does Sony "eye focus" work on bird eyes when the bird is moving or is relatively small in the frame?

 

[NancyP]

Magic Lantern alternative firmware (primarily for video) is available for most models of Canon cameras. The ML coding team takes a few weeks from commercial release to issue the beta of the ML firmware for that model, and final is done usually by 6 months. It does focus peaking and a number of other video-centric tasks. I have no idea what the capacities are of the native Canon firmware used by Canon video-centric SLRs (the "C" series). Video is not my thing. The reason Canon doesn't issue its stills-centric cameras with the full suite of video features is that the full suite goes in the C series "pro" video cameras. No, the C series aren't top level Red cameras, but the price differential between C and Red is substantial.

 

[Loswr]

Mirrorless isn't a technology that's developed over the last ten years. It's a technology that's developed over the last 25 years or so

...the DSLR is hindered. It can't do proper eye autofocus, realtime histograms, focus peaking and all the other things that we take for granted with the modern generation of mirrorless cameras. When people realise their phone camera has a more intelligent focus and tracking system than their $3000 DSLR they start to wonder if they made a mistake.

I'm simply stating the economic case for why camera companies will inevitably drop them

Mirrorless didn’t come along 25 years ago, heck...camera obscura and pinhole cameras were mirrorless too. While you’re technically correct that a cell phone is a mirrorless camera, the topic of discussion here is MILCs – precisely because of the interchangeable lenses.

I don’t think the majority of people give a hoot about the intelligence of the focus and tracking system. They just want the camera to take pictures of the subject they point it at, and have those pictures turn out well. For the majority of people and the majority of subjects, any currently available camera – DSLR, MILC or smartphone – will do that. The choice comes down to budget and needs. What their smartphone won’t do that an ILC will do is allow them to put on a longer lens, or a wider lens, or a bounce flash, etc., and both DSLRs and MILCs can do those.

The economic case for companies dropping DSLRs will be when people stop buying them. That’s not going to happen soon, and it might not ever happen ‘because of MILCs’, because the extended and possibly incomplete transition to MILCs may be obviated a paradigm shift (e.g. lightfield cameras, and don’t even go to the ‘lightfield cameras are mirroress too’ place ).

 

[tron]

Magic Lantern alternative firmware (primarily for video) is available for most models of Canon cameras. The ML coding team takes a few weeks from commercial release to issue the beta of the ML firmware for that model, and final is done usually by 6 months. It does focus peaking and a number of other video-centric tasks. I have no idea what the capacities are of the native Canon firmware used by Canon video-centric SLRs (the "C" series). Video is not my thing. The reason Canon doesn't issue its stills-centric cameras with the full suite of video features is that the full suite goes in the C series "pro" video cameras. No, the C series aren't top level Red cameras, but the price differential between C and Red is substantial.

This is not entirelly true.
1. They may take years not weeks for new releases.
2. For some cameras they may never release anything ( and I do not mean the forbidden by Canon 1 series)
They have some F.A.Q sections which explain this. They even have a troll section
Still they have accomplished a lot (and proved that Canon could have worked more on their firmware)

 

[dtaylor]

nope, not even then. not enough resolution.

They can put any resolution they want.

repeat after me: mirror in lightpath is always a problem, not a solution.

I have yet to experience an EVF without perceptible lag and grain. They also have relatively poor color and DR compared to the real world (OVF). People make a big deal out of increasing gain in low light situations, but that amplifies lag/grain/color/DR issues. And while it's helpful to a point, it ultimately fails. I recently framed the Milky Way with a 24mm f/1.4 lens and a mirror. But while stars showed up in LiveView for checking focus, the Milky Way did not. In other words, I could not have framed it with EVF.

And after 10 years of development, on sensor PDAF still trails off mirror PDAF when it comes to acquisition and tracking speed. The z7 can only AF at 5.5 fps, and missed a lot of shots in DP Review's rather tame tracking test. Mirrorless can track a slow moving eye, but won't give you as many keepers when a sprinter is running towards the finish line.

So it seems a mirror in the light path is still a solution for some issues. We will see how the market reacts to Nikon and Canon FF MILC bodies over the coming years. And how technology progresses. But at the moment I can't see myself ditching DSLRs completely even if Canon introduced a dream FF MILC at a dream price.

 

[fullstop]

"real color" in viewfinder is irrelevant to me, as long as colors in my images are right.

And i don't shoot fast moving subjects, so .. mirrorfree perfect.