Canon needs to respond with SOMETHING

[sagittariansrock]

It is obvious, for anyone who like real, natural, virtually-analog capture , we need a high resolution DR camera to our best canon lenses and not a Sony 7R

Therefore it is obvius for anyone who wants rugged data that doesn't depend on luck of alignment of pixels and subject transients, and survives geometrical processing like CA, distortion, and perspective correction, rotation, and arbitrary resampling in practically lossless manner.

For someone who doesn't care about imaging quality, I guess it can be sufficient and they can use low resolution cameras with inferior DR.

Boy, no one is going to accuse you of "excellent written communication skills"!

 

[Hillsilly]

Only because I'm feeling particularly argumentative

Canon has never chased anyone. They never chased anyone in the past, and they are not chasing anyone now.

Canon were pretty quick to chase Sony's camera division (previously known as Minolta) when they introduced auto focusing SLRs. The Minolta Maxxum 7000 came out in February 1985. By the end of 1986, Auto focus SLR's accounted for more than 50% of SLR sales and was dominated by Minolta and Nikon. And where was Canon? (hint: The T80 doesn't count...)

Bleh...it would be a wonderful day if everyone could just be happy with the fact that pretty much every single camera on the market today puts nearly every camera from the film era to complete and total, utter shame when it comes to IQ. Even when it comes to drum-scanned large format film, while you gain in resolution, even that can't really touch the color depth and brilliance of a high resolution digital sensor these days.

If you look at the popularity of instagram, camera phones and software from places like VSCO, NIK etc you get a strong impression that image quality isn't a high priority for a very large percentage people. Over the last year, I've noticed a huge trend in photographers moving away from image quality perfection towards quality destroying film and art filters in an attempt to give their photos a less clinical/digital look and add more "feeling". I'm left wondering if a rejection of perfection is part of our human psyche. I'm going to side with Canon's APS-C development team on this - IQ, DR, color depth etc are vastly over-rated.

 

[Zv]

Although I would love to have seen Canon put focus peaking in as standard on the EOS M I think their reasoning behind not including it is simply because the vast majority of people using it would not be using manual focus lenses with it. It's very much a consumer level camera aimed at the amateur. Most of whom will just use the kit lens. To be fair for static subjects you can easily just tap the zoom button to help focus. Focus peaking is more for useful for video. I have ML installed and after the initial "wow - focus peaking!!" moment I haven't really needed it, and I have two FD leneses that I regularly use with it. For me the Magic Zoom function is better especially in bright sunlight.

Aside from all that, don't you think focus peaking can be rather tricky to master? In my experience it works most reliably on fairly simple subjects that are fairly close; but if you have, say, a building 100 yards away with a large tree close in front of it, and want to focus on one rather than the other, good luck - all of it will likely get focus peaking and you may get an unpleasant surprise when you examine the result. Magnification is more reliable (though it's nice if they're combined - a sort of belt-and-suspenders combination that works rather well on the Sony A7s, at least (perhaps others too, I can't remember).

Hmmm ... Yeah it is a bit tricky. I have a trick for focus peaking - I put the camera into a monochrome picture style so that it's easier to see the focus peaking colors. The extra contrast helps determine where the peak is.

In the situation you mentioned are you using a wide aperture? I'd imagine if the objects are that far away it would be quite hard to do selective focus. Usually in that type of scene I'm using hyperfocus as I want the tree AND the building in focus. It's only for relatively close subjects and wide apertures that I would consider using a focusing aid.

For moving subjects I tend to use the focus scale to set the focus at a pre determined length (say 3 meters for instance) I then wait for the subject to get close to that distance and then fire away. A bit like trap focus, which you can do with ML too. I did that for a St. Patrick's day parade and it worked well. I'm always aware of subject distance and try and keep the focus ring at a distance that is relative so I only need to move it a little.

I guess after a while you get a feel for manual focus and it's really only super critical stuff where I need the focus peaking. I also think you end up missing the moment if you are bogged down looking at a screen all the time.

 

[Loswr]

For someone who doesn't care about imaging quality, I guess it can be sufficient and they can use low resolution cameras with inferior DR.

Are you suggesting that 22 MP and 12-stops of DR are 'low resolution' and 'inferior DR'? Or perhaps you're suggesting that millions of professional image makers 'don't care about imaging quality'?

More likely, you're merely a familiar troll.

 

[jrista]

Only because I'm feeling particularly argumentative

Canon has never chased anyone. They never chased anyone in the past, and they are not chasing anyone now.

Canon were pretty quick to chase Sony's camera division (previously known as Minolta) when they introduced auto focusing SLRs. The Minolta Maxxum 7000 came out in February 1985. By the end of 1986, Auto focus SLR's accounted for more than 50% of SLR sales and was dominated by Minolta and Nikon. And where was Canon? (hint: The T80 doesn't count...)

Well, if you want to get right down to business. In the late 70's, Konika released a camera with a passive AF system. Everyone else followed suit, and released cameras with the same kind of AF system. Canon? Instead of simply "responding" with a "me too" product, they innovated...and created the first active AF system capable of focusing in the dark.

The T-80, which does count, as it was well into development and just about ready for release when the Minolta AF cameras were released (I mean, it was less than two months later that the T80 hit), was Canon's first modern-ish DSLR AF system and was obviously in development for some time before it's release. That was 1985.

Canon released the first EOS in 1987, two years later, with a completely new CAMERA SYSTEM designed from the ground up. We aren't just talking AF, were talking about the platform that Canon launched to fuel their camera systems for decades, the same system that their current modern cameras are based on. Were talking about a mount system, a flash system, a camera system that spawned Canon's entire photography ecosystem. It takes more than two years to plan and develop such a huge thing, so one has to assume they were already working on it by the time the T-80, a-7000, etc. hit the streets.

So, did Canon "respond" with EOS, an entirely new camera system, just because of the a-7000's AF system? Or did Canon innovate their way into total dominance with a camera system built for a new era from the ground up to support the things their customers demanded? Personally, I think there was a little bit of both "response" and a lot of "lets build something kickass and new that will triple our bottom line". It just takes too much time to R&D up an entirely new camera system from scratch for it to just be purely in response to the AF dslrs that hit in '86. The plan had to have already been in motion before hand.

 

[AvTvM]

F*ck focus peaking and all that video-style sh*t. All I want is a kick-butt, precise and fast af system. To hell with manual focus rings. I am done with that since the 1970s.

I want an oculus rift grade evf instead of those laggard mickey mouse vga evfs. Along with a good af-system with af fields all over the place all the way out to the corners.

 

[jrista]

F*ck focus peaking and all that video-style sh*t. All I want is a kick-butt, precise and fast af system. To hell with manual focus rings. I am done with that since the 1970s.

I want an oculus rift grade evf instead of those laggard mickey mouse vga evfs. Along with a good af-system with af fields all over the place all the way out to the corners.

???

 

[traingineer]

I want an oculus rift grade evf instead of those laggard mickey mouse vga evfs. Along with a good af-system with af fields all over the place all the way out to the corners.

Zuckulus Rift*