Interesting Bloomberg piece on the future of photography

[amolitor]

Smartphones akin to the film to digital switch? Yeah right.

Phones are obliterating the P&S market. They're not 'replacing a lot of low end' they're utterly trashing the market. There's some money to be milked out of it yet, but that segment is over as a cash cow. The market has bifurcated into camera phones and more-or-less high end cameras (interchangeable lens cameras and a niche of very high end fixed lens cameras which seem to exist largely as halo products).

At this point the next market to get eaten is that high end system, and the better phones are definitely nipping at the low end DSLR. Where mom used to buy a Rebel, she's just using her iPhone which takes better pictures in her use cases anyways.

I don't know what will happen to DSLRs, mainly because what happens to markets like this is usually something unforseen. There are so many possibilities, some pundit will get it mostly right by accident and will be hailed as a genius. He's not. And the DSLR market will be decimated by whatever the new strange thing is, and will struggle to reinvent itself in the new image, likely fail, and will shrink down to a niche selling into the tail of a market, praying that the tail is pretty fat. See also film.

 

[runnah]

Rumor has it the next generation of high end prograde cameras will be mirror less. Which only makes sense as it will remover the last mechanical component from the camera. Interchangeable lenses will be around for a while longer but honestly I doubt they last another 10-15 years.

But yeah the ps market is done for. Most folks I see either use phones or an entry level dslr.

 

[Tiller]

Rumor has it the next generation of high end prograde cameras will be mirror less. Which only makes sense as it will remover the last mechanical component from the camera. Interchangeable lenses will be around for a while longer but honestly I doubt they last another 10-15 years. But yeah the ps market is done for. Most folks I see either use phones or an entry level dslr.

What form of lenses will take their place? I've read an article somewhere about using water as a lens, which seems incredible.

 

[KmH]

The march continues to making photographs a commodity.

When companies need advertising images they'll just have their minimum wage minions search the photo sharing web sites for what they want and get whoever made the images to let them use it/them for free.

More and more MP on smaller and smaller image sensors means more and more coding has to be done in software so the camera can produce a decent image.

 

[vintagesnaps]

Since early in photography cameras have been intended for everybody to use, and most average people (unless they have the interest in becoming 'photographers') will probably use whatever's the easiest not necessarily the best - that might be left for professionals. The average person used a Brownie, pros used wooden tripods and big wooden view cameras.

In sports at least there are photos on websites by the time a game is done, there isn't time for post, or for going thru a couple of hours of game footage to pull an image out of a stream. There's been the ability already to do that but seems to be too time consuming to be practical. It just depends on how a photo would be used, what the best way is to record an image and make use of it. We may continue to see smaller P&S's or hybrids, better quality phones with cameras, better detachable lenses for phones, or who knows what else. Usage and equipment will likely continue to change.

So while snapping photos of their meal that looks like the dog's dinner by the time it gets posted on social media pages is apparently fun, it's still new enough that people seem entranced by having everything in their phone and aren't always managing it responsibly (texting and driving). The novelty eventually will wear off. People already seem to be realizing if they're spending a lot of time using their phones constantly texting and snapping pictures of everything, they're missing out on some of just living their life while it happens.

 

[Derrel]

Rumor has it the next generation of high end prograde cameras will be mirror less. Which only makes sense as it will remover the last mechanical component from the camera. Interchangeable lenses will be around for a while longer but honestly I doubt they last another 10-15 years.

But yeah the ps market is done for. Most folks I see either use phones or an entry level dslr.

I do not believe ANYBODY who says mirrorless cameras will displace conventional d-slr cameras anytime in the near future. People actually prefer d-slr cameras over mirrorless cameras, according to Nikon, and according to the CIPA figures. Here is a June 18,2013 article in USA Today. Mirrorless camera sales don't reflect potential

"The mirrorless segment is gaining huge ground in Japan, where it makes up about 10% of the camera market, according to the Camera & Imaging Products Association. Of the 1.8 million cameras shipped in the Americas (not just the USA) in April, a measly 38,843 of them were mirrorless — 2% of the total."


Yeah...TWO percent mirrorless shipments in the "Americas", meaning Canada, the USA, Mexico and Central America, and South America.

 

[amolitor]

Has anyone built a mirrorless DSLR? That is, maintain the form factor, the sensor size, the feature set etc, but use an EVF instead of a mirror? It seems that "mirrorless" has thus far indicated a market segment that boils down to "high end P&S" rather than merely "doesn't have a mirror".

 

[Derrel]

Has anyone built a mirrorless DSLR? That is, maintain the form factor, the sensor size, the feature set etc, but use an EVF instead of a mirror? It seems that "mirrorless" has thus far indicated a market segment that boils down to "high end P&S" rather than merely "doesn't have a mirror".

Ummmm, in a manner of speaking, Sony "sort of" has...with their SLT technology. They have a mirror that's fixed in position, and allows the image-forming light rays to go right through a mirror, and the finder uses an EVF...but the form factor, and size and weight, is pretty much the same as a "regular" pre-SLT Sony-branded d-slr, and the cameras still use the Minolta Maxxum/aka Sony Alpha lenses. Removing the flipping mirror has really boosted the frames per second rate, but there are still a couple of EVF-centric issues, such as dark EVF image in dimmer shooting conditions, and a slight lag in refresh of the image on fast-moving subjects or when panning rapidly with the camera.

The question is a bit of an odd duck, inasmuch as a mirror-LESS dslR would have no Reflex mirror, so maybe my answer isn't 100% what you were expecting.

 

[amolitor]

The half-silvered mirror jobbies always struck me as an OK idea, but nobody liked them because they cost speed and made a dim finder. They used an EVF on some of them to boost the finder image back up to decent levels or something? I hadn't heard of that varient.

It makes sense to me to pull the EVF image right off the sensor and dump the mirror entirely.

That was the answer, and you're right, it wouldn't be an SLR at all, it would be something else. But the idea would be an EVF, no mirror, but otherwise targetting the current DSLR market. Lag does seem to be a problem with the EVFs, which I gotta say is a bit of a mystery to me, but I assume I am missing something about the tech.

 

[Derrel]

Here's a brief article by an influential web photography writer, on why he dislikes EVFs...and keep in mind, he owns and uses the Sony NEX-7 as his "wintertime" camera of choice. I dunno...there are a number of camera designs that could or would be "good", I think...but the real sticking point is "legacy lens systems" versus "buying all-new gear for an unproven system".

Why I Hate EVFs

 

[brunerww]

Has anyone built a mirrorless DSLR? That is, maintain the form factor, the sensor size, the feature set etc, but use an EVF instead of a mirror? It seems that "mirrorless" has thus far indicated a market segment that boils down to "high end P&S" rather than merely "doesn't have a mirror".

The first camera with the form factor, APS-C sensor size and feature set of a DSLR was the little-known (and initially overpriced) Samsung NX20.

Sony seems to have give up on the "half silvered mirror" and is taking a shot at a DSLR form factor mirrorless with the entry level A3000, but, to take Derrel's point, it has a crappy EVF.

That said, it is the bestselling Sony on Amazon's DSLR Best Seller List as of today, ahead of every one of their DSLTs.

If Sony follows up with reasonably priced APS-C A5000, A7000 and full frame A9000 mirrorless cameras with OLED EVFs, we may finally have cameras that are real alternatives to the complexity of the mirror box.

In the meantime, the reflex mirror rules.

 

[KmH]

The Internet is having a huge impact on the future of photography, and that future is pretty bleak.

http://www.thephotoforum.com/forum/...user-submitted-photos-boost-online-sales.html

“It’s great to have real-life photos,” said Michael Gilday, Beam’s multimedia lead for Mini Cooper. “It’s like a gold mine."

 

[mishele]

The Internet is having a huge impact on the future of photography, and that future is pretty bleak.

http://www.thephotoforum.com/forum/...user-submitted-photos-boost-online-sales.html

“It’s great to have real-life photos,” said Michael Gilday, Beam’s multimedia lead for Mini Cooper. “It’s like a gold mine."

Scary, isn't it?!!

 

[KmH]

There will still be a market for high quality images.
Albeit a much smaller market, with fierce competition among the few that will survive the trend to using amateur made/grade "real-life photos" that will shrink the commercial photography market.

I think the "It's like a gold mine." is about real-life photos = don't have to pay for them.

 

[mishele]

Marketing genius, really.