A feature that really should exist on all dSLRs. [Rant]

I guess I am just old-school. For me, a camera must have ISO, aperture, speed, and maybe white balance if you do not shoot raw. All else is luxury and just not used by me Guess I am just too lazy!



But I do understand, that some people want more features!

 

Yeah, who needs a meter or way to focus anyway? Those are luxuries that just get in the way.

 

OK, forgot about the meter to be honest That is quite useful.

But 6 of my cameras still do not have a meter

 

It's not that I NEED more features. I commonly shoot with my trusty old Olympus OM-1 manual film camera that doesn't even have a working meter anymore. (use a $5 external old one I got at a garage sale with it), and it does just fine.

It's more like "This camera has all kinds of sensors and motors on it, and why shouldnt customers be able to get their hands on them for free, since they already exist in the camera?" Well as it turns out, they can. Sort of (API is not exactly as user friendly as it could be. Java for example would be an obvious choice for a language to write the coding API in, for easy communication across various devices, but Canon only has it in C natively, and firmware is not very "plug and play").

Also, most of the things you would use this for would be re-optimizations. For instance, different ergonomics, button layouts, or different autofocus software to meet abnormal needs, or whatever. Such that you would install it (or link it to a removable peripheral) and then forget about it / have it work in the background. That doesn't neccesarrily add up to more buttons to push or any more complicated of a shooting experience.





A good example would be if you are a sports photographer, and your camera's auto-ISO feature assumes that you are shooting handheld still subjects. Thus, it will only crank up the ISO once shutter speed goes below 1/60th or something like that.

But if you're shooting fast moving things, you would want ISO to be bumped up if it falls below 1/500 or 1/1000th perhaps. The Canon 7D can't do that normally, for example, but it probably could with custom programmed firmware. This is not a feature that you would ever think about again, though, probably, after installing it. Thus, it improves your exposures for your usage case, but does not add complexity.

 

Yeah, about 90 of mine don't either (though I rarely use most of them, and my handheld meters take care of that problem in any case when I do).

 

It's something you have to remember to do. And even if you always do remember, you have to actually do it, which takes time and a little bit of your concentration and can make you miss shots or get poorer compositions.

If you're shooting fast paced action, where just the right moment may be much more important than a tiny little bit of extra noise, then auto-ISO can make a significant difference (and you can set it to a maximum level, so it won't go behind your back and do ISO 12800 or something if you don't explicitly tell it to).

IMO, you shouldn't be setting any of your settings manually unless you have a good reason to believe that in your current situation, the camera is going to guess incorrectly with its auto functions.

 

Can you tell me what camera you are using? I wish I had a similar one. All cameras I tried, never actually could guess what I wanted the image to look like. So the cameras often made the wrong decisions and I switched to using at least some manual again ...