Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Canon has sold its last film camera

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 163 posts

Re: Canon has sold its last film camera

#121

Post by PuffinBlue »

petepete wrote: post #76
geerlingguy wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> outperforms both Canon and Nikon by a considerable margin Not sure the metric, but SLRs still own the focusing crown for most action-based photography (though the mirrorless cameras are getting closer to being good at it). And exposure/metering is pretty much even, resolution is pretty even, ISO/noise gives an edge to Sony/Nikon over Canon, body/UX/comfort/grip gives an edge to Nikon/Canon over Sony (unless you hav…

> Not sure the metric, but SLRs still own the focusing crown for most action-based photography (though the mirrorless cameras are getting closer to being good at it) I'm not sure this has been true since the Sony α9. Its autofocusing abilities are amazing , and that's coming from me - a Nikon fan and D500 owner. If I shot people rather than wildlife, I'd probably switch for the eye-AF alone.

The a9 falls down when zooming and focusing at the same time though. That's fairly important for sports and a few other parts of other types of photography.

The Nikon D5 still has the crown when you add in that test and percentage wise will beat Canon/Sony. In absolute numbers, because the Sony shoots so fast it can bring home more 'keepers' in terms of numbers of photos though.

And the focus point coverage is WAY bigger on the a9, so overall I would call it a tie depending on what you are shooting.

Re: Canon has sold its last film camera

#122

Post by snowwrestler »

jonknee wrote: post #4
snowwrestler wrote: post #2

I'm not surprised; in SLRs at least, Canon was never the dominant film camera company with the biggest customer base. Their SLR business did not catch up to and pass Nikon until the digital era. Canon's decision to put the AF motor in the lens helped them in verticals that use huge telephotos (sports, mostly). But their film cameras lagged Nikon in the sophistication of their AF, their automated exposure control, and…

Well that and there is almost no market for new film cameras.

Sure, but Nikon and Leica still sell 35mm film cameras.

I think that because they were the dominant brands in 35mm in the film era, they still have fans today among people who still like to shoot film.

Re: Canon has sold its last film camera

#123

Post by GuiA »

acomjean wrote: post #6

As someone who shot and developed a lot of film (I was a photo editor at a daily college paper..) I won’t miss it. Though printing black and white pictures was kinda fun, they often had dust and getting the exporsure and contrast right was tedious. I don’t miss film. Though there were a lot less pictures taken and shared before everyone had a camera on their phone. A different time in a lot of ways.

I still shoot black and white medium format, and spend about 10 hours a week in a darkroom.

It’s hard to compare spending 2 hours on a print vs 2 hours on a shot in Lightroom - they’re very different processes. That being said, the reason why I enjoy it so much is because I’m working with a physical process that - once fully understood - is reliable, coherent, and predictable (to your comment about it being hard getting the exposure and contrast right - split filter processing changed my life. It removes a lot of the guesswork and basically turns it into a binary search). Working with software is anything but - I can’t count the number of times where something didn’t work quite the way it used to because of a software update, or I had to restart Lightroom to get it to behave, or some fairly direct manipulation I wanted to do was hidden under unnecessary layers of UI.

Not to mention that the final output of the darkroom process is a print - whereas the final output of software is a file. Since I care about making large prints, if I worked in software, I’d still have to deal with a printer and all the mess that comes with that to get an object.

The one thing that digital excels at is obviously back ups/instant duplication/being able to navigate through history/etc.

But they really are 2 utterly different approaches to making photographs, and I wish there were an embodied system (à la Dynamicland) that brought to the digital photography process the wonderful things from the darkroom process.

Re: Canon has sold its last film camera

#124

Post by BeetleB »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #72
sofaofthedamned wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good points, but the market is dying for DSLRs. I wince each time I use mine for the terrible wifi capability, the awful OS, etc. Why can't it be modernised? Because Canon and Nikon won't do it.

DSLRs have terrible WiFi because there is little demand for it. SD cards are interchangeable, and slot into your computer for a reason.

I want to view the photo on my phone while on site - not when I get home.

Re: Canon has sold its last film camera

#125

Post by wl »

chuckkir wrote: post #96

I was talking to a friend who recently got into 35mm film cameras. He develops the color film himself, but then immediately scans it in and uses digital tools to work on the images. I left a bit confused; what is he gaining by using film as the medium?

I can't imagine many people developing their own color film unless they like the process. It's much more involved than B&W and there's not as much room for playing around.

Re: Canon has sold its last film camera

#126

Post by ccnafr »

Original source: https://petapixel.com/2018/05/30/canon-is-now-out-of-the-fil...

I'm so tired of the TechCrunch blog spam on this site. They've literally stolen another site's news story and HN mods never replace their links with the original source of the article.

Why is this site always given a pass for content theft?

Re: Canon has sold its last film camera

#127

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

ccnafr wrote: post #126

Original source: https://petapixel.com/2018/05/30/canon-is-now-out-of-the-fil... I'm so tired of the TechCrunch blog spam on this site. They've literally stolen another site's news story and HN mods never replace their links with the original source of the article. Why is this site always given a pass for content theft?

You can always email hn@ycombinator.com to reach the mods with suggestions like URL changes. They usually respond pretty quick.

Re: Canon has sold its last film camera

#128

Post by ArlenBales »

ccnafr wrote: post #126

Original source: https://petapixel.com/2018/05/30/canon-is-now-out-of-the-fil... I'm so tired of the TechCrunch blog spam on this site. They've literally stolen another site's news story and HN mods never replace their links with the original source of the article. Why is this site always given a pass for content theft?

TechCrunch gives YCombinator a lot of publicity, for example pieces about its demo days. Of course there's a business relationship of sorts at play here.

Re: Canon has sold its last film camera

#129

Post by dboreham »

BeetleB wrote: post #124
toomanybeersies wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DSLRs have terrible WiFi because there is little demand for it. SD cards are interchangeable, and slot into your computer for a reason.

I want to view the photo on my phone while on site - not when I get home.

My Canon M5's WiFi actually "just works" and does what you want : view and download images to the phone in the field. It also uses the phone's GPS to geotag images. This is with an Android phone -- the workflow isn't as smooth with iOS apparently because Apple doesn't allow apps to drive the WiFi association. The phone maintains a BT connection to the camera and uses that as a side channel by which it coordinates an on-demand WiFi association.

Previous generations were not so easy to use -- my 6D does work but lacks the auto-connect via BT feature. Presumably the 6D2 has that though.

Re: Canon has sold its last film camera

#130

Post by BeetleB »

fetus8 wrote: post #13
sofaofthedamned wrote: post #7

I don't understand why Google / MS / Amazon etc don't buy either of Nikon or Canon? It'd give them credibility and they'd immediately improve the DSLRs. Imagine a decent Nikon with the Google Photos processing? Decent wifi? Regular updates?

What credibility are Nikon or Canon missing? Both companies have a level of brand recognition unrivaled in the Photography world...? Only in recent years has Sony and maybe Fujifilm developed more respect due to some of their advancements where Nikon and Canon have lacked. Their DSLR's are market leaders still. Again, only in recent years have Mirrorless cameras have started to catch up with the DSLRs Nikon and Canon…

>What credibility are Nikon or Canon missing?

Lots of stuff when you start thinking about it. Automation, as an example. Say I want my own custom metering algorithm - I can't currently upload that to my camera and try it out.

Take a look at what you can do when you can program your phone:

https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/experimental-nighttime-pho...

A phone's sensor is much worse than in Nikon/Canon. Yet if I want to reproduce the results in that post it's a fair amount of manual work to do so on a DSLR.

Say I want to shoot a photo of a tourist spot, but with no people in the photo. A standard way is to take several shots seconds apart, and then on the PC merge them using the median. All the people disappear. Why can't I program my DSLR to take 20 photos every 5 seconds and do that computation, and discard the 20 images and just keep the processed one?

Once you start thinking this way, you suddenly realize you're holding a product whose interface resembles something from 1980's DOS.

Post reply on HN