The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

That's what happens when non-tech companies make products with fixed firmware, and don't back it with a commitment to upgrade and maintain it - almost SaaS like.

It's hard to go back to a regular (non-upgrading) car after driving a Tesla, for example. If some camera maker realises that software is just as important as hardware, and continuously upgrades one model for 5 years, including tight integration with apps, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

>The first is the complete lack of innovation. Without any meaningful APIs, end users cannot do much with their DSLR. There's no app store where I can buy apps to enhance my DSLR.

I disagree here entirely. The DSLR "app" market predates and has been the inspiration for all of these apps we see on phones. Photoshop filters, lightroom presets and actions, etc. All of the stuff that that inspired things like instagram filters have been around for decades now, and have consistently always been a step ahead on power and quality. You don't run them on camera, but... you wouldn't want to! When you're shooting with a DSLR you're shooting for consumption at higher resolutions than you can see on your LCD display. You want to be able to look at things in more detail than you could ever do on the camera itself.

>The other reason is much more banal. For various reasons, people jumped to the DSRL bandwagon thinking that would make for better photos compared to more compact cameras (false for most people)

You're right here, but I don't think people actually wised up to this.

If we're talking specifically about DSLRs, mirrorless cameras are just better for most people at this point - Sony has almost single handedly rendered DSLRs obsolete for the vast majority of use cases where people need prosumer or professional cameras. If we're talking about prosumer+ cameras in general, it's even simpler than your reasons: Most of the people taking pictures with their phones are doing so for people who are consuming them on their phones.

You simply don't need a DSLR or mirrorless or medium format camera when everyone viewing your pictures is also using a phone. People aren't getting photos printed, and they're not viewing them on monitors. I'm really impressed with my iPhone 11 Pro camera - it works fantastic! - for viewing photos on the phone. But throw it up on my 4K monitor, and the pictures don't compare at all to my old D5300, much less my a7r 3 or even my rx100 m7 (assuming good shooting conditions and manual mode - the 11 Pro auto settings are quite good and significantly better than the 5300, and in some situations seem to be about as good as the rx100). I haven't gotten any printed to put up on display, but just seeing how poorly they compare when I'm looking at them in Lightroom, I wouldn't want to.

The way the majority of people consume photography has changed, and the requirements for producing photos for that medium has changed with it.

> Add on top of that the incredible computational imaging capabilities that have been developed over the past few years and the quality of images you can get from the size of optics and pixels that these devices have is amazing and more than good enough for 99% of people.

These computational imaging capabilities are good enough for 99% of people because they're taking pictures on their phone and viewing them on their phone. They are NOT good enough for professional uses.

https://spectre.cam/full-res/Full%20Size%20Comparison%20for%... This sort of thing would be completely unacceptable on a prosumer+ camera. There's some programs out there that can do similar things on your computer, like Luminar, that are significantly better at it - but are also using significantly more computing power to do it. Doing the same sort of processing in Luminar on a raw out of my a7r 3 takes 30-40 seconds to apply on an i7-7700k running at 5.2Ghz, and the results still sometimes come out looking similar to the iPhone shot.

The tech isn't nearly there for this to be used on standalone cameras. Maybe in 5-10 years, but certainly not today.

>I've got some complaints when it comes to my a7r 3s interface, and I assume the 4 hasn't changed much, so I'm probably in the group you're talking about, but...

A7R III is already another crowd, there are tons of people like simpler DSLR (e.g. Nikon D3500), simpler mirroless (e.g. Olympus PEN) and compacts (tons of models). Those could all use a "smartphone like interface" and "computational photography".

Now, for more hardcore enthusiasts:

>I do want those things (or, kind of - I want better autofocus across the board, and I want the option of automatic hdr and bracketing) but I don't want an iPhone or Android style camera interface.

Well, I'm a pro photographer (or have been, more into dev now, with a side of video), but I absolutely could use all that things.

Though by iPhone or Android camera interface I don't mean seeing the same thing in your mirrorless screen.

I mean more like the ability to download/write apps, advanced functionality made simple, things to automatically update/sync/post images, etc.

Think more like Magic Lantern -- and the ability to write or download stuff like that with an official API.

I just got an 11 Pro for the camera. A lot improved but it’s not a panacea. Blurry photos are still likely in the evening. Photos straight into the sun actually worsened because of the HDR (that I can’t disable anymore), making the sun and nearby clouds look like they have a “shadow”