Wait until AI hits camera, like DLSS. It will be all over then.
Nikon Is ending 70 years of camera production in Japan
281–290 of 371 posts
Re: Nikon Is ending 70 years of camera production in Japan
#282Oof, that's not a good sign. For me, Japan is the place for the best camera and lens manufacturing. Most of the makers seem to split their manufacturing between Japan for their quality models/lenses and cheaper countries for the consumer stuff, which I think is a valid compromise. But this feels short-sighted on Nikon's part and rather like they have already failed. Perhaps instead of relocating their production they…
Nikon is the worst performing of the big 4 and has been on a death spiral for years at this point. I wouldn't be surprised if they will stop photographer camera & lens production 5 years from now.
Re: Nikon Is ending 70 years of camera production in Japan
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also less moving parts, so this results in a more reliable product.
And smaller. I think the days of a big ‘hero camera’ are behind us. People just don’t want to lug around the weight if they don’t have to, and it’s no longer such a status symbol.
We went through this period where people bought an APS-C DSLR with a relatively cheap kit zoom lens which never came off the camera shooting on (A)utomatic. They weren't "wrong" but a lot of those folks would have been just as happy with a higher end P&S like Canon's G series. And, today, they're just fine with a smartphone.
Re: Nikon Is ending 70 years of camera production in Japan
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Phones are already better at taking non-blurry pictures in very low light. They generally have pretty fast shutter speeds available for moving subjects. Dynamic range is not particularly important now that exposure blending works so well. Diffraction all comes out in the wash. Smaller sensors allow wider apertures (and phones have some room to grow in terms of sensor size). The resolution advantage is actually quite…
If you use multiple exposures for exposure blending you lose sensitivity, and in the case of fast shutter speeds image quality plummets. Phones are simply not better at taking non-blury pictures in very lowlight. Cameras evolved since the 90s, we have 5 stops of IS, sharp f/1.4 lenses and exposure stacking. The resolution advantage is not moderate at all. A 12MP phone is around as sharp as a theoretically perfect 8MP…
>Diffraction absolutely doesn't come out as a wash. What matters is the actual diameter of the aperture, not the ratio
It's actually the f stop that matters for diffraction, not the absolute diameter. Roughly, this is because the light spreads more with a longer focal length because it has a longer distance over which to diverge. If you crunch the numbers this exactly compensates for the larger absolute diameter of the aperture. Here is a post with a reference: https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/21428
It's amazing how much enthusiast discussion about cameras is based on basic misconceptions about optics.
Re: Nikon Is ending 70 years of camera production in Japan
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
>but I've seen superthin flat lens, with a marginal cost of production around ~$2 in a university facility, that work better than some $500 lens -- and the latter are expensive because they are hard to make the traditional way. I find this very fascinating because while I enjoy my ever-increasing smartphone camera and use it as a daily driver, I have a about 13 year old Canon DSLR (one of the first one they made now)…
I would love smartphone postprocessing over DSLR raw images. I feel that phones usually make better decisions for contrast, white balance, exposure than DSLRs do. With a DSLR, reaching the same finished product usually requires a ton of manual work editing photos. Of course, the DSLR has far better detail on the pixel level, and if you need to zoom in at all, it wins in a landslide. I wish I could combine the strengt…
DSLRs (and other high-end cameras) typically have a ton of JPEG options too. Though I usually just shoot raw and let Lightroom apply presets.
That said, the traditional camera manufacturers are pretty much laggards with respect to software so their better hardware isn't really used to full advantage a lot of the time.
Re: Nikon Is ending 70 years of camera production in Japan
#286No more Lord Nikon. Say hello to Lord iPhone.
Re: Nikon Is ending 70 years of camera production in Japan
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
>but I've seen superthin flat lens, with a marginal cost of production around ~$2 in a university facility, that work better than some $500 lens -- and the latter are expensive because they are hard to make the traditional way. I find this very fascinating because while I enjoy my ever-increasing smartphone camera and use it as a daily driver, I have a about 13 year old Canon DSLR (one of the first one they made now)…
I use a little bit newer Nikon DSLR (~2013), which adds another thing (the first generation of DSLRs wasn't really good at this): Color. The color of iPhones is just bleirgh in comparison, which is a little bit weird considering the cargoculting on HN of Apple's "computational photography".
This is the first comment here on computational photography, which I think is really the reason for traditional camera manufacturers going away. Most high end cellphones this generation can do stellar photography.
My dream is a camera with a nice sensor/lens and an iphone brain. It likely already exists, up there orbiting the earth...
Re: Nikon Is ending 70 years of camera production in Japan
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine so. At the risk of angering Leica fans: they’re shipping not exactly state of the art technology at very high prices, with a lot of the R&D actually being done by Panasonic. (Or, in the case of their Lux compact cameras, they’re literally shipping Panasonic cameras with a different sticker on them.) Look at the Leica Q2: it costs $5000. The Fuji X100V costs $1300. I know there’s a bigger sensor in the Q2, b…
There's an interesting relationship between Leica, Sinar, and Panasonic for sure - Panasonic is seems to be behind the firmware in even the older Leica M series cameras, which are definitely made by Leica. The SL2 is essentially a Panasonic SR1 with a nicer body. The Leica S series medium format cameras use similiar looking firmware, and the the internals of the newest S3 power the Sinar S30|45 digital back. The Lux…
Agree on M models not being worth the money new. I've always bought gently used bodies 2 years after release. Still, the M-system is capable of nothing that any other non-rangefinder can do: which is to capture the decisive moment. There's no blackout period and you see what's beyond the framelines, such that you can anticipate the composition. The Fuji X100 comes close.
Re: Nikon Is ending 70 years of camera production in Japan
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you’re about 2 or 3 years too late with this comment. The switch to mirrorless is already here, Nikon and Canon have the majority of their core lens lineups out already for these platforms so it’s unlikely they’d replace them again for the next decade or longer. And yes, they are mostly better than previous generations across the board. Which is pretty cool, that something based on such a simple idea that’s b…
What is the deal with mirrorless? (no mirror, but why does this improve optics?)
As well as the comments already made, there's another thing to consider: in a SLR or DSLR, the path used to determine whether or not you're in focus is different from the path light follows to the medium: the autofocus system has a screen that takes light from a mirror, and then adjusts the lens based off that measurement. In manual focus, you're basic it off the path the light takes to the focusing screen, via a mirror.
In either case, when the photo is taken, the mirror whips out of the road (which generates mirror slap, another problem), and the light travels to the film or sensor. Since this path is a different distance to the one used for focusing, it requires only a small calibration error between the body and lens to end up with out-of-focus images. It is very normal to have to tweak the focus (higher end bodies will let you do this), or to have to have a body or lens physically corrected. No matter how exquisite your optics - in fact paradoxically, this effect is worst with high-end optics - the way the light path works here can be a real pain for getting good focus.
Because mirrorless systems focus and capture from the same medium, this literally can't happen with your mirrorless camera.
Re: Nikon Is ending 70 years of camera production in Japan
#290Apple could obliterate the pro video and DSLR market with all it has learned about sensors and image processing in the past decade. It would only need to release a pro body like Red, Black Magic, etc, supporting different mounts (Nikon F, etc) and an integrated workflow with Final Cut. It has already done that for the consumer market and part of the enthusiast market... My guess as to why Apple hasn't done it yet is…
While an Apple Camera would be interesting to see (and why not, given that they've just entered the headphones market, at the risk of cannibalizing Beats), I think it's more likely that they'd want iPhones to remain the all-in-one digital camera kit. Maybe introduce a way to attach extra lens as MagSafe accessories some day.
Apple released one of the very first digital cameras back in the day - The Apple Quick Take (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Qu). Somewhere deep in their R&D facility I wouldn't be surprised if they are quietly working on a full speced ILC camera system - they could just license the Nikon Z mount (which is the most advanced and future proof mount of any other vendors - Nikon's real ace in the hole) or - as people have said here just outright buy Nikon - and apply all of their silicon / imaging knowlege to it.I wouldn't put it past Apple.