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Nikon Is ending 70 years of camera production in Japan

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Re: Nikon Is ending 70 years of camera production in Japan

#331

Post by cactus2093 »

andi999 wrote: post #239
cactus2093 wrote: post #121

Earlier 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?)

I think a lot of the replies you’ve gotten focus on the wrong thing.

Mirrorless in practice really just means the camera works more like your phone camera. You view the image on a screen instead of through an optical viewfinder. That brings some nice benefits, none of them are necessarily a game changer on their own but together it makes for a major step forward in the experience. Now the viewfinder shows you the picture more like it will actually look, the processor can see the image as you’re composing it before you take the shot and provide hints and show you that information overlayed on the image, the processor is involved in auto focusing and can do things like use ai models to focus on eyes, plus the physical benefits like there’s a big complex moving piece the camera no longer needs.

Camera makers then used this change to make a bigger platform shift at the same time. Just like a major version bump in software, if you have breaking changes you’ve been waiting to make you might want to make them all at once. They widened the mount diameter of lenses, which combined with the shorter distance to sensor because of the lack of a mirror gives more flexibility in letting in more light to the sensor. And they built a new set of lenses around it, whereas a lot of the lenses in their old lineups were sometimes decades old and not designed for the crazy high megapixel sensors we have now and in the near future. Most of these new lenses released in the past few years have been very high quality, so to answer your question that’s really where the improved image quality comes from, this new generation of lenses.

Re: Nikon Is ending 70 years of camera production in Japan

#333

Post by benrbray »

howlgarnish wrote: post #85
benrbray wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big downgrade in quality too, in most cases. When I moved here and had to furnish a house / stock a kitchen, I was amazed at the diversity and quality of basic cheap home goods here.

"Here" being Japan? Most of those cheap home goods (Muji etc) are made in China now.

Mujin / Daiso can have questionable quality so I avoid them for items I know will get a lot of use. I'm talking about places like Shimachu or the kitchen stores in Kappabashi. Tons of "made in Japan" products for about half the cost of what I remember paying for cheap Chinese wares in USA.

And, when I do buy an expensive item "made in Japan", I can generally trust that it is of high quality. Compare this to shopping for appliances in the USA, where brands like KitchenAid and CuisinArt are perpetually cheapening the quality of their products while keeping the price the same and coasting on the reputation they built in the 1970s and 1980s.

Re: Nikon Is ending 70 years of camera production in Japan

#334

Post by Baeocystin »

nomel wrote: post #327
Baeocystin wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct. That motion of the mirror itself is responsible for most of the noise, and some wobble of the camera as well. It's a trade-off, though. Seeing the actual image through the lens, and not a digital representation, which is what you get with a mirrorless system, has its benefits.

> which is what you get with a mirrorless system, has its benefits I never found those benefits. What would you say they are? Early on, the problem was mirrorless were slow in autofocus, and they had relatively terrible EV quality. Now they have better autofocus than mirrorless, and more importantly, with the very high resolution EV displays they have now [1], what you see is exactly what you end up getting. You don'…

The true colors of what you're shooting, the true dynamic range, and the ability to see to edges of the focal plane with greater clarity. What you see in a mirrorless camera has already gone through a great deal of processing to approximate what you'd see naturally with an SLR system.

Which is fine for what it is! If you aren't shooting in a studio, the reduced mass of equivalent lenses with mirrorless systems is a big quality of life upgrade all on its own, for example. But the color representation just isn't there, and it isn't going to be until we get better color in our display systems. It's being worked on, of course, but there's a long way to go.

Re: Nikon Is ending 70 years of camera production in Japan

#335

Post by tomatocracy »

Wistar wrote: post #271
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow that lens is bonkers. What a reasonable price. I love it. Aside, I enjoy that Ken also loves this lens, despite it being mostly plastic, which he usually shits all over. It actually seems like a feature here, for weight purposes.

I have a 70-300mm DO and it is not a lens I like much. The 400 DO is probably light-years better. It is definitely light-years more expensive.

I have the 400 DO. It's not really "light" but it's much much less of a beast than the 400/2.8. I really like it - it feels like it hits a sweet spot for me in the weight/light gathering ability/quality trade off and the quality is indeed excellent. But there's an argument that a 70-200/2.8 plus a 2x TC is very close in quality these days, gets you more flexibility and is a bit less unwieldy for a loss of only half a stop in light gathering ability at 400mm.

Re: Nikon Is ending 70 years of camera production in Japan

#336

Post by tomatocracy »

earthboundkid wrote: post #311
jodrellblank wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it help with using cameras for video footage, or would it be no problem to hold the mirror out of the way for a long time? (I imagine it being held in some kind of tension that wouldn't like long term force on it).

My DSLR had a hard limit of 30 minutes video time, but I suspect this is because of the software issues, not mirror tension per se.

If it's a Canon DSLR and is supported by the Magic Lantern firmware modification, it will allow you to circumvent this limit that way. It's possible that you may then need to use an external recorder via HDMI to avoid overheating depending on the model etc.

Re: Nikon Is ending 70 years of camera production in Japan

#337

Post by foldr »

sudosysgen wrote: post #325
foldr wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 t…

I'm not talking about linear resolution. I'm talking about angular resolution. Here, the airy disk diameter is the image size. At the same magnification, the image height is proportional to the object size. Since when the f number is smaller, at the same magnification, substituting in the thin lens formula with the magnification, you find that the object size is inversely proportional to the focal length. From this y…

Apologies for the snark. This would probably be a fun discussion in person. In my experience, most apparent disagreements like this just come down to confusion over which factors are being held constant out of field of view, sensor size, focal length, total amount of light gathered, etc. etc.

If the phone was using a slice of a DSLR sensor, then yes, the absolute aperture would be what was relevant, as you obviously cannot improve the resolution of an image merely by cropping it (if you imagine a ultra ultra wide DSLR lens which becomes a normal phone lens after the crop).

But two points:

First, you're then comparing resolution at a focal length that's irrelevant to DSLRs, so in practical terms it's not a like for like comparison.

Second, phones are using sensors with higher pixel density. The question is just whether the phone can use a wide enough fixed aperture to avoid being limited by diffraction at the desired resolution. A fixed aperture of e.g. f1.6 is practical at phone focal lengths but not (as a fixed aperture) at full frame focal lengths. If you calculate the theoretical linear resolution limit imposed by phone camera f-numbers, it's approaching 1000 lp/mm for the better models (e.g. an iPhone with an f1.6 aperture and a ~10mm sensor). I'm sure the real limits are lens aberrations and noise at the moment.

Re: Nikon Is ending 70 years of camera production in Japan

#338

Post by ece »

epx wrote: post #146
x87678r wrote: post #72

I bought a new SLR body probably every 5 years for the last 40. My newest smartphones are so good I've given up. Yes if you want crisp incredible detail, or if its your wedding you need an SLR, but no other reason.

I do see a big difference but it is another expensive ecosystem to maintain, it is difficult to justify for a thing that can only take pictures and I have no hope of making a buck with to offset costs.

I think people can get sucked into buying what they don't need, but buying a good body and a lens or two every few years can be worth it even if you're just an amateur trying out different types of photography.

Re: Nikon Is ending 70 years of camera production in Japan

#339

Post by pta2002 »

alacombe wrote: post #220
foldr wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Doing great things with 10X less light is impressive, but at some point, you need a big sensor and good quality glass. This problem is basically solved already by taking multiple exposures and blending them in software. Once we're at the point where stacking 10 exposures works reliably even in challenging conditions (and we're pretty nearly there with the latest phones) then many of the advantages of a larger sensor…

> This problem is basically solved already by taking multiple exposures and blending them in software. Here's the problem. Doing "things in software" is akin to saying ultraprocessed food is gourmet "food".

Image stacking is extremely common in low-light photography, especially astrophotography (where it is essentially the only way to get the 30min+ long exposures needed to image some deep-space objects). This need is somewhat mitigated by a sky tracker, which moves your camera together with the sky, but these are expensive and will slowly drift, making it still require multiple exposures (though you can get to several minutes before you get trailing, while without one you can only really get to a few seconds).

Basically, it's a pretty common technique for increasing SNR, it's a very different kind of "doing things in software" than, say, an iPhone's fake bokeh. It's no surprise that phones are starting to use it.

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