Canon rush to reassure investors as camera profits plunge

Post by xster » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 7:10 AM UTC

brokenmachine wrote: post #129

xster wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another department I doubt these traditional Japanese companies can catch up on is computational photography. I can take 5s handheld night time photos with adequate quality on a bunch of phones these days. There's still no way of getting anything useful out of DSLRs longer than 1/15s without tripods.

I'm not smart enough to do exact calculations with aperture, etc, but I think the amount of light taken in with a 1/15s exposure with a DSLR would be more than a 5s cameraphone image. Just taking the area of the lens, say a 5mm diameter cameraphone lens is pi x 5^2=79mm^2 vs a DSLR, conservatively 60mm diameter is pi x 60^2=11309mm^2. So 143 times the lens area, while your example exposure time is only 75 times more.…

Ummm that's a really good point. Though numerically, the numbers are probably debatable.

Taking for instance a full-frame Canon 5D II and something like a Huawei P30 Pro on the back of a napkin. A full-frame sensor is 864mm2 and a 1/1.7in sensor is 43mm2. Huawei with a RYYB sensor has an ISO of 409,600 vs 6,400. The phone aperture is /1.6. Realistically, /1.6 glass would be too heavy, so let's call it /2.8.

The ratio would then be 20 (sensor size) * 0.0156 (ISO) * 0.57 (aperture) = 0.178x before AI kicks in for, say, another 75x more exposure time ~= 421x more usable light on the phone.

Based on super unscientific anecdotal experience between the 2 (since the human eye is logarithmic), it seems about right.

Post by throwaway9d0291 » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 7:28 AM UTC

souprock wrote: post #126

throwaway9d0291 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like Fuji does part of what you want. Fuji (at least the X-T3 I own) doesn't have an explicit "Aperture priority, shutter priority, auto, manual" mode dial like most cameras. Instead it has physical dials for aperture, shutter speed and ISO. The dials have "auto" positions and the shutter and ISO dials can be locked in place. So instead of aperture priority, you leave the ISO and SS dials in "auto" and chan…

You might not trust auto, but don't you trust the previous manual setting even less? It could have been under completely different lighting conditions. Suppose you are up in a high desert. At night, you take pictures of blossoms by starlight. The next day at noon, you spot an interesting and rare bird of prey quickly flying by while holding an interesting prey item. Quickly you flip the camera on and take a photo. Oh…

> You might not trust auto, but don't you trust the previous manual setting even less? It could have been under completely different lighting conditions.

Usually it'll be in similar lighting conditions because I shoot with my camera pretty continuously.

> Suppose you are up in a high desert. At night, you take pictures of blossoms by starlight. The next day at noon, you spot an interesting and rare bird of prey quickly flying by while holding an interesting prey item. Quickly you flip the camera on and take a photo. Oh bummer, the camera was still configured for starlight, and you'll probably never have another opportunity for a similar photo. All pixels are white.

This is unlikely to happen because I tend to shoot with my camera continuously. I'd have taken a photo of an interesting cactus long before I saw the bird.

That said, assuming I already had a super telephoto lens attached to the camera (which is the bigger problem, if I was shooting blossoms I probably wouldn't have the right lens attached), it'd take me less than a second to move the relevant dials on the Fuji to something acceptable. On the Sony that's not possible but that's just a sacrifice I make by shooting Sony.

And in this situation, I'd expect the auto settings to do something stupid like expose for the sky instead of the bird. For example the camera might choose low ISO, wide aperture, relatively slow shutter speed while I'd want max shutter speed, moderate ISO and whatever aperture works with the other two.

> Why can't you lock the aperture in place?

The lenses just don't come with a locking mechanism for the aperture wheel. It has some little clicks but that's it.

> Why do you need to lock something in place if there is a separate dial position for auto? (if not auto, isn't it locked?)

The lock is a physical mechanism to stop the dial from turning accidentally while in your bag or something like that. Otherwise even if you put it in auto when you put it away, a bit of jostling in its bag can turn the dial to a different setting, which can be an issue when auto is usually between the extremes.

Re: Canon rush to reassure investors as camera profits plunge

Re: Canon rush to reassure investors as camera profits plunge