"The DSLR is dead" EOS R and cell phone cameras taking over - so they say

I've been using Sony mirrorless cameras for the past couple of years and have never liked them - always thought I would jump back to a dslr. Well last week I had to use the latest Canon 5Div (i believe) on an assignment. NOPE never again! I couldn't believe how it made the Sony cameras seem so advanced (actually how stepping back in tech history the dslr was). Although honestly a big part of the problem is Canon has just been crippling their lineup so much not to make an overall good camera (spec wise).

What is dead is limited software cameras. Cameras that are obviously intentionally crippled. I spent many years self cocking the shutter and putting one sheet of film in at a time - those days are gone. I am not paying $$$$ for a camera that doesn't have a healthy spec sheet. The camera doesn't make the picture I do I don't need a camera company that thinks it can force me to buy (and carry) many different options.

They are a tool and all of them now are fairly competent, the SLR is very mature tech, EVF based are becoming mature tech. I am not so sure there won't be DSLR's in the future, you can still buy large format film cameras, Nikon still make a film camera (F5?), if there is a market people will still make them even if they become niche. I can't see why people get so het up over what others use, use what works for you until you find trouble doing something you need to with it. I prefer to work with lighter cameras, I sold my Sony's due to the lens options being heavier than Leica's options and really not being any lighter than using a 5d, actually the X1d does not seem much more for far far better files. I never was a massive fan of the SLR format but for a long time it was the best choice out there, others loved it, RF's were poor over 90mm or so and found a 135mm far better on an SLR. When mirrorless came along I jumped very quickly but these were very personal choices, others are different and it is what works for them that matters.

Tech is all about making a product well enough to get people to buy it, but making it in a way that it supports the business as long as it can. So, some of the things posted here about Canon are likely true to some extent. However, any company's marketing departments job is to get us to use new terms and tech, and in the process, despise our old products so we sell them off, in favor of the new one's.

That being said, I've returned to photography again after a 25-30 year gap. I have a 5D Mark 3 now (vs my Minolta X-700 back then) which is the best camera I've ever owned. I've invested in the "holy trinity lenses" for shooting events, and anything else I like. I don't do this for money, only for myself and the event shoots I donate to the church. I tend to take pictures for me, and almost always have my camera with me wherever I go. So far I haven't run into any deal breakers which make me despise the DSLR. The phone however is only my very last option.

I remember the Nakamichi Dragon cassette player that guys brought back from their time overseas when I was in the military. It literally popped out and then turned the whole tape around to play the other side, then slid back in. Very fancy, but where are cassettes now? I've read many reviewers say that mirrorless cameras have a hard time auto-focusing in low-light. That's a big deal especially for event professionals. They're not perfected yet, but as the money goes, so goes the tech by popular vote. Unless I decide to make a business of this, which many have warned me against, I don't see cashing it all in and moving to a different system again. I will watch from the sidelines and wait for all of you to ditch your lenses so I can get a 70-200 L Mk 2 (with IS next time around) on the cheap, and be grateful for it.

The camera you have with you concept does work if photography for a person is more than some technically and creatively composed shot of some animal or object. There are more selfies shot than about any other kind of photo globally every day. A majority of photos are for memories and captures of the moment, and those shots, regardless of detail and composition, may bring a smile or invoke an emotion much more readily than a highly resolved image of a bird in flight, or a player dunking a ball/doing a touchdown, or some cityscape.

That being said, the average Rebel or XXD user that goes to a box store to buy a camera to take better pictures than their phone could care less if there is a mirror or not a mirror in their camera. Most of those folks, when they take off a lens, think the mirror is the sensor even. Once the consumer lines have all been replaced with mirrorless, that marks the end of the Canon DSLR. This topic of DSLR vs mirrorless is ONLY forum fodder and matters little in the global consumer market. All most people want is a camera that can take a picture well and creates very few, if any, hindrances to the photographic process.

mdvaden wrote in post #18748302
I don't think so if something like Sony's $1600 Bridge camera is considered a point and shoot. That's basically what it is. I don't want one, but saw one the other day and thought it was a great tool for the man who bought it. He had a DSLR and lenses previous.

I have two mirrorless already, but there's a high probability I will buy another DSLR in the next year or two.

What has me more curious is whether DSLR production will lessen or not.

DSLR sales have been in freefall since 2012 with 2017 being about 46% of what 2012 was and 2018 looks as if it will continue the slide,possibly even accelerating as 2018 only had one month that exceeded 2017 and is 10% lower than 2017 through the same time period. Data is only through October so holiday sales are not included. Also, looking at the data, mirrorless seems to be flat from 2012 to today with 3.9m units in 2012 and 4m units in 2017. DSLRs however are nowhere near the collapse of P/S and compact cameras which exhibited a 90% drop from it's high year.

TeamSpeed wrote in post #18783582
....Most of those folks, when they take off a lens, think the mirror is the sensor even. ...

Source? Or did you just make that up? I've chatted with possible hundreds of photographers over the years and have yet to meet one so ignorant that they would mistake a mirror for a sensor. So, if most folks would do so, I think I would have bumped into one at least.

gjl711 wrote in post #18783615
DSLR sales have been in freefall since 2012 with 2017 being about 46% of what 2012 was and 2018 looks as if it will continue the slide,possibly even accelerating as 2018 only had one month that exceeded 2017 and is 10% lower than 2017 through the same time period. Data is only through October so holiday sales are not included. Also, looking at the data, mirrorless seems to be flat from 2012 to today with 3.9m units in 2012 and 4m units in 2017. DSLRs however are nowhere near the collapse of P/S and compact cameras which exhibited a 90% drop from it's high year.

The ruler against which dSLR sales is measured may be a falsely chosen one!

1. During peak sales of dSLRs, the technology was still rapidly evolving in quality of images,
   
2. Lots of traditional SLR shooters were still in the middle of the adoption of digital (over traditional film)
   I, for example, was still going thru multiple iterations of 'newest generation dSLR' successive purchases
   

Mobile phones took over. Here is nothing to decline. Those devices replaced need for dedicated camera for majority of image takers.
As for mirrorless, it is obviously getting more and more dedicated camera users.
Where I'm i see more and more cameras like these.
As for R, I'm not sure if it will be replacement of any DSLR. I was trying to use it and camera, lens feels more like prototype of good start than good start...
I'm much more confident with two old DSLRs
and my mirrorless are film and digital rangefinder cameras. I also don't mind to slap my Ls on film EOS .
I still see plenty of DSLRs users where I'm. Including young people.

gjl711 wrote in post #18783640
Source? Or did you just make that up? I've chatted with possible hundreds of photographers over the years and have yet to meet one so ignorant that they would mistake a mirror for a sensor. So, if most folks would do so, I think I would have bumped into one at least.

Many photographers are not the same caliber as the parents at various events that bought a camera just to take a shot of their kid on the field. I have had countless discussions where folks took their lens off and pointed to the mirror worried that they would touch or get dirt on the "sensor". There are more parents using things like Rebels to shoot events than photographers that know their gear. Heck we have had several such discussions here on the forums even, and this is a photgraphers' board.

We like to keep a myopic view of photography and all the gear we discuss within the circle of "photographers', when there are so many others buying up gear that aren't photographers.

gjl711 wrote in post #18783640
Source? Or did you just make that up? I've chatted with possible hundreds of photographers over the years and have yet to meet one so ignorant that they would mistake a mirror for a sensor. So, if most folks would do so, I think I would have bumped into one at least.

Most DSLR users that I meet and talk with barely know anything about their DSLR. Many who own DSLRs have no idea that there is a sensor or a mirror inside their camera. They have no idea what a sensor is or what it does.

Source:
People that I know from church or family friends or people I bump into at WalMart or Best Buy who recently bought a DSLR or people who want to try photography and just bought their first interchangeable lens camera and come to me with questions. These people FAR OUTNUMBER the DSLR users who know what they're doing. Most of them, even after they've owned and used their DSLR for years, still don't know anything about it and have no clue as to the basic way it works.

Wilt wrote in post #18783648
The ruler against which dSLR sales is measured may be a falsely chosen one!

1. During peak sales of dSLRs, the technology was still rapidly evolving in quality of images,
   
2. Lots of traditional SLR shooters were still in the middle of the adoption of digital (over traditional film)
   I, for example, was still going thru multiple iterations of 'newest generation dSLR' successive purchases
   

...yet if you look NOT at 2012 numbers, but look at SLR volumes in the early 1990s, they were NOWHERE near the dSLR volume seen in 2012! IOW, the volume we see today might simply be the steadystate volumes seen in mature markets, with few new adopters and merely a predominantly 'replacement market' volume! ...the bottom in dSLR might be about the same unit volume of the largely replacement market volume of film SLRs seen in the mid 1990's.
Looking at CIPA figures, the all-cameras (not differentiated by type of camera) in 2010 was UP from 1997 by about 3X, for example.
If you look at dSLR volume in 2011, that same volume would have represented HALF of ALL-camera volume of 1995, an unrealistic proportion of all cameras sold that year!!!

Hey Wilt, pre digital I would not read too much into the data as CIPA data only shows data from Japanese manufacturers. Pre-digital there were many other players outside of Japan. Kodak, Polaroid, Hasselblad, Minox, and other non-Japanese manufacturers are not included in the data. I would guess that Kodak and Polaroid volume alone would be several times what all of Japan was putting out pre-2000. Digital sort of shifted the landscape where nearly all camera manufacturing is coming from a Japanese company.

I just looked it up. At Kodak's market peak, they had:
"Kodak commanded 90% of film sales and 85% of camera sales in the U.S., according to a 2005 case study for Harvard Business School."
And by 1996:
"Kodak commands over two-thirds of global market share. Revenues reach nearly $16 billion, its stock exceeds $90, and the company is worth over $31 billion. The Kodak brand is the fifth most valuable brand in the world."

And then came digital and Kodak died. I'm guessing that if you add in Kodak and Polaroids camera sales with the CIPA sales, the curve is going to be much more flat line. Heck, just doing the math on 1996 where Kodak alone had 2/3ds of the camera market, and we know that Japan produced about 40,000,000 puts the total somewhere around 120,000,000 cameras which is about what Japan was at it's peak in 2012.

gjl711 wrote in post #18783709
I just looked it up. At Kodak's market peak, they had:
"Kodak commanded 90% of film sales and 85% of camera sales in the U.S., according to a 2005 case study for Harvard Business School."
And by 1996:
"Kodak commands over two-thirds of global market share. Revenues reach nearly $16 billion, its stock exceeds $90, and the company is worth over $31 billion. The Kodak brand is the fifth most valuable brand in the world."

And then came digital and Kodak died. I'm guessing that if you add in Kodak and Polaroids camera sales with the CIPA sales, the curve is going to be much more flat line. Heck, just doing the math on 1996 where Kodak alone had 2/3ds of the camera market, and we know that Japan produced about 40,000,000 puts the total somewhere around 120,000,000 cameras which is about what Japan was at it's peak in 2012.

Let us assume that what you said about Kodak volume and Polaroid volume is fundamentally correct and a shortcoming of CIPA numbers...OK, the all-cameras figure is much higher, but then are SLR volumes back then significantly different from dSLR volumes, in the decline?! Does the addition of Kodak and Polaroid make any difference to the contention that using 2012 dSLR volumes was the use of an artificially high demand for SLRs of any type, ever?

Last trip I took my XT1 with kit lens and also used Pixel 3 XL. I was amazed what the cellphone could do with a tiny sensor. Some days I used phone more than the camera as it was convenient like more natural looking HDR without me doing anything, pretty decent shots in night mode, fake portrait mode doing very good job and so on. Computational photography is going to get much better.

As a guy who just upgraded to a 5dmk4 and considers it to be another 8-10yr investment, also the fact that i detest mobile phones. I wouldn't be sorry to see a mass exodus from DSLR's. Please forward your L glass at a heavily reduced cost my way. Thankyou