SLR vs P&S

The SLR camera will exist for a long time. Nothing in the near future will be able to replace an optical viewfinder - Live View is a tool for tripod work and for journalists who have to shoot over their head. Additionally, it's impossible to hold a camera steadily while using an LCD screen (and without bracing against something).

In any case, SLRs and point-&-shoots exist in two separate categories. Its dominance is only threatened by cameras like the Sigma DP and Olympus Pen, and rangefinders, if anyone besides Leica bothers making them.

tkbslc wrote in post #8134792
Even going a step farther and envisioning a new standard like micro aps-c with a reduced register distance like the micro 4/3, there would still need to be brand new ultrathin lenses for this to be worthwhile. And while a micro to EF mount adapter could exist, the point I was making is that Canon lenses are not very short, not any of them, so there is just no way to get a small kit with EF lenses.

Two choices that would appeal to serious photographers and sell like crap:

1) A fixed (built in) 30mm f/2 lens camera with an APS-C sensor using otherwise the same tech as P&S cameras available today.

2) A digital rangefinder like the Leica M8 (though preferably 35mm format) with a range of quality lenses between 20mm and 100mm.

I expect to see one of the above shortly after hell freezes over, though to be honest I never expected something even as cool as the Oly micro 4/3 concept. That is a moderately expensive camera aimed directly at serious photographers.

JeffreyG wrote in post #8133991
I think your standards for a good EVF are much, much lower than most SLR users. It goes way past resolution.

The EVF needs to update instantly for me to use it to shoot sports.

Current LCDs are rated at something 8 ms. I am not sure your eyes are faster than that.

The EVF needs to be able to display the full dynamic range of the scene.

Why ? Making it to display the exact dynamic range of the sensor has its own merits as you truly get what you see.

Also, you still have not talked about any solution to the issue of auto focus. You are not going to get any SLR users to give them up for some wunderkind EVF camera that has the same auto focus speed as current P&S cameras.

The ability for the contrast detect AF sensors to look through the mirror which then moves out of the way of the shot is a critical difference between SLR cameras and everything else. This is why we are a decade into the digital P&S era and the focus systems suck just as much today as they did at first.

So you are asserting that the main image sensor cannot be used as a phase detection AF sensor ? Sure it can, there are patents on that subject, I am too lazy to look. Right now I can come up with 2-3 solutions but not on this forum

As for P&S with their few milimiters focus lenths they simply do not have room for a phase detection system. Also AF lenses are much more expensive than MF lenses (yes, P&S lenses more resemble manual focus than AF as we know it)

Until the camera makers solve the above issues there is no reason to expect the SLR market to even decrease let alone fold.

vadim_c wrote in post #8135038
The EVF needs to update instantly for me to use it to shoot sports.

Current LCDs are rated at something 8 ms. I am not sure your eyes are faster than that.

My eyes are faster than that. I can see the LCD update, and that is what matters. Don't forget, it isn't just timing of the shutter release. I'm actually tracking the motion of the athelets through plays and any EVF lag is going to have parts of them out of the frame.

Because of how I meter scenes, I need to be able to evaluate the brightest and darkest tones.

Also, you still have not talked about any solution to the issue of auto focus. You are not going to get any SLR users to give them up for some wunderkind EVF camera that has the same auto focus speed as current P&S cameras.

The ability for the contrast detect AF sensors to look through the mirror which then moves out of the way of the shot is a critical difference between SLR cameras and everything else. This is why we are a decade into the digital P&S era and the focus systems suck just as much today as they did at first.

So you are asserting that the main image sensor cannot be used as a phase detection AF sensor ? Sure it can, there are patents on that subject, I am too lazy to look. Right now I can come up with 2-3 solutions but not on this forum

As for P&S with their few milimiters focus lenths they simply do not have room for a phase detection system. Also AF lenses are much more expensive than MF lenses (yes, P&S lenses more resemble manual focus than AF as we know it)

The number one complaint people have with current P&S cameras is the extremely slow AF systems. You are asserting that there is something better available?

I call upon Occam's Razor. If something better was in existance then someone would sell it and make a killing. Ergo - there is no better system.

BTW - you can patent all kinds of crazy **** that does not work. Having a patent is meaningless. Trust me, I have a few.

I'm not saying cameras like the new Oly do not make sense for a lot of things, but I do assert that they will not replace the SLR for many.

Personally, I see the argument of slr vs P&S a little more simplistically. The big advantage the slr has is a larger sensor and changeable lenses. You can't put a large sensor into a tiny camera because the corresponding lenses would negate the size advantage of the P&S.

On a day where there is plenty of light, a clean background and I can get close to the subject which is not moving quickly - I can produce an image up to a4 and no-one will be able to tell the difference regardless of the camera

Anything outside this ideal situation is where the slr is going to get better photos.

If you made a P&S with a sensor large enough to deal with low light, subject isolation through shallow DOF etc, interchangeable lenses etc.... then you're practically at a dslr anyway.... Most of the major camera companies make SLR style cameras that are half way between anyway.

So are SLR's on the way out ? If they are, the replacement would be so similar what's the point ?

tkbslc wrote in post #8134724
I don't think you understand what I am saying. Even the tiny 50mm 1.8 is about 2 inches long and 2.5" wide. That means that even with an ultrathin 1" inch camera body, you still have at minimum, a 3" thick kit. Good luck fitting that in your pocket.

And if you have to bring a bag, might as well sport a 40D.

Also, you keep referencing "squinting" through a viewfinder. The apparent image seen through a viewfinder is much larger than 2.5"

The Olympus EP1 is not something you could fit into your shirt pocket. You can slap one of the big zooms on the EP1 because it uses the same 4 thirds mount. You will still need a bag to carry it along with any accessories, additional lenses, flash, etc. The Canon SX10 is a point and shoot, but can not be described as a pocket camera.

I have never argued that the proposed Canon camera (ie EP1 equivalent) should replace the SLR. I own and use both a dSLR and a digital P&S. I think most dSLR owners also own and use both. I never considered an SLR and a P & S to be mutually exclusive. For me the proposed LCD camera with interchangeable lenses and a large sensor would fill a void between the two and would sell very well.

As for optical viewfinders on current dslr's, unless you buy the high end professional versions, you are usually limited. The amateur dslr's have very small viewfinders (eg. Sony a330 is about .74 magnification and the Rebel XS is about .81 mag). I still have an old Nikkormat from the late sixties. What a pleasure it is to shoot using that old viewfinder. It is huge and bright. IIRC, the reason they call a 50mm lens "normal" is because the view looks exactly the same as your eye. With the old time cameras, you could shoot with a 50mm and keep both your viewfinder (right) eye and you other eye (left) open at the same time. Almost impossible to do now with the current cameras. But with the current and developing technology, I have embraced shooting with an LCD. I just want these so-called "P & S" to come with a bigger sensor and the ability to interchange the lenses. To me the Olympus EP1 is a great idea and I just hope Canon follows suit.

I do not advocate getting rid of slr's. I just think that if you build a camera without the optical viewfinder, mirror box and pentamirror, etc., the LCD live view can then be vastly improved. The current live view in Canon (need to move mirror or suffer from very slow AF) and Sony (need for secondary tiny sensor which also results in much smaller optical view) is very limited and compromised because of the presence of the mirror box, etc..

JeffreyG wrote in post #8135077

My eyes are faster than that. I can see the LCD update, and that is what matters. Don't forget, it isn't just timing of the shutter release. I'm actually tracking the motion of the athelets through plays and any EVF lag is going to have parts of them out of the frame.

LCD lag is way much smaller than the mirror flip and shutter delay.
About your eyes faster than 8 msec - good luck with persuading someone believe that

Also the frame rate on a DSLR is limited by the mechanical shutter. On a camera with an electronic viewfinder it is limited by the speed of reading information from the sensor. The first one hardly can be improved any further. The second one can get faster literally thousands of times.

Because of how I meter scenes, I need to be able to evaluate the brightest and darkest tones.

Again the LCD will let you to evaluate much more accurately the brightest and darkest tones. A human eye in not capable telling that this part is 2.5 stops darker than that one no matter how experienced the person is.

The number one complaint people have with current P&S cameras is the extremely slow AF systems. You are asserting that there is something better available?

Sure, the phase detection AF, which is difficult to fit in P&S because ... see the previous post.

I'm not saying cameras like the new Oly do not make sense for a lot of things, but I do assert that they will not replace the SLR for many.

Ok we will return here in a couple of years.

toxic wrote in post #8134814
The SLR camera will exist for a long time. Nothing in the near future will be able to replace an optical viewfinder - Live View is a tool for tripod work and for journalists who have to shoot over their head. Additionally, it's impossible to hold a camera steadily while using an LCD screen (and without bracing against something).
.

Seen cameras with electronic viewfiinders ?

vadim_c wrote in post #8135371
Seen cameras with electronic viewfiinders ?

Shoot anything fast?

Also, my little Fuji P&S goes through batteries like nobody's business. Why? The LCD. And you know, that's not even a fast camera. I already have to carry a lot of batteries around. I wouldn't want to carry even more. The less electronic stuff my camera has to do, the longer my batteries last. That's why you see old film cameras that don't even need a battery but you'll never find a battery-less digital camera (unless it's an obscure solar powered one).

And yeah, film is expensive and inconvenient. Those are pretty much the only reasons I don't use it instead.

So the P&S may replace the SLR someday, but today is not that day. I doubt that would even happen, since people are moving in polar opposite directions - smartphones with for convenience and digital SLRs for quality. The former allows them to play MP3s, make calls, text, email, and surf the web all with a single device that fits in a pocket while the latter is inconvenient but offers up very little compromise when IQ and speed are priority.

If anything, it may be the P&S and bridge formats, and not the SLR format, that are on the way out.

cdifoto wrote in post #8135374
Shoot anything fast?

Also, my little Fuji P&S goes through batteries like nobody's business. Why? The LCD. And you know, that's not even a fast camera. I already have to carry a lot of batteries around. I wouldn't want to carry even more. The less electronic stuff my camera has to do, the longer my batteries last. That's why you see old film cameras that don't even need a battery but you'll never find a battery-less digital camera (unless it's an obscure solar powered one).

And yeah, film is expensive and inconvenient. Those are pretty much the only reasons I don't use it instead.

So the P&S may replace the SLR someday, but today is not that day. I doubt that would even happen, since people are moving in polar opposite directions - smartphones with for convenience and digital SLRs for quality. The former allows them to play MP3s, make calls, text, email, and surf the web all with a single device that fits in a pocket while the latter is inconvenient but offers up very little compromise when IQ and speed are priority.

If anything, it may be the P&S and bridge formats, and not the SLR format, that are on the way out.

Bingo. Sports shooters will not use EVFs for that reason alone. A modern LCD has a lag time of about 8 ms, and that's for an expensive high end TFT. The stuff you see in cameras is cheap and usually has a response time of around 16-20 ms.

In any form of sports even 8 ms is the difference between the subject being in the frame or being out of the frame, or catching that perfect slam dunk with the player's hands on the basketball's rim - something which really cannot be done even with a 10 FPS spray and pray. It just takes tons of practice and precise timing.

[QUOTE=cdifoto;8135374​]Shoot anything fast?quote]

High speed continuous shooting is not important to me. I have no aspirations (or money or ability) to have my photos published in Sports Illustrated. But if high fps is important to you, IMO, the future may well be eliminating the SLR in order to acheive higher fps. The mirror flip has got to be the eventual rate limiting step in shooting speed. Get rid of the mirror and how fast can the fps get? 30 fps? 60 fps? All you need is faster processing speed and more memory to maintain the image quality and with the current trend in tech advances, both are possible. (I guess you could call it video)

There are ergonomical advantages with using an LCD view screen. I am sure more than one SLR photographer has missed a shot of something spectactular happening outside of the frame because they were so focused on just the zoomed-in image in his optical viewfinder. Using an LCD, you are able to see all of your surroundings while you are shooting (helps to avoid stepping into an open manhole while you are shooting in the street) and you can quickly swing your camera towards a new photo opportunity.

funpig wrote in post #8135556

cdifoto wrote in post #8135374
Shoot anything fast?

High speed continuous shooting is not important to me. I have no aspirations (or money or ability) to have my photos published in Sports Illustrated. But if high fps is important to you, IMO, the future may well be eliminating the SLR in order to acheive higher fps. The mirror flip has got to be the eventual rate limiting step in shooting speed. Get rid of the mirror and how fast can the fps get? 30 fps? 60 fps? All you need is faster processing speed and more memory to maintain the image quality and with the current trend in tech advances, both are possible. (I guess you could call it video)

There are ergonomical advantages with using an LCD view screen. I am sure more than one SLR photographer has missed a shot of something spectactular happening outside of the frame because they were so focused on just the zoomed-in image in his optical viewfinder. Using an LCD, you are able to see all of your surroundings while you are shooting (helps to avoid stepping into an open manhole while you are shooting in the street) and you can quickly swing your camera towards a new photo opportunity.

It's not about frames per second. Electronic Viewfinders being adequate for certain photographers does not mean that we can abandon the optical viewfinder altogether. Many of us can live with missing shots outside of our viewfinder because we were focused on the image at the end of our lens but few of us can live with missing a shot because the electronic viewfinder didn't refresh quickly enough to show us what was happening at the end of our lens!

cdifoto wrote in post #8135582
It's not about frames per second.

I agree. But for more and more photographers, it is just blasting away (cheap available digital memory, no need to process) and getting one or two really great (or publishable) shots out of the hundreds or thousands of shots you can now take at any one event. You can read every third or fourth thread on this forum about how 3 fps is just not fast enough.

And the ironic thing about the slr is that at the moment of truth when the image is recorded, the viewfinder blacks out (this was always the complaint of the old rangefinder users).

funpig wrote in post #8135613
I agree. But for more and more photographers, it is just blasting away (cheap available digital memory, no need to process) and getting one or two really great (or publishable) shots out of the hundreds or thousands of shots you can now take at any one event. You can read every third or fourth thread on this forum about how 3 fps is just not fast enough.

That has nothing to do with this discussion.

funpig wrote in post #8135613
I agree. But for more and more photographers, it is just blasting away (cheap available digital memory, no need to process) and getting one or two really great (or publishable) shots out of the hundreds or thousands of shots you can now take at any one event. You can read every third or fourth thread on this forum about how 3 fps is just not fast enough.

And the ironic thing about the slr is that at the moment of truth when the image is recorded, the viewfinder blacks out (this was always the complaint of the old rangefinder users).

This post is somewhat agreeing with you and somewhat disagreeing with you, based on several other posts that I think anyone can find if they look closely enough.

I shoot NBA. My camera is always in single frame drive. 3 FPS is too much especially considering the strobes refresh about once a second.

Learn to time your shots and you'll get better shots, and due to that you'll realize that the lag of an EVF is hardly tolerable. Here's the thing - even though there's shutter lag with an optical viewfinder, I can still guess where the subject will be and continue tracking accordingly while the shutter goes off, and I am not one millisecond behind the game while tracking. With an EVF I'm behind by god knows how bad the latency of processing + displaying the images is, it all probably adds up to about 30 milliseconds if not more.

Disclaimer: I'm a computer engineer and I have worked with embedded systems in the past. I don't anymore, but that's irrelevant other than the fact that I don't know the current state of devices. However, I can tell you that it's nowhere near possible to display something in a fashion fast enough to be indescernible at the current point in time. Maybe 5 or 10 years from now, but now, you've gotta be kidding me.

8.5 FPS on my mark II? I use that just to show off or occasionally while shooting birds in flight just to see what kind of wing shapes I can get. In my opinion it's more of a gimmick. My camera is in single frame drive 99% of the time.

Next subject: contrast detection (on the sensor) vs phase detection (dedicated AF chip)

Contrast detection has proven to be very slow. It still is, even in the fastest systems, and on top of that it doesn't exactly run in a continuous mode fast enough to track a basketball player, and that's almost as slow as you'll get in professional sports. There's a reason nobody shoots high speed action with anything that does contrast detection for autofocus - it simply cannot keep up. That's where our pellicle section of our mirror that lets light down into the AF assembly comes into play. Being able to accurately track an object moving at 20+ MPH straight towards you is actually pretty important when you're shooting action.

Again, as has been mentioned, patents mean nothing. I've seen so many ridiculous patents get granted that it's not even funny. If the technology is not there it's not there, and guess what? It's not there.