Whose Camera Will I Buy in 2018?

June 12, 2013 1:24 PM

I really think there’s an excellent chance that the camera brand I buy in 2018 may be a brand that doesn’t make cameras today.
posted by The Girl Who Ate Boston (74 comments total)

I don't know about anyone else, but for stills I don't see any reason anyone who's bought a camera in the last several years will need a new one for ages to come...and for video the answer is definitely "Blackmagic" for this geek. The article is very much on point, it reminds me of that "state of the videogame console industry" slide deck that went around a couple years ago (before OUYA happened).
posted by trackofalljades at 1:33 PM on June 12, 2013

I'm not a professional (or amateur) photographer so I can't think of a reason why I'd ever buy a camera again in my entire life. My phone will be fine.
posted by Justinian at 1:44 PM on June 12, 2013 [6 favorites]

I've never used their business, but follow Lens Rentals' blog closely because of posts like this.
posted by thecjm at 1:47 PM on June 12, 2013

are Kodak and Polaroid gone? I still see Kodak digital cameras, with their annoying proprietary batteries. (Though I suppose everyone is going for an internal battery these days. I blame apple.)
posted by jb at 1:47 PM on June 12, 2013

I'm not a professional (or amateur) photographer so I can't think of a reason why I'd ever buy a camera again in my entire life. My phone will be fine.

The Future of the iPhone: Will Apple Let You Shoot RAW?
posted by phaedon at 1:48 PM on June 12, 2013

SLR bodies are fairly generic at this point. I'd be interested in hearing in detail about some innovations with lenses: they've been very good, but very expensive for decades and it'd be interesting if someone could find a way to chip away at the latter without losing the former.
posted by selfnoise at 1:48 PM on June 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

The top 3 cameras on Flickr are different models of iPhone.
posted by w0mbat at 1:49 PM on June 12, 2013

I have to say even as an avid hobbyist photographer, the times I take out my full body SLR to shoot are getting increasingly rare. I'm getting very good at shooting decent photos on an iPhone (that you can even print) and I really love traveling without a huge camera bag.

Ten years ago, I started a daily photo blog that died several years later, but I look back on that vs. now and can't believe how much has changed. In 2003, I used a then cutting-edge SLR that shot 6megapixel photos, which I downloaded by hand and tweaked in Photoshop. Then I would FTP the photo to my server and then write a post referencing the image.

I improved the workflow to the point today where I take a photo, crop, edit, and filter all on my phone, then send off to Flickr where I add one little tag to it and it'll get added to my photo blog.
posted by mathowie at 1:51 PM on June 12, 2013 [4 favorites]

Our real camera isn't a DSLR, but is a stabilized ultra-zoom. On the advice of friends she took her new smartphone with the allegedly very good camera to the zoo last week, and came back with the verdict that the phone camera is crap. It's very noticeably insensitive to light, blurry, and has poor color definition compared to the much older real camera. In the end sensors are nice, but there's no substitute for glass to focus the image, and the lens you can fit in a cell phone is never going to match up against what you can put in even the cheapest dedicated camera if only because a thicker body is acceptable.
posted by localroger at 1:51 PM on June 12, 2013 [5 favorites]

There is a world of difference between "taking" pictures and "making" pictures. Day-to-day, I take shots with my iPhone. But for a trip to the zoo, or Mardi Gras Parade, or birthday party, you need a DSLR to make good pictures.

(Full disclosure: I have about a half-dozen point-and-shoots for those in-between times)
posted by ColdChef at 1:56 PM on June 12, 2013 [3 favorites]

I was in to photography when I was growing up -- I bought a camera, lenses, and a complete darkroom for a song from garage sales, and had a blast. But now I just have a $100 point-and-shoot. I would love to have a real camera again so I could mess around with lenses and exposure and manual focus and all that fun stuff, but I just can't justify spending $600 or more on what amounts to a toy. There isn't a lot in the marketplace at prices a non-super-involved hobbyist can afford.
posted by miyabo at 1:57 PM on June 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

Also: I miss mathowie's daily photo blog. It was a beautiful design and he made great shots.
posted by ColdChef at 1:57 PM on June 12, 2013 [2 favorites]

Yeah, phone cameras are vastly better than they used to be but there's still quite a gulf in image quality. Particularly when you want a depth of field less than infinity. Plus using a DSLR is just inherently pleasurable... it's a nice tool.
posted by selfnoise at 1:59 PM on June 12, 2013 [2 favorites]

I love my DSLR to death, but a lot of that is the fact that I love twisting the lens to zoom and focus. I think the only real advantage that my DSLR has over something like the Canon G15 is the through-the-lens optical viewfinder, which I still think is the best way to do manual focus. But I think most hobbyists are sick of paying a lot of money for lenses, hence the popularity of Tamron and Sigma, and I wonder where the lens market will be in a decade.
posted by Elementary Penguin at 1:59 PM on June 12, 2013 [2 favorites]

I miss my old Fuji Disc 50. Luckily my iPad2 takes similar quality photos.
posted by Kabanos at 2:00 PM on June 12, 2013 [2 favorites]

I feel like the technological (and social) evolution of cameras is following that of computers really closely. Used to be huge and expensive, now it's tiny and you carry it everywhere in your pocket. Still, your pocket camera isn't as good as your desk camera or even your laptop camera (in this analogy the actual camera in your laptop doesn't count).
posted by Phredward at 2:01 PM on June 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

I've often considered the changes that have come along in the world of cameras since I got involved in photography just a few years ago, and as much as I'd love the idea of something new revolutionizing cameras even further, I suspect that glass is always going to be glass, so whatever they do with the camera bodies, be it making them smaller, shutterless, phones, etc, at the end of the day, a good lens is going to make the difference between a good photo and a great photo.

The physics of depth of field and light coming into the camera is certainly something that could be cleverly manipulated (I'm thinking about lens arrays here), but I think that for pros, the average camera is going to look pretty much like it does now, just with a lot more features.

And it'll probably still be made by Canon or Nikon.
posted by quin at 2:02 PM on June 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

I have a Nikon but I haven't used it since last year. These days I take all my pictures using my HTC phone. At the rate that phone cameras are improving, by 2018 I can't see anyone except a pro (or a snob) needing anything better.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 2:02 PM on June 12, 2013

I took my first international vacation, and left 90% of my camera gear at home. I ended up walking around with a Rebel body and two kit lenses, and I barely touched the telephoto lens. I've got different bodies, lenses, flashes, battery grips, the whole nine yards. But it weighs a ton and end in the end I opted to go for as light a camera bag as possible. I love taking low-light photography but ended up leaving the 1.4 and 2.8 lenses behind. They just weigh too much. I ended up taking a lot of Instagram shots and only got the SLR out when the little sensor and lens on my phone wasn't up to the task.

For the future of photography, I'm looking forward to something like this.
posted by thecjm at 2:08 PM on June 12, 2013

If you look at what's happened to video cameras in the last few years, it's a good bet the same thing will happen with all cameras -- basically the middle of the consumer market has dropped out. There are high end cameras (dedicated and dSLRs with emphasis on good video like the Canons and the Panasonic Lumix GH series), and the ultra-cheap not-afraid-to-drop-it-in-a-river sport cameras. Everything in between is disappearing because your phone or still camera will do just fine. As the distinction between still and video camera disappears and the phone gets pretty damn good at both, I expect a serious winnowing of the middle of the market of all cameras.
posted by George_Spiggott at 2:09 PM on June 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

Camera phones and DSLRs - those are pretty much the main camera markets that will be available in the future according to some report I skipped reading the other day*. You read the shoddy summary here first, folks!

* I think. At the very least I'm pretty sure I'm not making this up.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 2:10 PM on June 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

I've been progressively stepping down my dSLR body over the past few years as Canon has introduced smaller ones with better quality. The SL1 is a real revolution. It's ridiculously small, but still comfortable to use, and the quality goes head to head with their top of the line crop sensor body. Sure, you lose some of the convenience features, but I'm hard pressed to say what the tradeoff is for a walkaround camera.
posted by Caviar at 2:14 PM on June 12, 2013

"I was in to photography when I was growing up -- I bought a camera, lenses, and a complete darkroom for a song from garage sales, and had a blast. But now I just have a $100 point-and-shoot. I would love to have a real camera again so I could mess around with lenses and exposure and manual focus and all that fun stuff, but I just can't justify spending $600 or more on what amounts to a toy. There isn't a lot in the marketplace at prices a non-super-involved hobbyist can afford."

I bought my Minolta XG-M for $50 and it included a fantastic 50mm lens. I pick up other lenses from time to time, usually for about $20 to $50 each. The XG-M has a ribbon shutter, and I've had them jam before, but when that happens, I buy a new body for $20-50 and keep rolling on.

I occasionally covet new DSLRs, but for the most part, the ol' Da Shiv Pentax K10 he gave me a couple years ago works great. I might end up investing in some more lenses (or at least getting some of mine repaired), but in terms of printable photos, it does just fine.

I will say that my phone (a Samsung Galaxy) has a solid camera on there, and it's good for some stuff, but I don't always want a wide-angle camera with a fairly slow exposure, and I'd rather use the camera phone for what it's good at, rather than try to force it to be all things to me.

(Oh, and over the last couple years, I've actually gotten enough photo gigs — mostly from friends on Facebook who see me constantly posting — that I've been able to pay for most of my photo hardware out of that. But I'm nowhere near a pro or anything, which often leads to kind of awkward expectation-setting conversations with commissions, like, "You know that the stuff you like, I mostly shot on a Holga that's notoriously soft and unreliable, right? It's not just an instagram filter…")
posted by klangklangston at 2:20 PM on June 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

I miss my old Fuji Disc 50. Luckily my iPad2 takes similar quality photos.

Oh, snap!
posted by Sys Rq at 2:22 PM on June 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

I will say that tablets are pretty much the most obnoxious way to take a public photo, what with blocking the view of everyone around you.
posted by klangklangston at 2:24 PM on June 12, 2013 [8 favorites]

I'd love to be able to take better pictures than my iPhone, but it seems like an improved iPhone camera is going to come my way sooner than a truly amazing (yet affordable) compact. Imagine a Sony RX1 but $500 instead of $2700
posted by cell divide at 2:26 PM on June 12, 2013

Let’s face it, how many of you know whether they used a Zeiss or Leica Operating Microscope when you had surgery?

I know, and I can assure you there is a lot of money spent on medical imaging equipment. Endoscopes even more than operating microscopes. I imagine there are other industries that use a lot of specialized imaging equipment as well and I wonder how that impacts the financial health of these companies.
posted by TedW at 2:27 PM on June 12, 2013

its hard to say, mobile phones are good for quiet snapshots but people defer to a big camera for some reason and possibly always will.

big cameras for the big stuff and wee cameras for the wee stuff.

i love the gf3/gf2 range and also the nikon v1 is a cracker, the best wee one for stills is the sigma merril dp2 ....but its very very finicky, as in very very, but the quality is massive.

did i mention the v1 ? its tiny and does slo mo and 60i hd to boot, brilliant, also shoots 30 fps, it also went way down in price.

i think the first camera company to go open source wins.
posted by sgt.serenity at 2:30 PM on June 12, 2013

Very soon all possible photos will already exist on flickr. So then instead of taking a picture, you'll just put your phone to your head and remember what you saw and your phone will interpret your brainwaves and find a match on flickr.
posted by George_Spiggott at 2:40 PM on June 12, 2013 [8 favorites]

The best camera is the one that you have with you. Unless you only have an iPad.
posted by 2bucksplus at 2:44 PM on June 12, 2013 [4 favorites]

At the rate that phone cameras are improving, by 2018 I can't see anyone except a pro (or a snob) needing anything better.

Your "snob" remark is either mean or naive. I'm neither a pro nor a snob; I'm an enthusiastic amateur. My camera isn't the fancie$t but I buy the best quality equipment I can realistically afford. Even to a hobbyist like me it's clear that for creating sharp high-quality prints that are large enough to frame and hang on my wall, it's not just about megapixels - you need a better (and as best I can tell from what I've read, physically larger) lens than the teeny ones in phones.

I'm with the person upthread in hoping that lens technology gets cheaper, but there are good reasons that camera lenses cost so much - and why the one in your phone isn't adding hundreds of dollars to its price.
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:45 PM on June 12, 2013 [4 favorites]

Being able to point and shoot a camera at something doesn't make you a photographer. You have to know how to compose a shot.

If nothing else, my DSLR forces me to compose pictures, not just take them.

I hope, for this reason alone, that the cameras in cell phones get worse in quality, not better.

There are some truly shitty pictures out there, almost all of them due to the prevalence of the idea that a cell phone shot is "good enough". No, I don't think that it is good enough, and I wish a pox on my mother's crappy little phone for ruining at least two birthday celebrations.

I also am in total awe of the professional photographers out there. I hope, as the industry matures, that they aren't left behind in the long run toward mediocrity that our photo albums are doomed to be fated to.
posted by disclaimer at 2:48 PM on June 12, 2013

I predict the cutting-edge hipsters of 2018 will precipitate an ironic shift back to the camera obscura, and cameras will be either entirely handmade from wood or crafted from repurposed consumer objects. The larger the camera, the cooler; the ne plus ultra of camera obscuræ will be ones built out of old VW Microbuses that people will drive around (powered, of course, by a fixed-gear transmission).
posted by Eideteker at 2:49 PM on June 12, 2013 [2 favorites]

Let’s face it, how many of you know whether they used a Zeiss or Leica Operating Microscope when you had surgery?

Well, me, for one.

The next camera I buy will probably be from the same old names as the cameras I always bought. Right now I really need a high end Canon DSLR, but if I had an infinite amount of money to blow, I'd buy a new Hasselblad H5D. And I have owned both of those brands, as far back as the 1970s. The next camera brand I buy is likely to be the same brand as the very first camera I owned.

If, as this article suggests, you told a pro photographer in 1975 that the camera he'd buy in 2013 would be from a brand he never heard of, you'd be totally wrong. That is unlikely to change in the next 5 years.
posted by charlie don't surf at 2:50 PM on June 12, 2013

Oh and: I'm an amateur archivist. My DSLR is used more for taking pictures of documents and photos that can't/should not be scanned, and the quality of these archive shots is so far beyond what even the best scanners can do, that I'm seriously considering not scanning anything ever again.

You just can't get where I need to be ith a point and shoot or a cell phone.
posted by disclaimer at 2:55 PM on June 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

Hey! That's my Walkman!
posted by Thorzdad at 2:55 PM on June 12, 2013

I have a m43 camera that I love and use when I need wide angle, zoom, low light, or shallow DOF. But otherwise yeah, my modern smartphone covers 80% of my photography.
posted by MillMan at 3:01 PM on June 12, 2013

I will say that tablets are pretty much the most obnoxious way to take a public photo, what with blocking the view of everyone around you.

Particularly if it's a Nexus 7, which only has a front-facing camera. So you're standing in some pretty weird positions to get the shot and see what you're doing without being in it.
posted by George_Spiggott at 3:09 PM on June 12, 2013

"I predict the cutting-edge hipsters of 2018 will precipitate an ironic shift back to the camera obscura, and cameras will be either entirely handmade from wood or crafted from repurposed consumer objects."

One of the most fun projects I've ever worked on was converting an old concessions/candy shed at a camp into a pinhole camera. Unfortunately, it never quite worked right (never got totally light tight, and it got to over 120 degrees inside, so it was kinda impossible to work in with kids), but it was still a great challenge.
posted by klangklangston at 3:16 PM on June 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

I'm a crap photographer, but for most of my crap photos I most often use a 100mm macro lens (subject sizes of 50mm or less) or a 300mm telephoto lens on an APS-C sensor camera. Cellphone and tablet cameras remain a pretty poor substitute for these sorts of uses, and I don't see that changing in 5 years. On the other hand, I seldom print so 15 megapixels or whatever my camera does is overkill. I can see being lured back to a lightweight ultrazoom with an electronic viewfinder as long as the sensor and glass are "good enough". I'll probably be a brand I've heard of, though.
posted by jepler at 3:30 PM on June 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

Low light. Once my phone can take decent low-light photos, my point-and-shoot goes in the bin. There is obviously greater need for pros and hobbyists to have RAW gear and all that, but if I can get decent 5MB or whatever snapshots photos in dim light, I'm set. I'm due for a new (android) phone in a couple years, and when I choose it, that will be based on the camera on board.
posted by maxwelton at 3:31 PM on June 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

I'm was a full-time professional for 20 years, and now teach photography.

I've made a lot of good photos with my iPhone. But that's because I know it's limitations, of which there are TONS. Still, you can shoot well with it.
The same for Point and Shoots. I love my Panasonic LX-5 when I'm on a bike trip.

But if I want to be in control, or shoot something that matters. If I need to be aware of depth of field, or shoot with a very long or very wide lens, there is no beating an SLR.

I'm sure the 2 1/4 or 4x5 folks will say the same about their equipment.

There's just too much that phones can't do, and I don't think 5 years is going to change that. They'll be better, and cool, but not enough.
posted by cccorlew at 3:35 PM on June 12, 2013 [7 favorites]

Oh, and what maxwelton said. Low light is a deal breaker right now.
posted by cccorlew at 3:36 PM on June 12, 2013

So you're standing in some pretty weird positions to get the shot and see what you're doing without being in it.

LOL I remember taking pics at a crowded event, on a short platform with the press photographers, and someone handed me their camera and asked me to take a pic for them. It was a cheap old Kodak twin lens reflex, 120 format square film. Cool, I used a Rolleiflex before, so I knew just what to do, there's an old trick just for this circumstance. It's crowded and I couldn't use it at waist level, looking down into the viewfinder from the top, I would have just got a pic of the back of the crowd. So I held the TLR upside down, up in the air above my head, and looked up into the viewfinder. I got a great angle and wished I could get that high an angle with my SLR. I handed him back the TLR and he had a fit. He complained that I took the photo upside down and wasted his film. I told him, well, when you get the print, rotate the print 180 degrees. Nobody will ever know it's upside down.
posted by charlie don't surf at 3:46 PM on June 12, 2013 [14 favorites]

If something like the Lytro could be produced cheaply and generate decent resolution images i'd be all over it.

(Did I just say the future of still photography is in 3D?)
posted by onya at 3:53 PM on June 12, 2013

Phones are decent cameras for many things, but there are still plenty of edge cases where something better is needed, and I happen to shoot a lot of those edge cases. Though I agree to a degree that it's the photographer, not their equipment, that makes a shot, the fact is there are some shots you're never getting with a current phone—zoomed-in sports or action shots, for example, or low-light shots that aren't blurry as shit.

Could you get those shots with a phone camera in five years? Maybe! Technology does crazy things sometimes. The HTC One's camera has the best low-light photos I've seen on a phone. But even if phones solve the image quality conundrum, there's the interface to consider—about the only thing touchscreen interfaces do better than actual dials and buttons is picking autofocus points. Everything else feels clunkier and slower than the physical equivalent.
posted by chrominance at 4:03 PM on June 12, 2013

Plus re-learning how to point your 500mm-eqivalent phone at just the right spot, an action which seems quite natural with an SLR or ultrazoom since you work by holding the thing up to your face and then moving your face and hands together (possibly looking through your other eye for a coarse idea of whether you're in the right direction or not). How do you do that on a touchscreen camera that is designed to be held at arms length?

I also have not learned to push a touchscreen shutter button with as little camera motion as I have on a traditional camera.
posted by jepler at 4:28 PM on June 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

"I also have not learned to push a touchscreen shutter button with as little camera motion as I have on a traditional camera."

On an iPhone use the volume up button, or better yet, use the volume up button on your headphones.
posted by cccorlew at 4:46 PM on June 12, 2013 [11 favorites]

use the volume up button on your headphones.

!!!!! Whoa!
posted by ColdChef at 4:51 PM on June 12, 2013 [8 favorites]

miyabo I would love to have a real camera again so I could mess around with lenses and exposure and manual focus and all that fun stuff, but I just can't justify spending $600 or more on what amounts to a toy.

On the flip side, there's fun to be had when your $100 point-and-shoot camera contains a computer that can be reprogrammed.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 4:59 PM on June 12, 2013 [4 favorites]

On an iPhone use the volume up button, or better yet, use the volume up button on your headphones.

You can also fire a shot by pressing and holding the on-screen shutter release and letting go — the photo will be taken when you release, which I find can greatly reduce camera motion.
posted by wemayfreeze at 5:28 PM on June 12, 2013

On the flip side, there's fun to be had when your $100 point-and-shoot camera contains a computer that can be reprogrammed.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 7:59 PM on June 12 [+] [!]

Ha! I 'hacked' a canon power shot with this a few years ago. Amazing what it could do, and equally amazing was my utter incompetence at using it. I should try that again, now that I actually know what things like "shutter speed" mean.
posted by disclaimer at 5:31 PM on June 12, 2013

use the volume up button on your headphones.

Or send it a text message containing just the word "click".
posted by George_Spiggott at 5:49 PM on June 12, 2013

Oh, all right, that was a lie.
posted by George_Spiggott at 6:09 PM on June 12, 2013 [3 favorites]

Or send it a text message containing just the word "click".

This would actually be a great feature especially if you could have it "do" something with the picture, like upload it to a server or make it available to another connected phone or something. Like a remote triggerable webcam
posted by RustyBrooks at 6:57 PM on June 12, 2013

> Like a remote triggerable webcam

<nsa_spook701> aren't they adorable when they think we can't see them?
<nsa_spook290> yes, totes adorbs
posted by scruss at 7:10 PM on June 12, 2013 [2 favorites]

volume up button on your headphones.

Mind. Blown.
posted by smidgen at 8:19 PM on June 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

There's plenty of conversation potential in comparing DSLRs to iPhones, but I think this FPP gets at something more interesting. Somebody above mentioned the Sony RX1, which is a revolutionary camera in terms of quality versus size. Just a few years ago nobody would have predicted that Sony would be the solid #3 player in cameras; but last year Sony overturned the point-and-shoot market with the RX100, potentially opened a can of tasty worms with the RX1, and gained significant ground in the DSLR market.

Whether you'll be shooting with a dedicated camera or a mobile communication device in 2018 is one question. Who will manufacture those devices is somewhat subtler. It's interesting to speculate as the author does, "in a few years I’ll at least be considering a brand that doesn’t even exist today."
posted by cribcage at 9:47 PM on June 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

I've been waiting for the "big sensor in small body" thing to really catch on before I buy another DSLR. I know there are many more factors driving this than what actually makes a functional, useful camera, but we have the nth generation big-body SLRs, then the retro RF style Fuji and Ricohs, and then the P&S with or without interchangeable lenses, and that's kind of it.

The tricky thing is the people who are driving real innovation in the way humans use cameras are the iPhone people, and the Lytro people, and the GoPro people, et al. And the people driving the real innovation in the way cameras operate are for the most part continuing to make the same objects as before, with the exception of video on the DSLR platform and the things that enables like live preview.

We're already pretty good at making lenses and controlling them, and making images out of that light. We're not so good at continuing to evolve the technology we have to fit the way people's needs and wants for imaging technology have shifted over time.

That's a big reason why Polaroid isn't a big part of our life, but Instagram is. Similar void, different execution.
posted by a halcyon day at 9:55 PM on June 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

when you want a depth of field less than infinity

Bingo.

That and low light is why big sensors (or film) and fast, fast lenses will always have a place. When my phone can shoot at f/2 or f/1.4, then I'll think about it. And, if one of these putative "brands that doesn't make cameras today" is working on a phone-cam with usable 12,800 ISO (or, hell, 128,000), let me know.

If someone made a camera today with modern electronics but a knob on the lens for focus and F stop that I could afford, and a range of fast, wide lenses, for a price that a working stiff can afford, I'd give up my dad's old ten-pound Nikon F. Until then, I'm good.
posted by Fnarf at 10:43 PM on June 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

The idea of "OMG HOT NEW TECH" stuff appeals to non-artists who enjoy comparing specs of camera bodies, as if that and not the lens is what takes the pictures.

Real camera companies like Canon and Nikon will continue to make real cameras.

In motion, the "hot new tech" of Red will probably stick around, but Reds are being replaced by Alexas for people who are serious about duplicating the good things about film on digital.
posted by drjimmy11 at 11:15 PM on June 12, 2013

reason why Polaroid isn't a big part of our life

Also, prosaic reasons like the cost of chemicals and the cost of highly trained people to assemble them into film sheets, as opposed to a couple of programmers and a server farm. Polaroid would still be around if it cost ten cents a print.
posted by Fnarf at 11:29 PM on June 12, 2013

Hmm. I'm confused that no one is acknowledging that in x years "photography" could very well be about some non-lens oriented capture of whatever photons are bouncing around at a particular time. Not this necessarily, but it's on its way? Seems to me it's about grabbing as many photons as you can which you can describe precisely, then the rest is post-processing.

This said as someone who had a darkroom in a closet in 1965 and loves the smell of acetic acid.
posted by skyscraper at 11:48 PM on June 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

To all those of you declaring DSLRs dead, to those stating you haven't used your kit in years, to those stating your phone camera is "good enough" - MeMail me, I'll give you my address, and you can send me your now-unwanted, dust-covered lenses. Canon only, sorry, but I do have a friend who shoots Nikon and she may be willing to accept hand-me-downs too.

I like my phone. It shoots pretty decent shots in daylight or well-lit rooms. But when I really want to get a good photo, I grab my 7D (pleasingly heavy!) and shoot away.

I'm serious about the lenses though, people. If you really don't use it, I blew all my camera-buying cash upgrading from an XTi to the 7D, and would dearly love to have a lens other than the standard kit and non-stabilized zoom that came with the former.

Let’s face it, how many of you know whether they used a Zeiss or Leica Operating Microscope when you had surgery?

No clue. But I made it through grad school on an old Leica, have only purchased microscopes from Zeiss since then, and every Nikon scope I have ever used was obnoxious. Olympus, meh. Zeiss is still the only system I have used that made everything from the body, lenses, and camera down to the software that did the capture and analysis. Olympus and Nikon make great lenses but the hardware and/or software they used on microscopy systems was a mess last time I encountered it.
posted by caution live frogs at 5:25 AM on June 13, 2013 [5 favorites]

You can send me any Nikon glass you have, too, instead of caution live frogs' friend, who probably isn't even a MeFite!
posted by Elementary Penguin at 5:44 AM on June 13, 2013

I bought a DSLR last year, and I find it's made me a little bit scared of photography.

My old camera was a Canon p+s, 7MP, 1cm macro. It went with me everywhere, it fitted in my bag, it was robust enough that it survived the times I dropped it, and it became a friend. I understood how to work with it, the macro was such a great leap forward from my first digital camera that I found I was able to take the kind of pictures I wanted to take, and as my job at the time involved working shifts, if I had no plans for a weekday off I could head out to the woods or into town and have fun with it, or at least just list things on eBay with decent shots. I knew how to take TTV viewfinder photos with it, because I knew where I was with the focus when it came to building a filter, and I loved taking photos that way.

The DSLR is a lovely camera, but it feels a bit like riding a horse - I don't know how to control it, and I know where I want to go with it but I don't always get there. I'm dyspraxic so I struggle with understanding the settings, the white balance seems a lot more complicated, and although I can get beautiful shots with my nifty fifty and my macro lens and I'm learning to manipulate focus and shutter speed, the process of carrying around and changing lenses makes things feel less spontaneous. The camera does not fit in my handbag, so I find myself often seeing things I like the look of but not being able to photograph them as I'm on my way to work or to the shops and not specifically out for photography. I have a Diana, which in theory is designed for snapshots and such, but digital feels natural to me - although I have had a film camera since I was sixteen (and had to plead for it as my dad saw the cost of film and processing as 'throwing good money after bad') I learned a lot more when I switched to digital, purely because I did not have to keep in mind the economics of whether an image was worth the frame on the roll. (I eventually sold my Holga as it was this, rather than the crazy cost of processing the film here, that caused me to leave it at home.)

The solution might be to dust off the 710 and pop it in my bag, saving the Proper Camera for specific things, but the frustration I feel and the fact I don't seem to be, well, bonding with it makes me sad.
posted by mippy at 7:47 AM on June 13, 2013

Also, when I had a phone with a decent camera, I mainly used it for taking pictures of things in shops or newspapers as I inevitably forget to carry a pen and paper with me to write stuff down.
posted by mippy at 7:49 AM on June 13, 2013

It is a pretty exciting time in the evolution of digital imaging. Not that long ago it was not ready for prime time with pretty much the sole advantage over film being convenience, but now everything has changed and is continuing to change rapidly. The new dslr can essentially see in the dark, the image quality is fantastic and getting better, cell phones now almost all come with acceptable snapshot cameras and mirrorless cameras with image quality rivaling large dslrs are coming out at a rapid pace. I took a Fuji X100 on a vacation and came away with fantastic photos, as good or better than what I could have gotten from my dslr, and the camera fits into my pocket. It has certain limitations, but also advantages other than size. Like the author, I am excited to see what the next few years will bring. In the meantime the biggest frustration is that like computers of the last decade or so the latest and greatest are obsolete nearly as soon as you take them out of the box. Exciting times.
posted by caddis at 9:25 AM on June 13, 2013

A phone or a P&S is fine for lots of stuff, but I am a bit of an outlier in that 99% of the time I'm doing wildlife/macro/underwater photography. I imagine that I will be using a DSLR for quite some time. Even something like micro 4/3, from what little I've played with them, don't seem to have enough buttons and stuff to control what you need to control without looking at the camera instead of what you are shooting. Also, if I don't have my real camera, or even the appropriate lens, when I see something I don't think I would care if I did have a P&S on me, because I would be, like, meh, what's the point of even taking a picture if it isn't going to be good.

Regarding the article, it was less controversial than I was anticipating from the headline. It seems like the author was actually saying that in five years things will be pretty similar, but there may be one or two new entrants building systems that are comparable to Canon/Nikon.
posted by snofoam at 9:50 AM on June 13, 2013

I'm confused that no one is acknowledging that in x years "photography" could very well be about some non-lens oriented capture of whatever photons are bouncing around at a particular time.

This idea has been around a long time. I remember attending a seminar with Robert Heinecken back in the mid 70s. He was known for his photograms of magazine pages, contact printed so both sides were superimposed. I wish I could find my favorite print, he made a contact print of bacon and eggs, and a glass of orange juice. It turned out with a black background but everything else was vivid color, yellow yolks against a white background, bright orange with caustics around it, and two bright mottled red and brown strips. But I digress..

Heinecken was on a panel discussion, and he was soundly criticized for expressing an opinion that someday, photography would be non-silver, and involve some other recording medium entirely. He speculated it would be some sort of holographic storage, but then, holography was the hot new medium back then. He further speculated that photography would no longer involve cameras and photographic images as we understood them. It would be some other media, like you'd put a recording device on your head and it would constantly record everything around you, and your work as a photographer would be to locate the useful images and manipulate them.

In that way, photography would become more like vision. Your brain spends most of its time filtering out images that are not useful at that moment. Like right now, my brain is filtering out most of my peripheral vision while it focuses on the typed words on the screen. But in Heinecken's proposed continual recordings, we would do all that in post-processing. This alone was a radical idea, because fine art photographers were all into the Zone System and Previsualization. We knew our tools so thoroughly that we could tell which combinations of settings and film would record a negative that would produce a print that matched our previsualized idea of what image we could make from this scene. Most pro photographers sneered at the Postvisualizers, they were snapshot takers who just took pictures with no regard to optimizing the technology, they'd just fix it all in the darkroom afterwards. And there is some truth to that, IMHO.
posted by charlie don't surf at 10:02 AM on June 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

It isn't just the camera. You just don't get the same results from small sensors and simple glass. Camera phones are great especially if they are the camera you have on you. But the big semi-pro market is dominated by those who engineer large sensors and good glass for a reason.
posted by clvrmnky at 10:02 AM on June 13, 2013

some non-lens oriented capture of whatever photons are bouncing around at a particular time

Lytro lightfield cameras are basically this. Right now they make cheap low-res cameras but I'm sure they have something approaching DSLR quality in the works.
posted by miyabo at 10:18 AM on June 13, 2013

Especially for those of you mentioned Lytro - read this:

Bell Labs Invents Lensless Camera
A new class of imaging device with no lens and just a single light sensitive sensor could revolutionise optical, infrared and millimetre wave imaging.
posted by RedOrGreen at 11:17 AM on June 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

Hell, I'll take any DSLR you want to get rid of. I work as a newspaper reporter and take my own pictures for all my stories. I do not have a professional camera, I use a point and shoot. After taking literally tens of thousands of pictures with it, I have gotten pretty decent with it.

I wish I could afford better equipment to work with. I dislike cameras in phones, as so many of the images are horrible, plus I am tired of every concert I go to being a sea of people watching the show through their phone camera.
posted by SuzySmith at 1:47 PM on June 13, 2013