The relative merits of DSLRs and mirrorless

[Anthony]

Many users have reported eye strain.  I don't know what that is, but I can report being annoyed at how dim the EVF in my Fuji X cam is when the camera is used in blazing bright sunlight.  It would be nice if someone fixed that.

Have you tried adjusting the EVF brightness setting?  Also, have you tried changing the Preview Picture/WB setting?

[Anthony]

On the contrary, the battery issue is understated.

Moreover, it is not only about the battery consumption. My cameras' LCDs (not that I use them much apart from when I need to access the menus) simply cease to function in temperatures below -25. An electronic viewfinder would be increasingly useless in such circumstances.

Lastly, I live in Norway and often go to northern Sweden and northern Finland. I can assure you that there are many photographers in these areas who are active during winter, and in addition tourism is on the rise. Those who have tried cameras with electronic viewfinders find that battery life is dismally poor and that function ceases.

Optical viewfinders are far superior in cold climates - and of course the battery capacity problem is there in all temperatures. It is not a real solution to bring a large number of batteries with a mirrorless system when an OVF system gives you three or four times as many exposures per charge.

It is not my impression that the photographers who need cold capable equipment is few. Just perform an internet search for cold weather photography in different areas of the world, and you will see that the proportion of photographers who need equipment that can withstand low temperatures is significant. Photography is a popular activity in all parts of the world. Also, that proportion is likely to be increasing with modern tourism - quite a few people go to cold areas to experience natural wintery environments. 

Apart from the proportions of photographers in the Mediterranean summer and in the Arctic and the Antarctic, the capability of a mirrorless system versus a system with an optical viewfinder is hardly determined by proportions. We are talking about demonstrable and significant differences.

I am sure that there are circumstances where it is too cold to be suitable for mirrorless cameras.  But still the vast majority of photos are not taken in these circumstances, and so they are not relevant for most photographers.  There are very many circumstances where one type of camera is better than another, and people should use the best tool for the job.

In the olden days we were limited by the 36 exposure film roll; it is a lot easier to change a battery than a film roll.  And I imagine that changing film at -40C was not at all enjoyable.

We are very fortunate to live in an era where we have a choice of equipment, and long may that continue.  It would be a pity for all of us if the small number of photographers who need equipment to function at -40C were deprived of the ability to obtain such equipment.

[Anthony]

There seems to real world evidence that the battery for the Sony A9 represents a significant improvement, eg  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgmiREAxjO8  or  https://twitter.com/tonynorthrup/status/855103932716244992?lang=en

Of course, the same technology would presumably produce even more impressive results on a DSLR.  And I have not seen any tests of it in very low temperatures.

[Akira]

Akira, its actually the X-H1! And having used an X-T1, X-T2 and now an X-H1 I have experienced no eye strain at all!
The only strain has been on my wallet.

LOL, Mike, thank you for the correction and sorry for my ignorance!  Glad your new camera turned out to be "at least" eye-friendly. 

[Les Olson]

I really do think that the battery issue is overstated for most people in most circumstances.

Yes, but the same could be said of anything.  Most people in most circumstances don't need more than 6MP or apertures larger than f/8 or shutter speeds faster than 1/250.  Only photography enthusiasts need those things.  And even among photography enthusiasts most people in most circumstances don't need 45MP or f/1.4 or battery life longer than 500 shots. 

The unanswered question is whether cameras will be designed to meet the needs of a wide range of users, or only be what most people in most circumstances need?  Everything we see about the consumer digital and electronics world today suggests that users who need more than most people in most circumstances will be ignored.  The mp3 format is the example here: it is based on a model of how humans hear sound, achieving high compression by discarding information its model says you won't hear anyway. And "most people in most circumstances" won't hear it, but those who will don't get a choice: as Jonathan Sterne says "the mp3 encoding process [...] decides for its listeners what they need to hear and gives them only that".

[Jack Dahlgren]

It is not my impression that the photographers who need cold capable equipment is few. Just perform an internet search for cold weather photography in different areas of the world, and you will see that the proportion of photographers who need equipment that can withstand low temperatures is significant. Photography is a popular activity in all parts of the world.

Per,

You are right about impressions.

Impressions certainly vary by location and our thoughts are directly related to those impressions.
I notice that Norway has a total population of about 5 million which is similar to the metropolitan area I live in. Snow here is an event that occurs every 40 years or so, so my impression is very different about the severity of cold weather performance. It can not help but be true that my concerns about being smaller and lighter are More prominent to me than battery life in the extreme cold.

My ancestors (Danes and Swedes) solved that problem for me by moving to California

Anyway, the great thing about this forum is meeting people with other locations and situations and learning their problems and solutions.

[Airy]

Concerning photography, I got the impression that the selection is wider than it used to be. I do not see which category of enthusiast is being neglected, even though I'm the first one to complain re Df not being further developed, but let us be reasonable.

In ancient times we had film in a few formats, and all cameras, from simple ones to pro level, had the same basic features and controls... main differences were fastest speed, flash sync speed, the possibility to add a motor, and the exchangeable ground glass. Compare with now (we are getting too much, maybe). We lost the exchangeable ground glass for reasons not very clear to me - does really everybody rely on AF ? do Zeiss lenses not exist ? this seems paradoxical to me: one the one hand, Zeiss does good business, on the other hand, cameras are ill-adapted.

Other features were tailored to slide shooting : I'm thinking of the multispot measure on the Canon T90, one of my favourite features at the time. I was mostly shooting slides under difficult conditions (organs in churches => high contrast). In the absence of slides, one is better served with a histogram, and even that is not really useful given the current DR of sensors.

Generally speaking, the current selection is rich, too rich maybe, and even most picky users like Mr. Erlewine manage to find satisfactory cameras for doing things unimaginable 30 years ago.

Concening mp3, that's not my favourite format, but it is misrepresented by Jonathan Sterne. Fact is, the masking effect exists in humans, and mp3 uses it (and over-uses it, at times) to perform the data compression. Besides, to some, it is more the pre-processing (e.g. cutoff at 15kHz with all the phase shift effects) that may be problematic. mp4 / AAC does basically the same, only better. It is not a marketing trick, but an engineering one.

[Jacques Pochoy]

"even though I'm the first to complain re Df not being further developed, but let us be reasonable."

I would fully agree with Airy on this one 

For the rest of the thread, I'm in favor of the OVF or at least a rangefinder system with projected informations "à la Fuji". The main point being the batteries. Last time I went to Istanbul with family for 10 days, I wanted to travel light, didn't have any computers, just enough SD cards and two batteries for the Df. I loaded the second one the last day because I wasn't sure of the first battery level as it just had got to the last mark. I believe I could have done with just one.

What gets me thinking about parts of India (or others in the world) were you don't get electricity (though you can buy AA batteries), which happens to be the most interesting parts to photography...
In film times I didn't buy an F3 because you needed a battery for the shutter speeds (minus one mechanical 1/250th). So I bought the rustic FM2n (I still have three of them, one for each shutter model). Apart the cell, everything works with no batteries !
And I'm not speaking of Monsoon when everything is wet, or sand deserts (when you have to stay several days with a cleaning kit and screwdrivers) !!!

While I've followed the mainstream on digitals and electronics (I'm even trying to dump the portable computer in favor of the iPad Pro) and I'm quite happy with it, I used to go to such remote places that I brought packs of film relying on a new button battery (one year charge and two or three of those didn't take a lot of space) for the cell. Those places didn't even have cars or trucks but horses or camels or yacks.

So if the mirrorless reigns "à la iPhone", with chargers everywhere, even for refugees crossing the sea on inflatable rafts, i'll go back to chemicals and my ever ready FM2's, even though I'm getting a bit old for those parts of the world (alas).

[Akira]

Frankly, I don't think that the mp3 format is appropriate as an example for this discussion.

The compression formats like mp3 and jpeg have been needed largely to compensate the bottleneck of the technology: the storage capacity and the bandwidth of the data transmission.

Also, the problem of mp3 is that the hope for the future development of the listeners' ears is neglected.  The more sophisticated the ears become, the more details they can perceive and appreciate.

Unfortunately, the life cycle of a digital camera, DSLR or mirrorless, is a bit too short to wait for the growth of a user.

[CS]

I'm afraid I'm not sure.  Unlike the TV or the computer screen, the EVF will be turned off periodically by the power saving function.  So, the burn-in could be less of a problem.

 I did think that burn-in might be relevant with long exposures, but that is a WAG , because I don't know. My OLED TV periodically runs a pixel compensation cycle to combat burn-in, but a static image can still cause it if run long enough. Yes. there is a major difference in size between an OLED EVF and an OLED TV panel, but I don't know how they might compare in performance, or if it's really a concern WRT to cameras. I thought that you may know more about it.

[MILLIREHM]

I would fully agree with Airy on this one 


In film times I didn't buy an F3 because you needed a battery for the shutter speeds (minus one mechanical 1/250th). So I bought the rustic FM2n (I still have three of them, one for each shutter model). Apart the cell, everything works with no batteries !

Bought a Selenium based Gossen lightmeter then to be completely battery independent.

[Akira]

I did think that burn-in might be relevant with long exposures, but that is a WAG , because I don't know. My OLED TV periodically runs a pixel compensation cycle to combat burn-in, but a static image can still cause it if run long enough. Yes. there is a major difference in size between an OLED EVF and an OLED TV panel, but I don't know how they might compare in performance, or if it's really a concern WRT to cameras. I thought that you may know more about it.

Carl, I do have been aware of the concerns about the longevity of OLED in the earlier stage of its development.  What I haven't been aware of is whether the image being taken is kept displayed on the monitor (either the viewfinder or the one on the back of the camera)?  If I remember correctly, the image was kept displayed during the light composite on an Olympus body.

[pluton]

Have you tried adjusting the EVF brightness setting?  Also, have you tried changing the Preview Picture/WB setting?

Yeah...that was the first thing I tried, back 2013.
On my current Fuji XE-2s, moving the EVF brightness control from 0 (factory normal) to +2 (the maximum) brightened it by....about .5 stops. Seems to work indentically regardless of the Preview Picture Effect setting or WB.  Measured using a Minolta Spotmeter F.
I once measured the XE-1 EVF as being 13 stops darker than the bright daylight illuminated scene I was pointing it at.
In comparison, the D800 with 50/1.8 Ai lens(wide open for normal viewing) was about 3.5 stops darker than the scene.

[Les Olson]

Frankly, I don't think that the mp3 format is appropriate as an example for this discussion.

The compression formats like mp3 and jpeg have been needed largely to compensate the bottleneck of the technology: the storage capacity and the bandwidth of the data transmission.

Also, the problem of mp3 is that the hope for the future development of the listeners' ears is neglected.  The more sophisticated the ears become, the more details they can perceive and appreciate.

Unfortunately, the life cycle of a digital camera, DSLR or mirrorless, is a bit too short to wait for the growth of a user.

The mp3 is relevant in two ways.

One is that, as you point out, the mp3 was developed to allow a lot of files to be sent over limited bandwidth.  The problem is that the music the listener is offered is shaped by the mp3; eg, if you play loud and soft notes simultaneously most listeners cannot hear the soft notes, so the mp3 discards them so save bandwidth. But if the mp3 is going to discard them, why bother playing them?  We now have enough bandwidth that we do not need to discard all that music, but the music has not recovered.  The photographic equivalent of bandwidth is display, and the equivalent of mp3 compression is down-sampling to fit on a phone screen.  Not having a crystal ball, I do not know how cameras will be changed by the priority of pictures that look good on a phone screen.  That would be OK if other cameras were made with other design goals.  But what if they weren't? The curse of the mp3 is precisely that richer and more varied alternatives are permanently closed off because they are difficult to monetise in the prevailing social, esthetic and legal environment.

The second is that technology is not politically neutral: some technologies require a particular social and political environment and work because the people who control the technology are able to drive social and political change in their own interests.  The social and political environment is not natural or spontaneous: the corporate sponsors of the mp3 manipulated the environment so that it could flourish (this why Jack's parable of the squirrels in the old growth forest and the birds in the undergrowth is misleading). The mp3 was designed to allow large numbers of files to be sent over limited bandwidth, which was good for the music industry but even better for illegal downloading.  Therefore, the mp3 required a copyright regime heavily weighted towards Big Content, and the result was the creation of the moral panic about intellectual property "theft" and the DMCA, which opens the door to selling us, not a camera, but a "renewable non-transferable licence" to the firmware (https://abovethelaw.com/2017/08/did-the-supreme-court-pave-the-way-for-you-to-actually-be-able-to-legally-repair-your-car/ - the fly in the ointment of this case is that US government argued that extinction by first sale should be subject to a right of copyright owners to make persistence of copyright a condition of sale, so the Congress may be invited to change the law to make the USSC's decision irrelevant). 

The mirrorless design is not favoured by the manufacturers for photographic reasons, but because more of its elements can be patented, so it suits a business model based on monetising intellectual property rights. It is not that the mirrorless design is bad for photography, but that the business model that is based on it is bad for photography in the same way as it is bad for music.

[Anthony]

Yeah...that was the first thing I tried, back 2013.
On my current Fuji XE-2s, moving the EVF brightness control from 0 (factory normal) to +2 (the maximum) brightened it by....about .5 stops. Seems to work indentically regardless of the Preview Picture Effect setting or WB.  Measured using a Minolta Spotmeter F.
I once measured the XE-1 EVF as being 13 stops darker than the bright daylight illuminated scene I was pointing it at.

That is very poor performance, and not something I have experienced on either of my X-T cameras.