2017 Camera News

Here­with some re­portage on the most in­ter­est­ing cam­eras in the world, with opin­ions to pro­voke er en­ter­tain peo­ple who are up on this stuff, and a ba­sic sur­vey of the land­scape for peo­ple who like pic­tures and won­der about cam­eras.

[Up­date]: The same day I wrote this, DPRe­view ran a nice piece on shoot­ing Seat­tle cher­ry blos­soms with a bunch of dif­fer­ent cam­eras, in­clud­ing a few of the type­s, and in­di­vid­u­al cam­eras, dis­cussed here. Check it out.

I’m an en­thu­si­ast pho­tog (not re­mote­ly pro) and I’ve no­ticed, over the years, when I write gen­er­al­ly about what’s up with cam­eras, I get notes from peo­ple say­ing “thanks, that was interesting”. I think I may have sold a few cam­eras over the years, even.

Con­clu­sions first· Let’s see if we can start some ar­gu­ments.

1. The most in­ter­est­ing cam­eras in the world right now are the new dig­i­tal “medium formats”: Fu­ji­film GFX 50S, Pen­tax 645Z, and Has­sel­blad X1D. Here’s a com­paro. But they’re ex­pen­sive and you al­most cer­tain­ly don’t need one un­less you’re a pro.

2. The next most in­ter­est­ing cam­eras in the world are the ones in mo­bile phones. They’re ex­cel­lent for most things, but don’t ob­so­lete “real” cam­eras just yet.

3. All mod­ern cam­eras take great pic­tures. The most im­por­tant dif­fer­ences be­tween them are er­gonomic: How quick­ly and eas­i­ly you can get the shot, es­pe­cial­ly when con­di­tions are bad.

4. There are rea­sons to think that the “APS-C” and “full-frame” sen­sors are the big win­ners go­ing for­ward; the price of be­ing small­er, and the cost of be­ing larg­er, are both too high.

5. I think the SLR is prob­a­bly doomed; mir­ror­less cam­eras have too many ad­van­tages.

Pic­ture break! The theme is spring.

Cam­era tax­on­o­my· You can sort cam­eras in­to two bas­ket­s; by how big their sen­sor is, and by their phys­i­cal con­fig­u­ra­tion. For sen­sors, big­ger is bet­ter; sizes that are rel­e­vant to­day, small to large, are:

1. 1/2.3" (7.7mm di­ag­o­nal, more or less); this is what good mod­ern phone-cams have.

2. Mi­cro Four Thirds (~21.5mm di­ag­o­nal); what the mir­ror­less cam­eras from Olym­pus and Pana­son­ic have.

3. APS-C (~28m­m); what most “ordinary” DSLRs, and the Fu­ji­film/Sony mir­ror­less­es, have.

4. Full Frame (~43m­m); what’s in the Canon, Nikon, and Sony flag­ship­s.

5. Medi­um For­mat (~55m­m); al­so called 645, A.K.A. re­al­ly freak­ing big. This is what the “most in­ter­est­ing cameras” at #1 in the first list above use; in­ter­est­ing be­cause they have these sen­sors in bod­ies, and at price points, that are not to­tal­ly out of reach.

There’s a pret­ty good write-up on all these size trade-offs at Cam­era sen­sor size: Why does it mat­ter and ex­act­ly how big are they? But it’s from 2013 and doesn’t in­clude Medi­um For­mat.

As for con­fig­u­ra­tions, three are in­ter­est­ing these days.

1. Mo­bile phone; it fits in your pock­et and you shoot by tap­ping on the screen.

2. SLR; the most “traditional” shape, with a lump on the top, and you look out through the front lens with the help of prisms and mir­rors.

3. Mir­ror­less; you look at an elec­tron­ic re­pro­duc­tion of what the cam­era sen­sor is see­ing, ei­ther through a viewfind­er or a screen on the back of the cam­er­a. Those “most interesting” medi­um for­mat cam­eras are in­ter­est­ing part­ly be­cause two of them are mir­ror­less; the Pen­tax is the on­ly SLR.

Time for an­oth­er pic­ture break!

How big a sen­sor do you need?· The lit­tle ones in your phone can take great pic­tures; why would you want more? Two big rea­son­s: A big­ger sen­sor makes it eas­i­er to get that nice ef­fect where your sub­ject is sharp and the back­ground is fuzzy (see the sharp fuzzball be­low). Se­cond, if you have more pix­els you can blow your pic­ture up big­ger, for ex­am­ple to print and hang on a wal­l.

The first ar­gu­ment is good, but the sec­ond is weak. Be­cause most of us, these days, share and en­joy pic­tures on screen­s, and on­ly on screen­s. That blossoms-and-sky pic at the top came out of my Google Pix­el and, af­ter crop­ping, is 2764×3375. My 15" Reti­na MacBook Pro on­ly has 1200 pix­els of ver­ti­cal res­o­lu­tion. So I al­ready can’t dis­play all the pix­els from my Pix­el.

Al­so, on the wall of my liv­ing room I have a four-foot-tall print of a pho­to shot with an old-school pock­et cam (no longer rel­e­vant in the mobile-cam er­a) from an air­plane.

So, it’s sur­pris­ing how big you can go. But still… last time I was in Ve­gas I went wan­der­ing and end­ed up at Rod­ney Lough’s gallery, full of room-size blow-ups; I found many of them over­wrought and over­pro­duced, but wow, the im­pact is not to be de­nied. He’s still us­ing 4×5" and 8×10" film cam­eras, but I bet those medium-format pup­pies at #1 above could do the trick.

Real­is­ti­cal­ly though, are you go­ing to want to work with pic­tures wider than you are tal­l?

Pic­ture break!

So what re­al­ly mat­ter­s?· For most prac­ti­cal pur­pos­es, your phonecam will meet your pho­to­graph­ic need­s. Which is to say, the qual­i­ty of your pic­tures will de­pend most­ly on your abil­i­ty to see the op­por­tu­ni­ties.

Things your phone still can’t do: Take pic­tures of things that are a long way away; cap­ture the clas­sic por­trait look (but Apple’s work­ing on that); shoot in the dark (but late last year I man­aged to cap­ture ac­tu­al moon­beams with my Pix­el); have fun with dif­fer­ent kind of lens­es; take pic­tures in a rain­stor­m. Or (most im­por­tan­t) let you take con­trol of your pho­tograph­s.

So giv­en that any mod­ern cam­era can do all the things that your phone can’t, and pro­duce beau­ti­ful pic­tures, what are the dif­fer­ence that mat­ter?

It turns out that the cam­era com­pa­nies have (d­if­fer­ing) opin­ions about how pic­tures should be tak­en, and ship opin­ion­at­ed cam­eras. Which is won­der­ful. Per­son­al­ly, I’m a Fu­ji­film fan­boy, for ex­act­ly one rea­son: I like where the knobs and di­als are, and how they work, and how things look through the viewfind­er. I sup­pose I could get used to an­oth­er maker’s opin­ion, but at the mo­ment I’m pret­ty con­vinced that for me, the Fu­ji­film set­up lets me shoot faster and fo­cus sharp­er and light-compensate bet­ter.

There are lots of peo­ple who are go­ing to find them­selves in bet­ter tune with the opin­ions of Nikon or Canon or Sony, and that’s just fine; al­though I have to con­fess that the few times I’ve tried out a re­cent Sony it felt like I was fight­ing against the con­trol­s, not work­ing with them.

So, I’m gonna say, if you’re think­ing about a cam­er­a, don’t waste time wor­ry­ing about pix­els or sen­sors or ISOs or, re­al­ly, any specs at al­l. Bor­row or rent a few dif­fer­ent ones and take some damn pic­tures al­ready; then you’ll know.

Fo­cus on fun· I don’t get paid for tak­ing pic­ture (well, rarely) and you prob­a­bly don’t ei­ther, so we should bear in mind that this is a recre­ation­al ac­tiv­i­ty.

It’s a path I haven’t been down, but I sus­pect the cam­eras that win on the pure-fun met­ric are the fixed-lens mir­ror­less of­fer­ings, no­tably the Fu­ji XF-100 or Le­ica Q. Th­ese things are kind of ex­pen­sive, but they have great lens­es and great viewfind­ers and look cool and if you point them at pret­ty well any­thing and shoot, you’ll prob­a­bly be hap­py. Pho­tog­ra­phy should make you hap­py.