Its crazy to me that there isn't a modern version of this kind of camera. Sony and Cannon could be doing a lot to take away from the smartphone share if they made cameras more usable and modern:
- Built in GPS for location tagging in photos(a few cameras have this but for many you need an external dongle attached to the camera)
- Automatic backup of photos to cloud/network storage locations
- built in flash storage for redundancy
- Wifi that isn't trash so you could transfer photos at a meaningful speed
LTE band compatibility would be an issue for many, but I have it working successfully on T-Mobile US. I don't prefer using it for stills over my Panasonic/Olympus bodies, but I love it for video.
Stating the obvious, the market decided that the opposite would happen, i.e. that the smartphones would take away the market share of camera manufacturers instead. Smartphone camera experience is good enough for most people and smartphones offer other features as well.
"The market" didn't decide. There are maybe five major camera companies (Nikon, Canon, Sony, Olympus, and Panasonic), and a few minor ones (Fuji, Pentax, Casio, Sigma).
No one tried.
Everyone wants proprietary lock-in. No one wants to open up.
It's very much like the pre-iPhone phone market. It's not that no one wanted an iPhone, but that before Apple, no one was willing to try making one.
My phone works better for most purposes (holistically) than my full-frame camera. At this point, no one has money to make the kind of investment needed to revive it, and an open model is unlikely to see the light of day. 2024 models aren't much better than 2014 models. My main camera is from 2012, and not worth upgrading.
Curiously, lenses keep progressing at a slow but steady clip. Sigma just announced an f/1.8 full frame 28-45mm zoom lens.
What the market wants and what manufacturers provide isn't 100% aligned though. You make a good point about people wanting better cameras on their phones, but that doesn't totally eliminate the market for better portable cameras. Even if manufacturers would rather put their r&d money in areas that would be more profitable, that doesn't necessarily mean that there is no profit in other areas.
It's not dissimilar to back in the pre-digital camera era... most people were fine with having a crappy point&shoot or disposable camera, and then we all had that nerdy uncle or friend who was really into cameras and willing to spend the money on a real 35mm SLR or rangefinder or whatever.
Phones have taken the place of the old point and shoots.
That doesn't mean that manufacturers of pro-sumer interchangeable lens cameras couldn't do a better job with software, though...
It seems like the consumer market was completely destroyed by smartphones, used by people who don't particularly care about image quality, and the professional market is people who do RAW shooting with image file sizes of 40..90MB, with post-processing on a PC.
Seems like the niche between those markets never was large enough to warrant this functionality, given that both mobile standards and cloud service APIs change multiple times over the lifetime of a camera.
I think the RAW photo size is the constraint here.
If I'm out shooting an event or something it's not uncommon for me to get 500-1000 frames. Multiply that by say 50MB each and that's a huge chunk of data at least for some cell plans.
I'm an amateur photographer though so it's not a requirement for me. Maybe a professional wouldn't mind writing the expense of mobile data off as a cost of business.
It's not Crazy because you outlined all the ways it breaks or goes obsolete without a lot of maintanence...
- GPS doesn't count, although 'corrections' can be interesting.
- IDK you can totally do a workflow with a Sony camera to send to a phone/etc, may not be full-auto but I've done it.
- As a 'shooter' I'd rather get proper SD card redundancy on less-high end models than see a flash buffer for that isn't already present in how things work
- My a6000 had decent wifi speeds at the start, but it's hard to keep up with standards, also it's hard to get around the 'noise' of other wifi devices without making the camera larger or complicating the design for the sake of a wifi antenna.
- LTE is a continually moving target, adds cost for a marginal set of users that will bother to set it up.
- Everyone who's tried even a small amount of this never got far.
- Moving target. You're better off using DxO PhotoLab or Lightroom and keeping that up to date.
Mind you, this viewpoint is coming from the 'minmaxer'. Aside from my a6700 (and before that my a6000) I keep one 'main' camera as well as one or more 'cheap bodies' (i.e. store floor models or previous camera).
This makes it easier to do shots with different focal ranges without a lens change...
Pros will often have multiple bodies (but will be more discerning than 'oh hey 150$ with a lens lets goooooooo') and thus will have similar concerns...
At least Sony cameras can do automatic uploads either directly from camera, or tethered to phone. Afaik its primarily aimed at (sports) photojournalists who need to get photos out as quickly as possible, basically you can have editor pick up photos in near real-time. At least the couple models I checked advertise 2.4/5GHz 802.11ac wifi, so that seems like it should be decent enough. For geotagging, it should work fine if you have tethered to your phone.
- Sony briefly had a 'screenless' series of 'smart lens' cameras around 2014 - the Sony QX1 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_ILCE-QX1 ), QX10, QX30 and QX100 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSC-QX100 ) where you brought your smartphone to act as the screen. I think the concept at the time was just too abstract and clunky since it meant clamping on the camera to a phone, and probably had latency issues. They've also tried to make some high-end smartphones with better camera apps but it was a niche audience.
- RED also had some smartphones with a connector interface to supposedly add cameras, but the product line flopped pretty quickly.
Almost everyone already has a camera that has all of these features in their smartphone that they already carry with them.
That limits the market for a second device that is a better camera with all those features but not a smartphone.
Of course, computational photography combined with a proper lens and better sensor would be amazing, but it'd be a niche product and expensive (since it would be made in small numbers, and require expensive compute and much more RAM than current phones tend to have).
> Its crazy to me that there isn't a modern version of this kind of camera
You can bluetooth-pair (most) modern 'pocket' cameras with your phone to get this functionality.
(And for the uninitiated; such cameras will have infinitely better picture quality than can be provided by lenses than fit in a phone. I always take such a camera where carrying a full-blown SLR would be a pain the in the arse).
Their cameras weren’t actually all that good at being cameras.
Having used one it was a frustrating experience of constantly missing shots because of how slow it was to turn on. In comparison Sony was near instant.
Rather than going by camera, wifi SD cards were a lot of fun back in the day. I wonder how much you can do with the modern smaller form factor of modern SD cards. Could pair it up with an app on your phone via Bluetooth etc to retrofit more features on. Much like an Apple Shortcuts/CloudKit.
Would be a fun retrofuturist experiment to backport fun newer things to old tech with big SD cards.
Sounds like things haven't improved much in the past twenty years based on links like these:
Battery, space, and startup time limitations probably. As it is mirrorless cameras can only get like 350 frames per charge, so adding more power hungry features like GPS or LTE would only make thay worse. Camera bodies are packed as is, so having a limited amount of fixed storage (when there is perfectly good removable options) take up valuable space is not an especially appealing trade off. And lastly / most importantly, I need a camera to be ready to go as soon as I turn it on, I don't have time to wait for a full OS to boot up. Standby mode could mitigate that but see previous concerns about battery life.
> And lastly / most importantly, I need a camera to be ready to go as soon as I turn it on, I don't have time to wait for a full OS to boot up. Standby mode could mitigate that but see previous concerns about battery life.
> - Built in GPS for location tagging in photos(a few cameras have this but for many you need an external dongle attached to the camera)
Sony's lineup actually has support for precisely that in the pinout of the MI Shoe which all their cameras since over a decade use [1].
Unfortunately, the <insert swear word of choice> at Sony never released a GPS dongle, and while there has been root available for all Sony Alpha models up until the A7S2 via the integrated (fossil and cut-down...) Android subsystem and they all run Linux, to my knowledge no one has reverse engineered the MI shoe comms interface, how to get that ruddy thing into being a wifi client instead of that temporary hotspot crap, or how to make it behave like a goddamn normal UVC webcam over USB instead of needing their brutally unstable client app.
Sony makes truly best-in-class hardware (no one else has a competitor for the S series in a low-light scenario) at the best possible price point... but damn no matter what hardware they're dealing with, they're the typical Japanese company that cannot get software right.
Because the thinness of a phone and the optics of a real camera are mutually exclusive. Anything with proper optics is going to be way too chunky to use as a daily driver.
Sony used to have a whole Android subsystem on their Alpha cameras. It kind of surprised me more 3rd party stuff didn't come out that took advantage of this programmability. https://github.com/ma1co/Sony-PMCA-RE
It's incredibly slow and clunky. They're just bad at software. Even if the third party app was good, just getting to it through the camera interface would make it agonizing to use.
Funny, I don't want any of those features (besides storage), and turn off Location Services on my other devices. Not that the tech isn't cool, but you can't trust a tech company to not sell you out these days.
I bought our recent camera and steered clear of any cloud or internet integration at all. USB-C is fine, and snappy as hell, thanks. SD Card as well.
Cloud connection, wifi, flash storage, apps, computational photography, and I assume some sort of display screen ... You basically want a phone that does everything except make calls?
So, a lot of what you list is missing. But the canon 6d mkii has WiFi, and GPS. Allowing some of those features if tethered / connected to another device.
I used to do a lot of shooting with my Canon 5D. I had thousands of dollars in various lenses, plus some specialized flashes, etc. It took great pictures, but all that gear was bulky and heavy.
99% of the time I wasn't taking pictures with the intent of blowing them up to poster-size prints, or selling them to major publications. I was just taking pictures to document and share elements of day to day life.
(You probably see where this is going).
Smartphone cameras have kept up well enough with most consumer needs that it would be really hard to justify carrying a dedicated camera. Further, that camera would need to have all of the features of a smart phone camera (eg: filters, touchscreen, lightweight editing, etc. As you also pointed out) that it makes it unlikely to exist in a practical manner.
I will say I'm slightly surprised we haven't see an external "lens and sensor only" gadget that pairs with a phone. Use this gadget to capture a better raw image, and then use the phone to do everything else. Could be a USB/cable tether, or even some form of wireless (bluetooth is probably too slow though?).
tl;dr - I'm not carrying a dedicated camera around, no matter how much better the images might be.
>I will say I'm slightly surprised we haven't see an external "lens and sensor only" gadget that pairs with a phone.
This, camera tech on phones is great, but it's never better than a dedicated device. Plus, the models with best cameras aren't always the best phone experience. An external camera device that you could attach lenses and such to, but could dump the data on to your phone, and get GPS and such from your phone, would be a great middle ground.
You have a smartphone for photoing your food. Why there should be an option to upload to some service? What would you do when the service (or OS itself) became discontinued, just like in TFA?
> Automatic backup of photos to cloud/network storage locations
An another LTE modem which would be obsolete again in a couple of years? And eating money while it is supported?
Many of us would. I love my little Olympus PEN EPL8 camera, the form factor beats the crap out of phones, the quality of the pictures way better (despite "only" 16MP), etc. But the ... software experience is awful. I could come up with dozens of ways to improve the experience that would have been possible even in 2016 when it was made... (In fact I wasted a couple days writing my own custom WiFi remote control program for it a few days ago, hoping to snap birds at the feeder while I sit at my desk, cuz the "OI Share" Olympus/OM Systems one is terrible)
But there's not enough of a market at all to make it justifiable. Software developers are expensive. The interchangeable lens camera market is tiny, and the professional people who spend serious money care less about things like that and more about stellar optics and sensors.
The consumer (and even "pro-sumer") level tier of the camera market has almost disappeared. Even in Japan, which is camera crazy, it's in free-fall still.
Take Panasonic's new GH7, for example, a new rather nice Micro Four Thirds camera with a bunch of advanced features, but kind of targeted towards the video segment (so great for YouTubers, etc)... They announced the production numbers and it's only 4000 a month. That's... basically nothing... in the consumer hardware segment.
That said, I think this segment will come back in a bit. The digicam craze is evidence at least that young people (like my teenage daughter's age) can see the value in the camera form factor over using a phone. The ergonomics are way better. And Fujifilm can't keep the X100V series in stock, it keeps flying off the shelves. Phones themselves are becoming less "cool."
The Fuji cameras I'm working on include similar functionality. Basically the camera can connect to any AP, then it will find a client. From there the client can do liveview/automatic photo importing/change settings.
My older Olympus camera does the opposite. Becomes an AP and then the phone app switches WiFi networks and connects that way. It's an interesting approach but the problem is that Android and iOS get up to wonky unpredictable action when dealing with private ad-hoc wifi networks, so the situ becomes unreliable. (this was a vexing problem when I worked on the Google WiFi some years ago). That and the wifi range is terrible, and it's a drain on the camera's batteries.
petabyt I'm interested in this capability, is this available out of the box? What's the client API/contract? Or is Fujihack [0] required? (I just found it on your website.)
What happened to the "non-flat" CCD / CMOS sensors which were going to enable awesome smartphone cameras, by allowing lens assemblies with far fewer elements and virtually no chromatic aberration? Thanks to the fewer elements whey could be way thinner (or much wider in the same thickness, collecting way more light) and still fit in a smartphone body. This was supposed to especially benefit smartphones due to their fixed lenses (while for a variable zoom lens you would need different sensor curvature depending on the zoom level which is trickier....).
A couple relevant links (just a few search results):
Also, the quickly deformable (with an electric field) "liquid" lenses which would revolutionize the lens aspect, similarly appearing in a lot of news and then never seemingly materialize.
As someone with mild knowledge of semiconductor fabrication and optics, I honestly think these technology are not that meaningful to justify their cost of development and implementation, compared to the winning solution of arbitrarily complex plastic lens assemblies.
Chromatic aberration can be good enough with doublet lens design and Petzval is largely solved by the final field flattener usually with multiple concave and convex sections, and you can still easily fit a large number of lenses in a small formfactor.
Additionally being able to adjust the power of a lens is not a huge gamechanger, as a lot of the complexity with modern optic design is to counter various defects and distortion like aforementioned Petzval.
Rather, the fundamental limit is the sensor size. It's just not practical to achieve much better image quality with a physically small system
Thanks for the information! But my understanding was exactly in the direction of the issue you point out - the fundamental limit being the sensor size.
A curved sensor would, by allowing a relatively thinner (due to fewer elements) lens assembly, could have a larger area, and still remain within the allowed overall "thickness budget" of the smartphone. Hence my surprise that they seem to have gone nowhere.
It's a bit weird that there aren't any great ultraportable high quality cameras anymore. Some interesting ones I've found are the Yongnuo YN450M and the Switchlens.
I don't know if "ultra portable" is referring to a specific kind of camera type, but I got a Sony ZV-1 on black friday last year, and since then it has been my go-to camera over both my DSLR and smart phone. I usually just carry it in my pocket instead of my phone these days, but I also can fit it in my pocket with my phone if I want to.
People who want separate non-ilc camera are already niche. People who want to compromise image quality and ergonomics for ultracompactness is small niche within that niche. Its not like something Fujis X100, Sonys ZV, or Ricohs are huge cameras
Not sure about the Sony ZV or Ricohs but the X100 series are excellent cameras - the compromise of going for a prime lens works very well for this format in my view (Sony used to have the RX1 series but it was probably too expensive and a bit too big to work). I've used them since the X100s.
They also seem to be rising in popularity recently amongst people who don't also own a pile of DSLRs or MILCs - I think this is mostly due to the retro styling.
There's a lot of hand-wringing in the micro-four-thirds camera community about why Panasonic and OM Systems haven't released any updates to their older small/portable cameras (which the M43 system was great for, the lenses being much smaller than APS-C and full-frame). It's likely there's just no money in it and so they're focusing on more $$ niche tiers instead, with larger bodies. (Panasonic on video, OM Systems on bird/nature photography).
Fujifilm is having great success with their fixed-lens X100V, though.
So I've used the discussion here and the inspiration by @samcat116 to finally publish my review of the Samsung Galaxy NX - half smartphone, half "professional" camera: https://op-co.de/blog/posts/galaxy_nx/
Something I think should be said more often: the root cause of decades-long ongoing camera data exfil mess must have to do with 802.11 Wi-Fi standard.
Technically it could be just as painless and usable like Apple AirDrop; it might not be readily implemented in products, but technically it's shown possible. The reason why it remains massive pain has to be in the Wi-Fi standard that can't be kicked from client or established in split seconds.
I'm not a camera enthusiast - but are these cameras still "worth it" to go through all the effort for their qualities, or is this closer to a vintage computer enthusiast just cracking away at something because it's a challenge?
Very interesting route to go through to get the camera working again!
The compact models are probably not competitive to modern smartphones, except if you need optical zoom.
The NX series interchangeable lens cameras however don't fare too badly compared to today's models, and have a good price-point on the used market, if you are ready to do some bargain hunting.
In the last decade, the improvements were largely in sensor resolutions (from 20MP to 40MP, not relevant for most practical uses) and in "smart" auto-focus, with better tracking of eyes, animals or objects.
I have an NX Mini (which isn't exactly the same as the regular NX line) which has a "1 inch" sensor and a 3-lens interchangeable system. With the 9mm fixed lens it's as pocketable as a phone, but with a flip-out screen, a real flash and otherwise much better quality. With the 9-27mm zoom lens it's even a reasonable portrait camera. I haven't found one of the 17mm f/1.8 lenses, they're pretty rare.
Anyway, I really like that little thing. With a C-mount lens adapter I can use surveillance camera lenses which is pretty fun.
I'm a huge fan of the NX mini and they are fully supported by the SNS API bridge.
I have a bunch of them, one converted to infrared. Usually I have the mini with me when the NX500 is too bulky. It's a pity that the lenses are so rare on the used market. The image quality is just awesome for the form factor!
This is definitely not “worth it” given that NX is a dead platform, but I can totally see it being a passion project for someone who wants to improve the system. The NX cameras were pretty darn good. The NX1, which was the final flagship of the range, was an amazing camera IMO, and of course these cameras can produce excellent images (better than modern smartphones) with their APS-C sensors. Photography is all about light, so smartphones with tiny sensors will always be disadvantaged. Computational photography tries to work around the physical limitations, but it also yields some very unnatural results. Personally, I prefer traditional cameras where the bokeh is real and there’s no built-in adjustment to the image.
I've seen kids using 2010 era cameras, but I doubt they'd be using ones with floppies. Those are 90's tech and probably have 1024x768 resolution at most, plus can you even buy USB floppy disk drives, or plug it into your phone? (E.g. I have a Micro-SD card reader that I can plug into my phone using USB-C, and I can plug the card into my camera using an Micro-SD-to-SD-adapter).
Then there are the geeks taking pictures using the B&W 320x200 Gameboy cameras, my feeling is even the Gen-Z would view these people as nerds...
Just having exchangeable lenses is a huge boon. The sensor is probably worse than what you can find in a modern smart phone, but phones simply don't have the space for deep lenses and thus have to emulate effects like zoom and depth-of-field. On this camera you can have the "real" thing without paying $1000+ for a DSLR and $300+ for a lens.
And of course there's the effect where for every sufficiently popular camera their technical deficiencies become a desirable vintage look, given enough time. Kind of like people preferring vinyl records for their sound
> The sensor is probably worse than what you can find in a modern smart phone, but phones simply don't have the space for deep lenses
Phones don't have space for big sensors either, other than some gimmicky big-sensor phones (808 PureView, Lumia 1020). The iPhone 15 Pro main camera sensor is 9.8x7.3mm, compared to say, the Ricoh GR III with a 23.5x15.6mm sensor, about 5x larger. The GR III is actually less tall/wide than an iPhone, but about 4x the thickness.
The big problem with the NX cameras is that they are no longer supported and won’t ever get more lenses. If happy with kit lens or adapting manual lenses, then they are probably cheaper than other mirrorless.
Can't say for this camera specifically, but expensive lenses and larger pixel sizes usually do what they are worth in cash. There's no viable way around paying more, like trying to milk phone cameras with AI enhancements. At least for the glass.
The hashtag on one of the original author’s tweets is “ShittyCameraChallenge” and the photos don’t look great, so I think it’s mostly about reviving dead tech and learning.
"Worth it" is relative.
No camera phone can beat pictures from my Leica Q3 with it's full-frame 61MP sensor. Especially if it is anything but ultra bright out there.
But like you said it's an enthusiast thing. Photos are a hobby of mine. If you don't really care about having the best look and quality and are fine with good quality a 48MP RAW iPhone pic can be edited quite nicely with Photoshop nowadays. Even for large screens to enjoy them on.
If you don't care at all, snap away with any semi-new phone and pictures will be good enough for phone screen/sharing.
Readit News
- Built in GPS for location tagging in photos(a few cameras have this but for many you need an external dongle attached to the camera)
- Automatic backup of photos to cloud/network storage locations
- built in flash storage for redundancy
- Wifi that isn't trash so you could transfer photos at a meaningful speed
- LTE for the same reason when on location
- Run apps for upload to a variety of services
- More computational photography features
There is, I own one, and it has every feature in your list! YONGNUO YN455, Android-10-powered 20MP Micro Four Thirds camera: https://www.hkyongnuo.com/productinfo/660161.html
LTE band compatibility would be an issue for many, but I have it working successfully on T-Mobile US. I don't prefer using it for stills over my Panasonic/Olympus bodies, but I love it for video.
Here's what it looks like: https://i.imgur.com/3mdBWXt.jpeg (my photo, with Laowa 6mm Cinema lens)
And here's what it sees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzlBA2wSU7w
No one tried.
Everyone wants proprietary lock-in. No one wants to open up.
It's very much like the pre-iPhone phone market. It's not that no one wanted an iPhone, but that before Apple, no one was willing to try making one.
As a result, the camera market is all but dead:
https://www.canonwatch.com/here-is-what-happened-to-the-came...
My phone works better for most purposes (holistically) than my full-frame camera. At this point, no one has money to make the kind of investment needed to revive it, and an open model is unlikely to see the light of day. 2024 models aren't much better than 2014 models. My main camera is from 2012, and not worth upgrading.
Curiously, lenses keep progressing at a slow but steady clip. Sigma just announced an f/1.8 full frame 28-45mm zoom lens.
Phones have taken the place of the old point and shoots.
That doesn't mean that manufacturers of pro-sumer interchangeable lens cameras couldn't do a better job with software, though...
Seems like the niche between those markets never was large enough to warrant this functionality, given that both mobile standards and cloud service APIs change multiple times over the lifetime of a camera.
If I'm out shooting an event or something it's not uncommon for me to get 500-1000 frames. Multiply that by say 50MB each and that's a huge chunk of data at least for some cell plans.
I'm an amateur photographer though so it's not a requirement for me. Maybe a professional wouldn't mind writing the expense of mobile data off as a cost of business.
- GPS doesn't count, although 'corrections' can be interesting.
- IDK you can totally do a workflow with a Sony camera to send to a phone/etc, may not be full-auto but I've done it.
- As a 'shooter' I'd rather get proper SD card redundancy on less-high end models than see a flash buffer for that isn't already present in how things work
- My a6000 had decent wifi speeds at the start, but it's hard to keep up with standards, also it's hard to get around the 'noise' of other wifi devices without making the camera larger or complicating the design for the sake of a wifi antenna.
- LTE is a continually moving target, adds cost for a marginal set of users that will bother to set it up.
- Everyone who's tried even a small amount of this never got far.
- Moving target. You're better off using DxO PhotoLab or Lightroom and keeping that up to date.
Mind you, this viewpoint is coming from the 'minmaxer'. Aside from my a6700 (and before that my a6000) I keep one 'main' camera as well as one or more 'cheap bodies' (i.e. store floor models or previous camera).
This makes it easier to do shots with different focal ranges without a lens change...
Pros will often have multiple bodies (but will be more discerning than 'oh hey 150$ with a lens lets goooooooo') and thus will have similar concerns...
They all suffered from running Android 4.x with no major upgrades from Samsung.
- RED also had some smartphones with a connector interface to supposedly add cameras, but the product line flopped pretty quickly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_Camera
That limits the market for a second device that is a better camera with all those features but not a smartphone.
Of course, computational photography combined with a proper lens and better sensor would be amazing, but it'd be a niche product and expensive (since it would be made in small numbers, and require expensive compute and much more RAM than current phones tend to have).
You can bluetooth-pair (most) modern 'pocket' cameras with your phone to get this functionality.
(And for the uninitiated; such cameras will have infinitely better picture quality than can be provided by lenses than fit in a phone. I always take such a camera where carrying a full-blown SLR would be a pain the in the arse).
Would be a fun retrofuturist experiment to backport fun newer things to old tech with big SD cards.
Sounds like things haven't improved much in the past twenty years based on links like these:
https://nerdtechy.com/best-wifi-sd-card
https://old.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/12ocr4u/the_wi...
Sony's Alpha series all run Linux, with standby.
Sony's lineup actually has support for precisely that in the pinout of the MI Shoe which all their cameras since over a decade use [1].
Unfortunately, the <insert swear word of choice> at Sony never released a GPS dongle, and while there has been root available for all Sony Alpha models up until the A7S2 via the integrated (fossil and cut-down...) Android subsystem and they all run Linux, to my knowledge no one has reverse engineered the MI shoe comms interface, how to get that ruddy thing into being a wifi client instead of that temporary hotspot crap, or how to make it behave like a goddamn normal UVC webcam over USB instead of needing their brutally unstable client app.
Sony makes truly best-in-class hardware (no one else has a competitor for the S series in a low-light scenario) at the best possible price point... but damn no matter what hardware they're dealing with, they're the typical Japanese company that cannot get software right.
Rant over.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi_Interface_Shoe
It's the only thing I miss having upgraded to a D500 some years later.
https://www.zeiss.co.uk/consumer-products/photography/zx1.ht...
The 6000$USD price tag unfortunately made it hard to justify at the time.
I bought our recent camera and steered clear of any cloud or internet integration at all. USB-C is fine, and snappy as hell, thanks. SD Card as well.
Damn expensive though.
99% of the time I wasn't taking pictures with the intent of blowing them up to poster-size prints, or selling them to major publications. I was just taking pictures to document and share elements of day to day life.
(You probably see where this is going).
Smartphone cameras have kept up well enough with most consumer needs that it would be really hard to justify carrying a dedicated camera. Further, that camera would need to have all of the features of a smart phone camera (eg: filters, touchscreen, lightweight editing, etc. As you also pointed out) that it makes it unlikely to exist in a practical manner.
I will say I'm slightly surprised we haven't see an external "lens and sensor only" gadget that pairs with a phone. Use this gadget to capture a better raw image, and then use the phone to do everything else. Could be a USB/cable tether, or even some form of wireless (bluetooth is probably too slow though?).
tl;dr - I'm not carrying a dedicated camera around, no matter how much better the images might be.
We have. They've all failed.
Olympus tried (2016):
https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/olympus-air-a01
Alice Camera is a kickstarter thing that might be about to ship now finally?
https://www.alice.camera/
And there's another recent one, SwitchLens:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/halohub/switchlens-powe...
There's others that have been tried too I think?
This, camera tech on phones is great, but it's never better than a dedicated device. Plus, the models with best cameras aren't always the best phone experience. An external camera device that you could attach lenses and such to, but could dump the data on to your phone, and get GPS and such from your phone, would be a great middle ground.
... why?
You have a smartphone for photoing your food. Why there should be an option to upload to some service? What would you do when the service (or OS itself) became discontinued, just like in TFA?
> Automatic backup of photos to cloud/network storage locations
An another LTE modem which would be obsolete again in a couple of years? And eating money while it is supported?
But there's not enough of a market at all to make it justifiable. Software developers are expensive. The interchangeable lens camera market is tiny, and the professional people who spend serious money care less about things like that and more about stellar optics and sensors.
The consumer (and even "pro-sumer") level tier of the camera market has almost disappeared. Even in Japan, which is camera crazy, it's in free-fall still.
Take Panasonic's new GH7, for example, a new rather nice Micro Four Thirds camera with a bunch of advanced features, but kind of targeted towards the video segment (so great for YouTubers, etc)... They announced the production numbers and it's only 4000 a month. That's... basically nothing... in the consumer hardware segment.
That said, I think this segment will come back in a bit. The digicam craze is evidence at least that young people (like my teenage daughter's age) can see the value in the camera form factor over using a phone. The ergonomics are way better. And Fujifilm can't keep the X100V series in stock, it keeps flying off the shelves. Phones themselves are becoming less "cool."
[0] https://fujihack.org/
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What happened to the "non-flat" CCD / CMOS sensors which were going to enable awesome smartphone cameras, by allowing lens assemblies with far fewer elements and virtually no chromatic aberration? Thanks to the fewer elements whey could be way thinner (or much wider in the same thickness, collecting way more light) and still fit in a smartphone body. This was supposed to especially benefit smartphones due to their fixed lenses (while for a variable zoom lens you would need different sensor curvature depending on the zoom level which is trickier....).
A couple relevant links (just a few search results):
https://optics.org/news/12/5/4
https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/sonys-new-curved-ima...
https://www.dpreview.com/news/7542036825/french-startup-is-p...
Also, the quickly deformable (with an electric field) "liquid" lenses which would revolutionize the lens aspect, similarly appearing in a lot of news and then never seemingly materialize.
https://opg.optica.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-31-26-43416&id...
https://www.nextpit.com/liquid-lens-technology-smartphones
Chromatic aberration can be good enough with doublet lens design and Petzval is largely solved by the final field flattener usually with multiple concave and convex sections, and you can still easily fit a large number of lenses in a small formfactor.
Additionally being able to adjust the power of a lens is not a huge gamechanger, as a lot of the complexity with modern optic design is to counter various defects and distortion like aforementioned Petzval.
Rather, the fundamental limit is the sensor size. It's just not practical to achieve much better image quality with a physically small system
A curved sensor would, by allowing a relatively thinner (due to fewer elements) lens assembly, could have a larger area, and still remain within the allowed overall "thickness budget" of the smartphone. Hence my surprise that they seem to have gone nowhere.
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They also seem to be rising in popularity recently amongst people who don't also own a pile of DSLRs or MILCs - I think this is mostly due to the retro styling.
Fujifilm is having great success with their fixed-lens X100V, though.
Technically it could be just as painless and usable like Apple AirDrop; it might not be readily implemented in products, but technically it's shown possible. The reason why it remains massive pain has to be in the Wi-Fi standard that can't be kicked from client or established in split seconds.
Very interesting route to go through to get the camera working again!
The NX series interchangeable lens cameras however don't fare too badly compared to today's models, and have a good price-point on the used market, if you are ready to do some bargain hunting.
In the last decade, the improvements were largely in sensor resolutions (from 20MP to 40MP, not relevant for most practical uses) and in "smart" auto-focus, with better tracking of eyes, animals or objects.
Anyway, I really like that little thing. With a C-mount lens adapter I can use surveillance camera lenses which is pretty fun.
I have a bunch of them, one converted to infrared. Usually I have the mini with me when the NX500 is too bulky. It's a pity that the lenses are so rare on the used market. The image quality is just awesome for the form factor!
edit: Many of these aren't that old, the last NX was 2015, I still use a pentax APS-C DSLR around that age and it's fine.
Then there are the geeks taking pictures using the B&W 320x200 Gameboy cameras, my feeling is even the Gen-Z would view these people as nerds...
And of course there's the effect where for every sufficiently popular camera their technical deficiencies become a desirable vintage look, given enough time. Kind of like people preferring vinyl records for their sound
Phones don't have space for big sensors either, other than some gimmicky big-sensor phones (808 PureView, Lumia 1020). The iPhone 15 Pro main camera sensor is 9.8x7.3mm, compared to say, the Ricoh GR III with a 23.5x15.6mm sensor, about 5x larger. The GR III is actually less tall/wide than an iPhone, but about 4x the thickness.
But like you said it's an enthusiast thing. Photos are a hobby of mine. If you don't really care about having the best look and quality and are fine with good quality a 48MP RAW iPhone pic can be edited quite nicely with Photoshop nowadays. Even for large screens to enjoy them on.
If you don't care at all, snap away with any semi-new phone and pictures will be good enough for phone screen/sharing.