Honestly, I think that would be an awful downgrade. The software on, say, a Canon camera is fast, reliable and easy to use. Magic Lantern is "just" about adding even more advanced advanced and/or obscure features.
>The software on, say, a Canon camera is fast, reliable and easy to use.
I think this is Stockholm syndrome speaking. Most photographers have no problems installing apps and upgrading their phones.
Yet ask them to set a timer, change focus/metering point and it's a nightmare. Let's not even talk about Canon's camera control/export app, whatever it's called.
Software is hard.
I’m taking about Matrix Metering, Center-weighted or Spot Metering.
I deal with photographers in their 50s/60s weakly. They all love their phones and hate the menu screen on their Canon/Nikon/Sony. You set it up the way you like it and hope to never need to touch it again.
Time how long it takes you to find and change the Exif copywrite on your photos, daylight saving, or how to save JPGs in one card and RAWs in another. It’s a nightmare.
This might blow your mind, but professionally-oriented cameras all have dedicated buttons to toggle metering modes without looking away from the viewfinder.
The 5D has twice the functions on the button, even, since pressing the button and scrolling one wheel does one thing, and the other another. It's very handy.
In comparison, I was trying to set bracketed exposure on my RX100 yesterday, and I still haven't managed to find the feature.
You should drop the condescending tone toward people who have more years of experience photographing professionally than you have of age.
I can operate my Nikons blind folded and single handed. Canons are not my cup of tea, but I can get by if needed to.
Sonys, on the other hand, have amazing sensors and great glass, yet bury such important features under menus requiring pressing the Fn button while staring at the LCD, or something like it.
> You should drop the condescending tone toward people who have more years of experience photographing professionally than you have of age.
You might want to avoid making arbitrary assumptions about anonymous debaters, who may just as well be far more experienced than you, especially when said experience is not particularly relevant to the discussion of easy operation.
It's not interesting to know if someone can efficiently navigate an instrument after 25 years of experience with it. At that point, quirky UX ends up entirely concealed by muscle memory, and such person ends up being a poor source of input for UX matters.
>…who may just as well be far more experienced than you
I wasn’t referring to myself. But to photographers in their 50/60s.
> It's not interesting to know if someone can efficiently navigate an instrument after 25 years of experience with it. At that point, quirky UX ends up entirely concealed by muscle memory, and such person ends up being a poor source of input for UX matters.
Agreed. I made the same point a few comments above.
> I can operate my Nikons blind folded and single handed.
What's the issue, then? The Nikon shooting interface obviously works well for you, and I think that is far more important and used than changing daylight savings settings.
> Time how long it takes you to find and change the Exif copywrite on your photos, daylight saving, or how to save JPGs in one card and RAWs in another. It’s a nightmare.
I don't know enough about Nikon or Sony, but I use Canon and I know where all those settings are. Even if you want to search the web to find where they are, I don't think it is a big deal: most of those settings you listed I change once or twice a year.
In any case, I think it is better than the settings app on my iPhone, where the General sub-menu contains everything from controlling Background App Refresh (Why not in individual app sub-menus?) to enabling iTunes Wi-Fi Sync (there is an iTunes and App Store sub-menu too).
As I said elsewhere in this thread, better Menu UI would be a side benefit. I’m craving for fast processor and powerful software on the back of a big sensor and glass.
What do you want the fast processor and powerful software to do, though?
For instance, I can't imagine trying to cram the Lightroom UI into a 4" screen on the back of my camera is a good experience, especially when I have a 30" 4K screen at home to edit on. To me, the current Lightroom for iOS is nowhere near as usable as the desktop version, and still quite a bit slower.
>What do you want the fast processor and powerful software to do?
What they already do in smartphones, but better. Almost guarantee you’ll never miss a shot (no blinks, blur, bad exposure), better signal processing, etc
> I can't imagine trying to cram the Lightroom UI into a 4" screen
Me neither. I’m not proposing that in the slightest
> What they already do in smartphones, but better. Almost guarantee you’ll never miss a shot (no blinks, blur, bad exposure), better signal processing, etc
OK, but that seems to be turning the camera into a point-and-shoot and I am not sure most of what is left of the ILC market wants that (or maybe it is just me). For me, I would ultimately want to control things like exposure, shutter opening, etc... myself (who is to say a "bad" over/under-exposed photo or some blur won't make for a better photo?).
I think people who want a point-and-shoot like experience are by-and-large are happy with smartphone cameras today (especially with advanced processing like Android's Night Sight), and they are not going to carry around a bulky ILC just to take photos.
In any case, I think Zeiss is trying to do something similar to what you want with the ZX1, and I will be interested to see how large that market is.
>OK, but that seems to be turning the camera into a point-and-shoot
Not at all.
>For me, I would ultimately want to control things like exposure, shutter opening, etc... myself (who is to say a "bad" over/under-exposed photo or some blur won't make for a better photo?).
100% agreed. But if instead of “shit, I missed this shot” I could have 3 taken before I even pressed the shutter, and one of them is perfect, I'd take it in a blink. Besides all the pie in the sky stuff that I imagine could be done as well.
>I think people who want a point-and-shoot like experience are by-and-large are happy with smartphone cameras today (especially with advanced processing like Android's Night Sight), and they are not going to carry around a bulky ILC just to take photos.
You're probably right. I don't know if it's a viable market, but one can dream.
> 100% agreed. But if instead of “shit, I missed this shot” I could have 3 taken before I even pressed the shutter, and one of them is perfect, I'd take it in a blink. Besides all the pie in the sky stuff that I imagine could be done as well.
Sounds like what you might want is a 8K video camera with a ring buffer that gets flushed to storage whenever you press the shutter button :p
On the 5D, press the metering button and turn the knob.
About the rest, I've never timed it because I've never needed to do it. Lightroom does most for me, and even the card thing would be roughly a one-time thing. I don't know what a comparison between a 6" touch display on a phone and a 2" non-touch display on a camera is supposed to show, but the camera menu isn't that hard: press menu, scroll to the appropriate section, select menu item and change what you need. It's pretty much the same on phones as well.
I'm trying to figure out the subset of people who are saving RAWs but relying on the camera's EXIF data, when Lightroom et al are perfectly capable of setting all the metadata right there.
Get into the enthusiast / prosumer models and there's more buttons for a reason. I want to change metering on my 5D4? I press the metering hard button on the top of the camera.
I'm not really a photographer, but a software developer with gadget cravings causing me to have a few cameras of different brands.
Canon's smartphone app is quite terrible (although this is a slam at smartphone UX, not camera UX), but I can't really see smartphone apps for cameras as anything other than a useless gimmick.
However, that app has no relation to how it is to use a modern camera. Comparing the UI's of iOS, Sony's Android camera app, Sony's A6000 and Canon mirrorless/dslr, Canon's modern mirrorless UX is by far the best. Easiest to use, prettiest, etc.
For everything an iPhone can do, Canon works exactly the same, but then Canon also does so much more. Focus point is by touch screen, and it's much more responsive than my phone. It also seems much smarter with regards to tracking. Important settings are in the HUD, rest in an quick menu one touch away.
All of this is of course subjective and anecdotal, but I would by quite saddened to end up with smartphone-d cameras. I do not see it making any positive improvement.
