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.
I also recall Zeiss ZX1. There was a Nikon Coolpix S800c. Another comment mentioned RED cameras. With what you listed, that’s already a handful of products that flopped - I’m not surprised manufacturers aren’t eager to continue this way.
Interestingly, Android was originally meant to be a camera OS, until they pivoted because mobile phones were a larger market[1].
For a cool $10k? Not going to be popular in any case, as are the RED cameras. These are all pro-level cameras.
> Nikon Coolpix S800c
A useless toy, that happened to have a just barely better image quality than built-in phone cameras at that time.
If you try to find mirrorless cameras with Android, with a reasonable price ($1k-$3k), then there's only NX. Nobody else even tried that seriously.
NX was great, I had it for a while (it was stolen). It suffered from Gen1 diseases, that could have been fixed. But _nothing_ comes close in usability ever since. I have Sony Alpha, and it's UI/UX is just shit. I don't use it at all anymore, I don't want to spend time categorizing and manually geotagging its photos.
But that’s my point. There were pro level and entry level devices, as well as something in between like the NX. Camera manufacturers tried, people just didn’t like it and chose smartphones.
> There were many attempts, some listed in other comments[1][2].
No, these were not such attempts. A touchscreen camera is NOT what I want. The point isn't to make it phone-friendly or phone-like, but to make it open. Knobs and buttons are good.
The Olympus AIR and Sony QX series cameras would be awesome if they came with open APIs so I could program them. They came with proprietary Sony / Olympus kludges which ran on smartphones. The Olympus AIR is officially dead; the app is no longer maintained, and doesn't work on modern phones. Olympus was actually starting to try (in contrast to Sony), and released things like 3d CAD models, but the product was discontinued before it was finished.
Tossing Android on a camera is not the same as an open camera. An open camera would allow me to:
1) Write apps for it, taking advantage of what it can do.
2) Make accessories for it. This includes an open mount standard (of which MFT is the only one; I have the spec for the asking), an open hotshoe standard, open batteries, etc.
I'd be able to do things like super-resolution, custom white balance, custom autofocus systems, custom grids (rule-of-thirds / etc), and so on. I'd be able to program a handful of them to all have the same white balance, settings, and trigger, so I could shoot from five angles at once. I'd be able to use them for machine vision applications or video conferencing, for the coding. For power zoom lenses, I'd be able to eliminate focus breathing by adjusting focus and zoom together. I could make a panorama app, a focus stacking app, or an app which did smart image stacking for low light. I could toss on a machine learning algorithm on it, and have a custom shutter control so it decided when to shoot. I could use IBIS to track the stars for night photography.
That's what an open camera would consist of.
NOT a touch screen, Android, and connections to Instagram and Youtube.
> Not to mention mirrorless replacing DSLRs.
I was shooting mirrorless long before that.
Indeed, 10 years ago, you could buy a Sony A7R. Go to DPReview, and compare high ISO images from the A7R versus a top-of-the-line $6000 A9III and tell me which one is better. Or compare them on DxOMark.
10 years buys us:
- Higher video resolution
- Better autofocus
- Instead of obscenely fast shooting speed, we now have incredulously fast shooting speed
Unfortunately, the images aren't noticeably better, though.
120fps is kind of useless (unless you want to spend your life sorting through images; that's over 7000 images for a minute of shooting). Some models do give more resolution (notably, not the A9III in this comparison; the A7R had more), but that's only usable under bizarre conditions (even shooting 24MP, with an f/1.4 lens, if one eye was in focus, the other eye would be limited by DoF and not the sensor). Plus, a 4k monitor tops out at 8MP.
I will mention: If cameras used the same kind of smarts as a Google Pixel Pro, the images would be much better.
Olympus exited the business, sadly. I don’t know if they were slimming down after the “accounting scandal” aka exposed corporate fraud or something else, but I’m a bit disappointed, what with my almost ten-year-old Olympus μ4/3 body (that was an attempt at an open standard, by the way, and IIRC even Fuji participated before they decided to go it alone). On the other hand, as you say, sensor-wise it’s not really significantly worse than what I can buy today.
OM Systems owns the old Olympus IP and makes cameras, though so far they're mostly just minor improvements of existing Olympus models. We'll see if they bring out a new camera this year. But the OM-1 MK II is actually a pretty compelling camera for bird photography, some excellent autofocus / bird-detection features. And weather proofed.
M43 also lives on fine in Panasonic's lineup. Logitech just released a M43-mount $1000 live streaming cam ("Mevo Cam"). And like you say, the standard is open. I don't think it will die. The compactness of the lenses and their relatively lower price makes a lot of sense esp for new entrants (see "Alice Camera" etc).
Somehow I missed this. Although I'm currently a canon shooter I first started on Olympus gear. Tbh it was fine for a beginner but the image quality wasn't competitive with canon or Nikon.
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.
Its really a physics thing at a certain point. Smartphones are always worse than their contemporary purpose built camera counterparts because smartphone cameras have to be so small. Meanwhile a pro camera could weigh 10 pounds with a lens the size of your thigh. We simply don't know enough about optics to take that package and put it into a smartphone without compromising quality in some way.
The optics and sensors might be a physics thing, but everything else about standalone cameras really could've done much better at staying competitive.
As others have mentioned, lack of geotagging, wireless connectivity, and other convenience features made them poor competitors to smartphones. And it wasn't just wireless connectivity being behind the times, Canon's T7i (aka 800D) launched in 2017 still made you find a mini USB cable. They were good at optics, but dropped the ball on the rest of the product.
Even though the phone had worse quality pictures, it brought many other things to the table.
Do people really feel like its geotagging and wifi thats holding the market back? To me its just a lack of exposure (no pun intended) to what a camera can do for you among the general class of consumers. knowledge of shutter speed, aperture, metering the scene used to be required to take a photo at all, now its a black box where even if you know what this means your phone doesn't let you at the controls. On top of that consider a prosumer camera. Mine from 10 years ago takes 34mb raws. new ones probably double or triple that. SD card transfers to your workstation make quick work of that, much faster than piddly old wifi or the backing up to cloud services I see mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Imagine uploading 16gb to dropbox while out and about, the camera would never shut off.
Geotagging is a real bummer, I took a trip to Italy years ago and brought an SLR and I wish those photos were geotagged.
"Piddly old wifi" is part of the problem, it's certainly what I'd expect camera vendors to support. You can push multiple gigabits over a good wifi connection these days.
If any camera companies are reading this, you probably read "I wish my camera came with a purpose-built app specific to your brand of cameras manufactured in 2024 (to be EOLed and replaced by a different app next year) and reimplementing an entire photo library with sync to your own subscription services because your manager says you need subscription revenue," but no I'd just like it to join my house's wifi network and give me a button on the computer to copy the files to a folder or add them to my Photos library.
I don't think any of the camera manufacturers have good UX people. They sell engineering, not usability. Even Sony, who makes a bunch of laptops and phones and such, sucks at this compared to the West. Maybe it's just not a strong part of Japanese corporate culture?
They sell tools not toys. Of course the ux is different than what most developers designing for the consumer might be used to. Its brilliant for what it is on a pro camera. Lots of physical buttons, informationally dense displays, instant startup and off, able to use the device without the screen on at all (in the case of a dslr at least). Does exactly what it says on the tin for you and its not going to rearrange how all the menus work every 3 years when a new PM wants to make a name for themselves.
Well, the overall UX isn't just the UI (getting photos geotagged or edited or off the camera, for example, are pain points others have pointed out that they still don't address well). Of course form factor is a (big) part of it too.
Even when discussing just the on-camera UI, there's nothing about "tools for professionals" that says they must never change the UI, or that every setting must be immediately accessible in a flat hierarchy, or that you must use a one-axis scroll wheel to change a 2D focus point, etc.
Yes, it's a great thing that there are features of a standalone camera (like instant on, or physical buttons) that smartphones don't have. However, that doesn't mean the cameras have to disregard all the UX and UI changes other electronics have gone through over the last 10-20 years (some good, some bad, but over the long term they've become more approachable to more people). Meanwhile cameras remained largely unchanged and as a result DSLRs are pretty much a dead segment now. (I too loved the viewfinder and ability to use them without an screen, especially when optical... but not the rest of the experience).
As a former amateur photographer, I eventually sold all my bodies and lenses because it was just such a pain to use them compared to the smartphones and prosumer prime compacts of the day, which were all iterating much faster than the "proper" DSLRs. Back in those days, even just getting the photos off the camera wirelessly was a pain, requiring the use of 3rd-party WiFi SD cards or really old USB cables. I think these days mirrorless is once again trying new things, but I'm out of the hobby now and can't afford to reinvest into it :(
I want back the UX of electronics from twenty years ago, with physical knobs and dials. Spare me the glitchy touch screens on kitchen appliances that can't be operated with wet fingers. Spare me the cheap pseudo buttons without a noticeable click point on washing machines. I don't want to wait multiple seconds after pushing the power "button" to see if the device just lags or if I didn't push hard enough. I don't want a TV that needs minutes to boot android, only to overlay what I want to see with ads benefiting the manufacturer. I don't want to wait a minute after starting the car before I can configure the heating... on a touch screen that first makes me accept the ToS.
> Spare me the glitchy touch screens on kitchen appliances that can't be operated with wet fingers
Well, the person upthread did say "I don't think any of the camera manufacturers have good UX people" (emphasis mine) and the kitchen appliance companies don't either
My Sony a7 mirrorless solves basically all of the issues you have described.
The menu hierarchy isn't flat.
Physical knobs for everything, even customizable. Touch to focus (though I prefer using the ring tbh).
BT/WiFi transfer. A bit slow (2-3 sec for a 50mb raw photo) but fine for what I need. I use a USB-c SD reader for my phone and sync the entire card to an SD card in my smartphone.
Full size HDMI built in.
I don't think I would say that cameras are dead, it's just that it's a hobbyist thing now. Most of my friends would never buy a camera except a cheapy one like an Instax for fun, they're not dropping a grand on an f1.4 35mm.
Thanks for the suggestion! I don't have much money right now, but really miss SLR-like photography. I've long eyed the Alphas with envy, and now that I no longer have any Canon lenses anyway, maybe my next one will be a Sony instead once I can afford one.
Can I ask how your experience with the electronic viewfinder has been? Is it as fast and clear as a traditional dSLR's optical viewfinder?
Yes. Japan had changed a lot in past 10-15 years, but traditionally the culture had been anti-fun, anti-profit, and more recently anti-culturalist. UX engineering looks a borderline indecent activity for people with this set of cultural values. It's seen like how Mycogenian nuns look at beauty salons.
"They sell tools not toys" - no offense, I hate deceptive UX engineering and e14n as the next guy - and vibration motors in Dyson vacuums - but that kinds of denials existed, and IMO had hamstrung Japanese tech products for too long.
The nice part about a pro camera is if you used a pro dslr camera 20 years ago the new one is pretty much turn key for you. It's like bash, could be cleaner perhaps, yet timelessness and knowing that will continue in the future is also a huge feature.
Some of Dyson models make an "aftertaste" vibration when the trigger is let go, and it clearly comes from an extraneous feedback device inside that serves no other purpose. Maybe I shouldn't see it as disingenuous as I feel.
What camera bodies are you using that are 10lbs? Even a 5D with a 70-200 attached is like 5lbs. Most camera bodies are between 1-3lbs unless you’re talking cinema cameras, which are an entirely different beast.
Most people with DSLR’s or mirrorless are working with around 3lbs even with a lens.
But then why hasn't open source stepped into the breach?
This seems like the kind of thing that a single, dedicated hacker could crack wide open.
The pieces are all commodity, no? People can buy lenses independently, so you don't have to design those. Everything else should be COTS--processor, networking/cellular, display, etc.
It might not be super cheap, but it shouldn't exceed $500 on the BOM. And then people can iterate on it over time.
Creating a high performance image processing pipeline requires significant engineering effort and probably a custom SoC or DSP. You need to take care of auto focus and all the other physical configurations (shutter time, aperture, ISO), then you need to add post processing to correct for lens distortion and to do white balancing. I wish there was a FOSS camera, eg with the rather open MFT lens mount, but I don't see it happen any time soon.
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...
What software exactly are modern DSLRs or mirrorless cameras missing? I know, picking at software is a favorite past time on HN, but most of the time it is missing the point. Examples for this include: ERP systems, embeded and or safety relevant software, software in highly regulated markets or sectors. And, it seems, cameras. Computational photography is all fine, on an iPhone.
The most glaring is just good integration with phones and cloud services. From what I've seen, none of the systems that offer WiFi/Bluetooth integration are actually any good.
In terms of computational photography... I think they're fine... a lot of things can be done in post-processing, which is fine, and there's been amazing advances in autofocus and stabilization.
Pro photos are too large to be any good with syncing to a cloud service while you are on the go. My 16mp camera is considered old at this point but still makes 34mb raw files. 15 photo burst is a half a gb in other words. now measure your lte upload speed.
Agree. If I were Canon, I’d try backing a truck full of money up to Apple in order to secure an API connection through which their cameras could have the user authenticate securely with Apple and throw photos into a black box, which would spit them into the user’s iCloud Photo Library exactly like an iPhone pic. It may be too late though if Apple thinks people might delay iPhone upgrades (since those are so often camera-quality-driven) if they had a better-quality way to take pictures.
Eh. Shuffling pictures from my G9x MkII to my Android phone is pretty simple enough. I do wish the data transfer speeds were faster, but it is still stupid simple to pair to the phone. From there I can see the photos and choose which to download. Or I can select them on my camera and send them to my phone or laptop. I've often taken the camera with me on a trip with some friends and shuffled the photos into group chats the next time I had a few minutes of downtime.
The camera which is several years old at this point already has some good video stabilization. The AF is backed with good hardware, its pretty good and can even do face detection. Its far faster and more accurate than my much newer Pixel.
I wouldn't really care to do much post processing on the camera itself other than the basic filters and affects it can already do, as the interface is pretty small so it is hard to get details. If I'm really going to do some post-processing I'll be pushing it to my desktop with a large monitor so I can really see what I'm doing. But honestly if I'm going to work at it on my desktop I'll more likely just pull out the SD card and stick it in the computer and get far faster transfer speeds.
About the only feature I'd personally like would just be some kind of direct camera integration with Google Photos/OneDrive/iCloud/OwnCloud/whatever, have it just start syncing photos the moment it detects its online. That and good built-in GPS support. Apart from that I don't really know what else I'd do with more "smart" connectivity. I bought a camera like this because I wanted to manually adjust things instead of having some AI model twist and warp the photo into whatever the training data suggests looks good.
Interesting. I posted on the micro four thirds subreddit recently asking if the Panasonic app integration was any better than Olympus' (which ... isn't good) and commenters seemed to agree it was not.
I'll consider a switch to a Panasonic for my next camera, since OM Systems seems mostly moribund.
FWIW I don't know if they'll make another G9x. The most recent similar camera would probably be the G7x Mk III. I think that's probably the camera I'd get if I were to replace my G9x tomorrow. I'm a huge fan of the small size of this G9x though.
I had a Panasonic (GX85) and have since switched to Fujifilm, but I found the menu system UI and phone/app integration on the Panasonic a lot better and more usable than many other cameras I've tried (including Sony's and Fuji). The Fuji (X-T30) makes up for it on the UX front through by exposing more of the settings via external controls.
I’ve got an old t3i running magic lantern that has features camera makers still refuse to integrate, such as punching in digitally to check for focus while recording video, zebra stripes, and focus peaking. Admittedly most the stuff I want is related to video but I was sideloading firmware with these features (the aforementioned Magic Lantern) in 2013.
I’d say there are three groups: A) casual photography for capturing memories B) casual but with a desire to take better quality pictures C) enthusiastic amateurs and pros.
Now only C will buy a dedicated camera. But in the late 0’s and the 2010’s, segment B did too—lots of people bought DSLRs to get better quality pictures — often sticking to the kit lens and not getting all geeky about photography… just putting everything on automatic would still offer much better quality than a compact camera or a phone camera.
As phone cameras got better, people in this market segment switched to phones — they might just care more about the type of camera on the phone than the most casual of users do.
I think B is going to slowly come back. It's already happening among some youths with the retro-digicam phase. The ergonomics of photos-by-phone suck, and the novelty of phones as a status symbol has worn off.
The first company to really "get" the integration of point and shoot cameras into the mobile ecosystem properly will win big.
Fuji is already selling boatloads of X100Vs, and there's the Ricoh GR3, etc as well. There's a trend for ergonomic nice high end fixed lens cameras.
And for kicks go on eBay and look up the prices of used old Canon PowerShots. Have a nice condition pink one in a drawer you can make some coin. From worthless e-waste to $300 status symbol...
The market definitely decided this... Even before internet access was common on phones, or phone cameras were decent, the requests were for better cameras on phones. Because the camera you're more likely to use is the one you have with you. You're more likely to have your phone than a separate camera, and photos are often a matter of opportunity.
This makes sense because “the market” rather than a handful of cellular companies decided that people want LTE connectivity to be expensive and relegated to phones
I think they would happily negotiate that price down to nil per month, if they could be absolutely sure a 'device' on your account wasn't actually your cousin 'sharing' your cellular account to save a bit of money.
Anecdotally, I've seen it closer to $10/month for car or smartwatch, and $0 for Kindle though I'm not entirely sure if they're still shipping cellular. Tablets are closer to that $20-$30, 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.
The used ILC market is insanely good over the past few years, I'd strongly argue most interchangeable lens cameras passed the "good enough" point for most types of photography circa 2013. This has meant there is basically a decades worth of "good enough" used gear out there to buy. It's a similar story for video folks; lots of old Black Magic m43 cams available for ridiculous prices on eBay etc etc.
The gains from 2013 to today in the ILC market are much less interesting than 2003-2013 was, where we saw a pretty wild rate of improvement from the Canon 300D/Nikon D70 beginnings of a consumer market through to the modern era of digital SLRs.
My "daily driver" camera (olympus EM-1 MK II) dates from 2013, as one example of this, and still produces great results. The latest iteration of this model is not a quantum leap for most types of photography.
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.
As sibling says... they have high resolution, but terrible optics. Fixed aperture, bad in low light, and all the photos get a similar.. flat... quality to them that they then alter heavily in software with various computational photography / "AI" techniques that ... well, they're fine, and good for the market they're after, but it's limiting.
Even a 15 year old interchangeable lens camera with a lower MP sensor can produce better pictures than a phone, esp if you want to do things like background blur / bokeh which is not possible at all with a phone (though they emulate it in software).
Hell lately I've dug up an old Canon Powershot 12MP CCD digicam out of a box, and put a hacked firmware on it (that can shoot RAW and let you do proper manual control of the lens), and gotten really interesting results. That thing has a tiny sensor, but having actual aperture control makes a big diff.
I can pull out my decade old Sony and it absolutely beats a new iPhone on image quality. Zero contest. Phone images only look ok because they are mostly viewed on a small screen.
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.
> A camera should be by definition running on dedicated camera firmware, and nothing else.
Says who? There's no intrinsic reason a camera couldn't run with an Android OS. In fact, there's a lot of good reasons why you would want that - simpler development platform, reusing existing drivers, etc...
> There's no intrinsic reason a camera couldn't run with an Android OS.
There is: battery life and startup time.
DLSRs have no problem being being on standby for weeks if not months with minimal battery drain and then springing to life within a second at the press of a button. Android phones do no even come remotely close to that level of efficiency.
A lot of that comes down to the always-on radio on the phone... When I've done road trips, I've used my phone mostly as an mp3/podcast player and had it in airplane mode, and it lasted much longer than when it was just in normal operation. Standby for several days.
My M1 air is in standby for weeks at a time on a single charge. There's no reason you can't do similar with a phone. Maybe not months, but definitely for extended periods of time.
E-readers running Android can last forever on a single charge, too. The biggest drain on most phones' battery are the wireless radio (like you described) and those big, beautiful screens :) But certainly not the OS itself!
A DSLR has the added benefit of not needing a screen to be on for it to work (this is why they still have better battery life than mirror less as well). Then again, SLRs have even better battery life (it's only used for the light meter and on newer models autofocus motor and film advance).
Sure, a camera is a specialized tool doing a limited set of functions. It does not need the vast majority of functions Android offers: phone, 5g, internet, app stores... No nerd for that on a camera.
What camera needs: fast "boot", stability, reliability, ability to run offline for decades.
And no, I don't want all software being developed the way a social.media app for a phone is.
- 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.
Not always. See ricoh gr. Chunkier than a smartphone with no case? yes. but still fits in the pocket, and probably not much fatter than that same phone after the user has slapped a case and a wallet or a pop socket onto it.
Is that strictly true? If you want it as thin as today's flagship phones, sure, but if you just go for pocketability, it might not be. There are some fantastically compact, perfectly good prime lenses out there. The top end point-and-shoot lines haven't been updated in ages, but even the old ones were are a pretty damned good compromise.
That isn't an inevitability. The modem doesn't negatively affect the lenses and sensors, choices by people in companies are what result in worse sensors/lenses in phones.
My Pixel takes reasonably good images, even printed some in A4, at A3 they suffer. That is for the camera generated JPEGs, the RAW files are all but unusable.
It shows that smartphones use small, and crappy, sensors behind even smaller, and crappier, lenses. Phone got a long way, and there is a reason they replaced point-and-shoots. They are still a far cry from "real" cameras.
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.
Sony also had a product line of these kinds of devices a decade ago. You know its an old review when one of the cons listed is "No support for Windows Phone."
Mind boggling they put an EF mount over a 4/3rds sensor! M43 lenses are smaller and cheaper and the mount spec is an open standard and license free I believe.
Personally I like analog dials and like to have them configured to control ISO and shutter speed, so would have a hard time using a touch-screen only system like this. Same problem I have with the Sigma camera.
I looked at the Alice camera, and immediately had to suppress the urge to sign up for the kickstarter while I took a step back to consider that this will end up in the tech junk drawer after a few novelty outings.
It fails the same 'one extra thing to carry around and keep protected while not in use, which is most of the time' test as small mirrorless point and shoots and micro four thirds interchangeable lens cameras ( speaking as a long time OM-D user and enthusiast)
And if it's possible to affix it to my phone it will also get left home sooner rather than later, because now all of my phone accessories, mag safe chargers, car mounts, cases, etc no longer fit, which makes it cumbersome to carry around and use as a phone.
Funny I forget about my phone and barely use it, while my Olympus PEN E-PL8 goes with me everywhere :-) My phone gets used for Android Auto and 2FA and that's about it.
But to me the Alice thing is the worst of both worlds. Still need to use the stupid touchscreen LCD (which sucks for my aging eyes), doesn't have analog controls. But is still a bulkyish object. Hang anything other than a pancake lens on that, and the ergonomics are going to blow, too.
>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.
Rise in popularity is an understatement. People who ordered the X100vi on launch day 6 months ago are still months away from actually getting them. The demand is just insane, they can’t make them fast enough, even after moving production to China (which is kind of unfortunate).
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.
Right, that's something that I'm actually sometimes missing on my NX500 when using vintage lenses, but I'm not sure how relevant it is for pro amateurs in general.
It's super useful, esp if you're going after longer focal lengths and snapping birds, and if you're... like me... into manual focus or vintage lenses. My little Olympus M43 camera has an older IBIS system and it's very useful and I can definitely tell when it's off or not configured. Newer cameras have made huge improvements in this, and, yeah, autofocus ...
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.
They are proper cameras, with proper camera-sized sensors, and some model had interchangable lenses. One of them, for better or for worse, even came with Android. https://op-co.de/blog/posts/galaxy_nx/
While I tend to agree with your sentiment, this particular project resurrects bricked-by-corporate e-waste—I'd call that a win.
Plus, let's have fun while we can. On the next planet, cameras will be recyclable, limited to 12 holographic shots, and wrapped in humble cardboard. You'll have to take it to the local colony druggist for developing. Perhaps you'll browse Earth Imports section while you wait.
I would hope that we eject our ewaste into our star in a sustainable way.
The model says I'm being too speculative about our future and that we should tackle ewaste better right now. The model is usually right.
Appreciate the comment. I guess every little bit helps. Maybe I'm becoming a bit of a hater. The last project I commented on in this way had much less utility.
- 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