The camera above is an Alpa 9D. It's an indestructible, handmade, Swiss camera from the late 1960's or early 1970's. If there is plastic on the camera I've never been able to find it. Everything is steel or some sort of magic Swiss alloy. It was built on the premise that we'd always be using film and that while film might change and lenses might get better the basic box would never change and precision shutter speeds would always be precision shutter speeds. And that's why these cameras were very, very expensive. They were expensive because we expected that they may last for thirty, forty or fifty years. That's what your money bought.
But why do we give a sh*t about indestructibility now? Why do people pass over the very, very good visual performance of Nikon D800s and Canon 5D mk111 cameras to (over)pay for D4s and 1DX cameras? You may be able to strafe them with machine guns or drop them from your Apache attack helicopter and have some sort of reasonable (but irrational) belief that they will survive intact but the reality is that almost every camera out in the market will be tossed into the trash can because its sensor has become obsolete long before any of them blow a gasket or disintegrate. Since a tiny, tiny slice of professional photographers make any sort of money shooting sports it certainly can't be pragmatism that motivates buyers. I think it's more a matter of ego or talisman worship.
I haven't bought a "Professional" camera body in quite a while. The last one I bought, brand new, was a Nikon D2Xs which I had for..........all of eighteen months. And I re-sold it because Nikon came out with a raft of much cheaper cameras that materially out performed the D2Xs in image quality. And hey, as a commercial photographer I rarely needed to take my cameras out in the rain or drop kick them into some rigorous service. And I rarely struck the camera vigorously with ball peen hammers....
Now I'm getting into the habit of buying cutting edge consumer cameras that deliver great images in more or less temporal packages. Stuff that will fall apart if you beat the hell out of it. But you know what? Everyone I know who buys D4s, 1DXs, and all the other "indestructible" cameras out there sticks them into padded cases and then inside additionally padded, wheeled cases. The cameras are coddled like babies. And why wouldn't they be? The owners paid a premium to own them....
I talked to a camera repair professional who works on all brands and all models. Guess what? In the current digital age the cameras with the lowest shutter counts, which he evaluates as trade-ins for a retail chain, are the "pro" cameras. The cameras most used? The mid-tier cameras. Cameras that deliver between 85 and 105% of the visual performance of the pro cameras at fractional prices.
The new paradigm? Buy the cameras that work well for you and just anticipate that they'll be gone in two years. Need rugged? Buy three cheap ones at $600 each ($1800) and pocket the rest of the money you would have spent on a D4. Or you can use that other $3200 dollars to buy some really nice lenses.
The Alpa 9D is like a rugged, aging biker who would look at the current crop of "pro" cameras as a bunch of "flash in the pan" poseurs. The whole rationalization of ruggedized cameras is so bogus in the digital age. I'd rather think of my cameras like laptop computers....if they lasted two years I'd be happy. If they lasted four years I'd be ecstatic. The lenses are a whole other story.
Go figure. Need a weather proof camera? Have you tried spraying your cheap Canon Rebel with some ScotchGuard? Have you heard about ZipLoc (tm) plastic bags? Indestructible? A super premium for weatherproof? Get over it....
