Just a few camera observations of late. Yeah, it's about Sony versus everyone in the DSLR market.

I'm feeling a bit philosophical today about cameras. I'm a gear head and I think, with my logical brain, that I should just be able to go over to the DXOmark site and scroll through the list of cameras that ranks them from "best" sensor to "worst" sensor, grab one of the cameras with the highest ranking (Nikon D810, Sony A7R2) and call it a day. If all that mattered to anyone was image quality (as everyone constantly says) then those two cameras would be selling like gang busters. The Nikon D610 and D750 would rake in some good cash among the less well-heeled, but no less fastidious, while the rest of the market would shrivel and die. But that doesn't seem to be what the irrational camera buying market is doing right now.

Of course, if we look at the big picture of all buyers; moms and dads with young soccer players, retirees on the trip of a lifetime, eager eyed students getting a first camera, etc. We can see that the majority of camera buyers don't subscribe to the idea that ultimate image quality is the overriding consideration for ownership. But, then, I am speaking directly to us. To me. To the ardent hobbyists. To the people who can tell you the number of custom setting channels on the Nikon D5300 even though they currently shoot with a Fuji XT-1. You know, the hard core. The real camera users.

Everyone I know who falls into our camp seems to be relentlessly trading or selling off gear with the intention of moving to some sort of mirrorless camera. When Panasonic and Olympus were really the only two pioneers, howling in the wilderness, and being snickered at by the bourgeoisie on DP Review, it was tougher to rationalize a smaller sensor, 12 megapixels in the face of 24, and a mess of noise at any of the higher ISO settings. Owners of professional DSLR cameras smirked about the different in continuous auto focus capabilities as well as buffer depth. And don't get me started about the hordes of people who bitched about the "primitive" state of electronic viewfinders.

Now these same critics are shifting in droves to mirrorless cameras. Not necessarily the models offered by the two pioneers but certainly mirrorless cameras as a subset. What the hell happened? Probably exactly what I predicted back in 2012----some company had the brains and the balls to switch their entire full frame product line to mirrorless cameras and, consequently, they are taking the market by storm and doing it without a hint of competition from any other full frame camera maker.

Yeah. It's those crazy people over at Sony. The Sony A7 series is changing everything when it comes to high end camera buying. We who fear change can point out to anyone who will listen about how crappy the Sony batteries are while our Nikon and Canon batteries are capable of lasting weeks or months between charges. The giant-handed among us can moan about the tiny, "ungrippable" camera bodies. The casual reader of sports photography blogs and websites can regale a younger generation with comparisons in focusing speed and the ever elusive, "lock-on" powers of traditional cameras. And some whiny Wallys will continue to talk about "the crystal-like clarity of the optical finder." Like a picture window into the world.....

None of that matters to the people who've used a great EVF finder and had the now mainstream (and revolutionary) experience of being about to look through the little peephole on the back of the camera and see EXACTLY what they will get when they push the shutter button. It's a method of viewing that takes the STUPID out picture taking, along with the mystery. And it's the removal of mystery, and secret insider handshakes that steams some of us to no end. You see, we want everything to stay as it is. We've had to master things like metering and white balance just as computer geeks mastered SCSI connections in the 1990's, and we feel as though that should be part of the initiation, part of the hazing, in order to become a "real" photographer.

As more and more people (camera buying "unwashed" public at large) get chances to look through the new, magic peephole into ever better EVFs there's no way, even with hundreds of thousands of pounds per square inch of resistance to change, that we'll ever get this particular Pandora's Box closed again.

It's only a matter of time before Canon (the Chrysler LeBaron of cameras makers) and Nikon (the self-proclaimed smartest guys in the room) come to grips with the accelerating shift in taste and the adaptation of superior (and cheaper to make) technology in cameras and start introducing EVFs in their regular lines. Not some bullshit line of cameras meant to be marketed into a niche in a half-assed sort of way.

Here's how it will happen: The next generation of entry level DSLRs from Nikon and Canon will both "feature" a new EVF viewing "experience." They'll keep their lens mounts the same and just eliminate the mirrors. Sony will help Nikon, at least, with PD-AF elements on the sensors and rank and file consumers will notice no perceivable hits on AF performance. But they will love the ability to pre-chimp. You already see it everywhere. Half the people with entry level cameras use them all the time in live view. They don't like to look into the finders because they can never predict how that image in the OVF will look after the cameras do their mysterious work.

Once the "feature" is rolled out to the base consumer a new marketing tactic will be to tout ever improving EVFs as market differentiators. "our EVF has 3 million dots." "our newest EVF has five million dots so you can count the silk threads in your ascot." "Our EVF responds to change at the speed of light." "With our EVF, combined with our 13th generation wi-fi, you can now watch all of your favorite TV shows through the finder, or click instantly to capture images.." 

The problem for everyone in the camera business is that Sony is just about to own the entire serious camera EVF market. Right now, today, they make three different full frame cameras, each with a great EVF, two with state of the art, 4K video performance. And they own a large part of what's left of the point and shoot marketing (RX100IV) and the bridge camera market (RX10ii) and the current highest end, high res advertising cameras, the A7R2.

If Nikon and Canon don't move now: today: immediately, to buy into what is a profound and seismic change in the way we all use our cameras then, in a few years, we won't even have the burden of having to choose between brands. At that point, if you are looking for a full frame camera it will be a Sony.

I have resisted so far. I don't like the sound of the shutter in the one body that seems cost effective and interesting to a portrait photographer (the A7II). I don't like the battery situation in the one camera definitely aimed at those who want to produce video (the A7S2) and I'm not interested in spending the extra cash for the high res model in the line up. Not when what I have still works. I am, after all, in that cohort of users who did have to learn the hard way.

Interesting data points for me were: the observation of so many Sony A7 series users at SXSW when the years before they were almost non-existent. Also interesting to me that my local camera store contact tells me that people (with money and expertise) are switching to the mirrorless Sony product from their traditional tools at an ever increasing rate. 2 to 1 or 3 to 1 over the traditionals...

I'm not (yet) a Sony fanboy. I felt a bit burned by their defecto abandonment of the translucent mirror series of cameras (a77, a99). They keep that system lingering on life support. I am sure they intend to pull a "Samsung" on the line but they seem to be doing it through a long campaign of attrition and the hopes that the market in general is so camera ADHD that everyone will have switched away to other cameras before they have to actively pull the plug and deal with the marketing fall out. I'm pretty sure Samsung has contaminated their camera marketing topsoil for at least a generation....Not an event lost on Sony's marketers.

I'm writing this more or less to strongly suggest to Nikon (and Canon) that the EVF will be the make it or break it feature for them going forward and that the time for reckless caution is past. I'd like that next D8X0 to have a beautiful and enormous EVF. Hell, if it makes focusing and exposure assessment that much better which user in their right mind would resist?

edited later. Here's what I wrote back in 2012 for TheOnlinePhotographer: http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2012/05/kirks-take-electronic-viewfinders.html

A Post SXSW Sunday Morning Walk Through Downtown with a Bag of Old Lenses. March 20.

New Painting at the Graffiti Wall. Olympus 40mm f.14 Pen F lens.

The big SXSW party is over. The airport was already a zoo at 4:30 a.m. this morning when we dropped Ben off for his 5:45 a.m. flight. Cars were backed up from the terminal at the drop off. Lines at the SkyCap stations were long and serpentine; littered with luggage. The lines inside, at the TSA security checks, were even longer. Ben nearly missed his flight. He made it to the gate with minutes to spare. 

We had a cold front move in last night and the temperatures this morning were in the lower 40's. After the sun came up, and the day warmed up a bit, I decided to go back downtown and see what the city looked like in the aftermath of a party for 200,000 of our new "best friends." 

Lately I have missed using the little gems in my Pen F (original film version) lens collection. I thought that today would be good day to give them a bit of a workout so I dropped four lenses into my smallest camera bag. I selected the 20mm f3.5, the 38mm f1.8, the 40mm f1.4 and the 60mm f1.5. All wonderfully clear and very compact. Theses are all metal, manual focus lenses built in the late 1960's and early 1970's. 

I'd driven past the Graffiti Wall on North Lamar earlier in the week and it was snarled with traffic and saturated with tourists. I thought I'd start there today and see if anyone was up and around before noon. Refreshingly, most of the people in attendance were there to paint. The ones who were there to watch or experience the wall for the first time seemed to be mostly locals. Traffic was light. The mood was jovial. 

I'm always interested in the performance of my ancient set of Olympus lenses with newer and newer cameras because I think of them as high performance optics and I like to see what can be squeezed out of them as camera sensors improve. Today I chose to use a Sony a6000 camera body. I was delighted with the results. 

This is the first time I've gotten really exemplary performance out of the 20mm lens. 

Temporary Event Signage. It's all getting stripped off now. 

Shot with the 40mm f1.4 lens.

The exemplary lens of the batch seems to be the 40mm f1.4 lens. It's tiny. Nearly the size of the new Olympus 45mm f1.8 or the Panasonic 42.5mm f1.7. I shot the signage above at the close focusing limit of the Pen F 40mm and also shot at f2.0. I thought I was seeing high sharpness without post processing so while I was sorting images I enlarged this one, and the one below, to 100% (24 megapixel sensor) and was amazed at the incisive sharpness on the "cinamaker" sign. I can't imagine another lens could be better. 

Temporary Event Signage. It's all getting stripped off now. 

Shot with the 40mm f1.4 lens.

The interesting thing about many older lenses is that they were initially tested and used with cameras that lacked anything like the performance in even the cheapest cameras out today. When I used these lenses on their original Pen F film cameras we knew that a half frame of Tri-X was probably the limiting factor in overall system performance but we assumed that the lenses were only as good as they needed to be to out resolve the files of their time (the 1960's and 1970's). Since we were limited to using them with a small format film camera we had no way of knowing what their full potential might be.

When I used them with the first generations of Olympus micro four thirds digital cameras (for me, the EP-2) I saw that the lenses were at least capable of resolving up to that standard (12 megapixels). The lenses also showed performance improvements in the last two generations of Olympus cameras with 16 megapixel sensors. Surely, I thought, this would be the bar at which the lens performance would be exceeded by the much higher resolution of OMD cameras. But every time I try them on a higher performance (as expressed in image quality) camera I find that, for the most part, the lenses continue to "keep" improving; or, at least showing more and more of the potential they have always had....

Industrial Ports. New Building at Seaholm.

Pen F 20mm f3.5 lens.

The real surprise for me was the performance of the 20mm f3.5. It has a bit of barrel distortion that's easily corrected in Lightroom's lens correction menu but the thing that impressed me is the high sharpness and even tonality I saw today. The last time I used this lens was on the front of an EPL camera and the lower resolution, combined with no focus peaking, as well as the sensor technology of the time, made the system slow to handle and not especially compelling. The edges never looked right and there was color shift or contamination in the corners and edges. Today, with the higher resolution camera, sensors designed for wider lenses used closer to the sensors,  and good focus peaking, the 20mm seems to keep  surprising me with its potential. It's a tiny lens and not a fast aperture one but there is something really great about being able to manually focus these lenses, use them at medium to small f-stops and not have to worry about endlessly refocusing them. Once set, and using manual exposure, it would hard to imagine a faster operating combination. That, and at f8.0 and 20mm the depth of field is quite deep.

Graffiti Wall. Pen F 38mm f1.8 lens.

I was originally inspired to pull out the Olympus Pen F lenses and work with them on an a6000 after reading Andrew Reid's column on EOSHD.com about the pair. Here's what he says about the 38mm Pen lens: 

"Now this lens has nothing to do with the digital PEN, it is the original fast portrait prime for the old 1970’s PEN camera, a half-frame 35mm format rangefinder style camera. The lens is wider and smaller than the smallest 50mm primes for SLRs like the Asahi Takumar Pentax 55mm F1.8. And it is quite a character. It is ultra sharp wide open, almost right up there with a Zeiss or Leica rangefinder lens."

Here is a link to the entirety of Andrew's article: http://www.eoshd.com/2011/10/nex-lenses-too-big-no-fast-pancakes-meet-the-olympus-pen-f-38mm-f1-8/

At any rate I'd been interested in seeing how the newer sensor in the a6000 worked with the 38mm lens so I acquired a camera and put on the lens with a pen-to-nex adapter. The last real test I had done with the Pen F lenses on a Sony APS-C camera were done with a Nex-7 and something about that particular sensor caused some color artifacting with the wider Pen F lenses. Swaths of the Nex-7 frames would have magenta discolorations; mostly near the tops and sides of the frame. 

What I found today was a much different picture. (Puns always intended...). In testing the 20mm, the 24mm f2.8 and the 38mm 1.8 I saw no signs of weird color casts and no big chromatic aberrations or purple fringing. Just acres and acres of resolution.

The 38mm focal length is similar in angle of view to a 58 mm lens on a full frame camera. I would quibble a bit with Andrew's assessment that the lens is critically sharp, wide open, but I will confirm that from f2.8 to f8..0 it outperforms nearly every modern AF lens in the same focal length ballpark.

It's a different kind of sharpness. Almost a reckless sharpness combined with good contrast, and nano-acuity. The sharpness seems deeper and less brittle, to my eyes, than more current lenses. 

Apparently, Olympus didn't just get good at making great lenses; they've been doing it for quite some time.  Now they've just figured out how to cut corners that most people might not notice....

38mm f1.8

38mnm f1.8

38mm f1.8 lens.

20mm f3.5 lens.

38mm f1.8 lens.

38mm f1.8 lens.

20mm f3.5 lens.

40mm f1.4 lens.

I resisted writing this last part for a while. I took a walk. I took a nap with the dog. But I felt compelled to say this:

With my in-depth use of Nikon manual focus "classics" on a Nikon D810 and D750, and my current testing of cherry picked Pen F lenses from 45 years ago, I have come to the conclusion that the older lenses are as good or better than all but the most premium lenses on offer today in most camera systems. It's true that you'll be trading off things like auto focus and lens supplied image stabilization but I'm okay with that. 

If you turn off the software inflicted image corrections provided to most maker's "general audience" lenses and compare them directly to the lenses I'm referencing above I think you'll be shocked to see just how little improvement has actually been delivered in the past 30 to 40 years of lens making and selling. While my ancient 20mm 3.5 Pen F lens has a bit of (correctable) barrel distortion the uncorrected distortions of dozens of current Canon, Nikon, Sony and m4:3 lenses are much more egregious. The little computers in our cameras that make files into Jpegs are throwing away image edges, and tons of pixels in the corners of images, just to get the files to look nearly as good as the ones coming out of ancient lenses. The same goes for corrections in raw files in desktop post production. We only overlook this now because we have enough pixels to throw away that we don't notice the enormity (and the costs) of these fixes until we go to print images quite large. 

I know camera sensors have gotten better and better but as the sensors have gotten better I think it's become a dodge or a crutch that allows camera and lens makers to make crappier and cheaper to produce lens designs which they then, knowingly, fix in-camera with computational cosmetics that depend on sheer pixel quantity to hide the side effects. 

I shot the image of the cake, above with an absolutely ancient Pen F 40mm lens. Handheld with no image stabilization and at a fairly wide (though unrecorded) aperture. When I clicked in to look at the 100% sample I was stunned at the level of detail and the cuttingly sharp rendition the lens provided. Better than my current collection of plastic barreled, modern lenses? In their own way.....yes. And more fun to shoot with as well. We've come a long way with digital camera but lenses? Not so much. 

Well, look at the handheld image, shot through a glass window, nearly wide open and tell me what you think.... here's a one hundred percent detail. Click to blow it up.... your call: