Thursday, October 29, 2009

Death of the DSLR Camera?

[thanks to 1001noisycameras.com]

Death of the DSLR Camera, article.

It includes an interesting brief outline of the history of SLR cameras, and he has some good points. Although I'm pretty sure the DSLR will stick around for many years yet, for professional users at least, most of the advantages are being eroded from below.

7 comments:

Walter said...

While the photo industry slaughters the last 'holy cow' - the mirror box of the reflex cameras . I have precautionary token my 'box' out of my Nikon F2 :-). As you can see it in my left hand. Here:

http://www.fotocommunity.de/pc/pc/mypics/588067/display/14261908

...

no, no, this was a joke. I bought the box in an danish photo repair workshop ... just for demonstration.

This was in 2008.09

neeraj said...

Something historical: At the end of the seventies I had a Minolta 110 Zoom SLR camera - see www.submin.com/110/collection/minolta110/.

That was an amazing piece of camera for me: Pocket film format (!), BUT a SLR with zoom ... so, it was very flexible to use and additionally small and convenient enough for me to take it with me during strolling around or traveling. I loved it. I never wanted a bigger camera. The only limitation was to make bigger prints, but that was not very important for me.

When I was picking up my pics from the shop after processing, I was often asked, how I had been able to make these fucking pics with POCKET film ... nearly nobody knew about this camera.

For example, sometimes I experimented by mounting some own additional lens system in front of it in order to make pics like through a microscope - it worked quite good, because with SLR I could always see what I would get on the film. So, I was able to make some kind of "super-macro".

Or I loved to make kaleidoscopic collages by using e.g. 20 prints of the same pic, and invented a technique to produce pentagonal or octagonal or whatevergonal collages with appropriate pentagonal or octagonal or whatevergonal frames, because you can't buy something like this ...

I had a lot of creative fun with this camera. Unfortunately it was stolen during traveling in South France, about mid eighties. After that, I had no camera for about twenty years until I started again with a Canon PowerShot A70 and now, after some years, with a PowerShot A630 ... and still I don't want a bigger camera.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Oh yes, that Minolta superzoom!! I had totally forgotten about that.

And how about that Pentax SLR with exchangeable lenses? That's a little beaut.

Still, too small format for me, I want at the very least sharp 8x10s.

But the modern Canon Ixus (Elph) will do that, and more!

neeraj said...

As far as I remember, it was mostly no problem for me to get quite sharp 8 x 10 cm or even bigger prints - o.k., it needed good lighting conditions, but it was meeting my demands ... and sometimes a little bit of blur enhances the atmosphere.

neeraj said...

Or did you mean 8 x 10 inches?

(Sometimes I had even that, but o.k., that was mostly really at the limit.)

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Yes, I meant inches.
("8x10" is such a common American expression that I've absorbed it.)

In the seventies the default prints where I was, were 9x13 cm. Later I think they became 10x15 cm.

neeraj said...

Yes, I remember now, I had mostly 10 x 15 cm prints, but at least once I had a pretty good print of about 20 x 30 cm, the pic was taken on a bright sunny summer day.