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Sony discontinues its last DSLRs
- gerikson 6y agoRIP OG Minolta Alpha-mount.
- vidanay 6y agoThat makes me wonder where my Minolta Maxxum 7000i 35mm camera and lenses are....gotta be in a box somewhere.
- jzwinck 6y agoSet a reminder for ten years from now and you can buy some great lenses for cheap.
- yazantapuz 6y agoExactly this. I have a A100 with several Minolta lenses bought online for a few bucks.
- mnw21cam 6y agoI had a Konika-Minolta 5D, which was a great camera for its time. After taking 55,000 photos the shutter mechanism broke, so a couple of years ago I thought about buying a Sony camera that could take my old lenses. Then I realised that actually all my old lenses were really bad quality, and an A7-III would need an adapter for them anyway. The only one that was vaguely decent was an old 400mm prime lens, but even that one I picked up for a pittance on Ebay a decade ago. So, I bought a Nikon. The modern lenses I have bought for that are miles better than the old lenses I had on my old camera.
- jrockway 6y agoThe first SLR I had growing up was a used Minolta with that mount. You can probably buy great lenses for cheap right now. (Yes, you'll have to turn a ring on the lens to focus them. It's not the worst thing in the world.)
- wl 6y agoJust keep in mind that those older Minolta lenses were designed for 35mm film. They'll be tend to be soft when coupled with a 36 megapixel full frame sensor, at least compared to modern lenses designed for high resolution sensors.
- jrockway 6y agoI think that if you're buying used lenses from the 80s, you probably didn't spring for the 36 megapixel full-frame camera.
- petepete 6y agoI was actually surprised they were still selling them. Have barely heard a thing since the (amazing) α99 II - that must be six years ago at least. Aeons in camera years.
- perardi 6y ago[pushes glasses up nose] That’s arguably not an SLR. Sort of. It’s an SLT. Used that neat semi-transparent non-moving mirror to simultaneously directs light to the imaging sensor and the phase-detect sensor. https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sony-alpha-slt-a99 https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sony-alpha-slt-a99
- ur-whale 6y agoThe question being of course: is that in any way a loss? My (limited) understanding being that mirrorless tech. has basically whooped moving-mirror tech. 's behind in a major way. Any photographer care to comment on why that might not be the case?
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y agoI'm not a pro photographer but I do enjoy amateur stuff. In terms of the newest cameras the DSLRs have essentially no advantages and many disadvantages. The one major thing you could cite as an advantage is the quality of the picture you see when looking in the viewfinder. But for most folks that isn't enough to make up for the drawbacks of reflex cameras.
- KMnO4 6y agoQuality isn’t overly important through the viewfinder. You’re just using it for composition. Whereas an EVF can fairly accurately show you composition, exposure at current settings, any sort of raster graphic they want on the screen (eg the head silhouette to frame passport shots), etc. My biggest gripe with the EVF is that it kinda sucks for astrophotography. I have to crank the ISO way up, take a test shot, and then turn it down before a long exposure. Our eyes are just much better at focusing on dim points in the sky.
- AzN1337c0d3r 6y agoNot sure what camera you use, but in Canon's terminology you can turn off exposure simulation which will make the image through the EVF look like a correctly exposed image with ISO cranked way up but you can set your shot ISO as low as you want.
- jzwinck 6y agoMost professional photographers who used DSLRs ten years ago are still using them. Electronic viewfinders are fundamentally inferior in terms of the viewing experience and battery life, but have other pluses like light weight, low cost and configurability (all of which amateurs prioritize more than professionals). It is not a huge loss though, because pros almost exclusively buy their DSLRs from Canon and Nikon.
- pmhpereira 6y agoDiscussion from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27052038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27052038
- jcims 6y agoDoes anyone have the inside scoop on why Sony seemingly abandoned the NEX platform? I bought the NEX6 in 2013, it was released at the end of 2012 and the last firmware update is v1.03 released ~15 months later. Based on my experience, they didn't run out of bugs to fix. The alpha 6000 was released in 2014 and the last firmware update is 3.21 released in 2019.
- perardi 6y agoSony’s entire APS-C storyline is a bit fuzzy. (Honestly, Canon and Nikon don’t exactly tell a coherent story there either…) It’s really unclear if they ever want to fully flesh out the lens line for that sensor size, and they don’t seem to have much enthusiasm for the line. Honestly, they seem to just want to sell full-frame.
- morsch 6y agoThey abandoned the NEX branding a long time ago, but they released a couple of APS-C Alphas at the end of 2019. I bet there are more to come, unless they're going to drop the <$1000 consumer market.
- jcims 6y agoI’m just wondering why I spent 1200 bucks on a camera that got three firmware updates and then nothing nothing else from the manufacturer. The software stack on these things is just getting bigger and it doesn’t give me any confidence to buy another Sony in the future.
- zokier 6y agoLike with most products, you bought for what it was at the moment of sale. Buying a buggy product and hoping that it will get fixed afterwards is just a fools errand in general.
- formerly_proven 6y agoNikon, Canon and others continue releasing updates for a long time, though. If anything Sony is the odd one in this market.
- skytreader 6y ago> Sony appears to have quietly stopped selling its A-mount DSLR cameras I just hate that Sony can't be bothered to give an explicit send-off to the A-mount line. Coupled with their abysmal customer service reputation, this really makes Sony my textbook example of a faceless, uncaring $BIGCORP. (Oh should I call them $ONY now?) It's really such a shame since I like their products, otherwise. I've owned an SLT-A35 since 2011. Being the first interchangeable lens camera I bought, this purchase was a declaration of investment in Sony's ecosystem. Four or five years later, the A-mount line grew stale in favor of the mirrorless line. 2015-2016 was confusing because Sony won't just admit their roadmap for the A-mount. I remember they did release a few more A-mounts but it was either at the very high end or was Japan-only. FWIW, at least I scored one great deal because camera shops started to practically give away their A-mount inventory. And I got a mount adapter that I now use with an a6K. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- deepstack 6y agoisn't DSLR pretty much dominated by Canon and Nikon now days. Make sense Sony doesn't want to do it any more.
- alistairSH 6y agoYes, but even Canon is putting most (or all) of it's R&D into mirrorless (bodies and lenses for the new full-frame, mirrorless RF mount system). I expect they'll slowly stop releasing new DSLRs over the coming years. And FWIW, a good friend of mine is a pro photographer and said he'll likely not buy any new DSLR bodies. But, he's still a few years away from needing a new body. Not to mention has north of $30k in glass, so would still run an RF with adapter for quite some time.
- glitchc 6y agoThis is unsurprising. Mirrorless bodies are less complicated overall, ergo cheaper to produce, leading to better profit margins. Camera makers are after all in the business of making money.
- fomine3 6y agoBut mirrorless is harder to break so possibly is it not good for repair department?
- dagmx 6y agoYes, but also Sony was an early mover into mirrorless (APS-C and FF) where they've had considerably more success. Most Sony users knew the Axx series (SLR/SLT) were dead when the A7 (mirrorless) released. Sony basically abandoned everything else to focus on their mirrorless platform and it gave them a huge market presence.
- perardi 6y agoAs a camera industry meta-commentary, it sure seems like the Big 3 really only want to sell full-frame cameras. Sony, Canon, Nikon, they seem to have roadmaps for a full range of lenses for full-frame, from wide-angle to super-telephoto. But APS-C? Meh. It’s a little confusing as to what works with what (hi, Canon, with your EF-M mount), and given that they never fully fleshed out a set of compact-but-performant sports lenses for that sensor size…it all seems perfunctory. They seem to want to only sell full-frame, as that’s where the sweet meat of the margins can still be found in camera sales. All their APS-C cameras feel like “get the value buyer in the door”, but, that seemingly hampers growing into the rest of the system, as they only have a middling set of crop sensor lenses.
- Someone1234 6y agoThey want to differentiate themselves as much as possible from smartphones to survive. As smartphones have continued to get better (first via optics, then via software/computational processing) it has been the physics that has kept full frame (and medium format) relevant. Personally I was a huge fan of m4/3 for the lower weight/smaller/open format interchangeable lens system but one cannot deny the cross-over between it and smartphones is perhaps too close to survive (Olympus is already out). APS-C isn't as bad as m4/3, but why invest tons of resources/time into a format that can also get swallowed by the megafauna that is smartphones (via e.g. periscope lenses)? Instead, they can offer consumer grade/entry level FF cameras, with no lens system dilution or headaches trying to implement an inter-compatible flange focal distance (between APS-C/FF).
- glitchc 6y agoAPS-C was a compromise format. It aided in making both bodies and lenses smaller and lighter, thereby enabling a cheaper product that could be marketed at the consumer level (amateur and family photogs). Pros who came from the film world almost entirely migrated to the full-frame format, noting that full-frame is actually smaller than 35 mm film, and 35 mm film was on the lower end of film size itself (compared to medium and large formats).
- brudgers 6y ago
- acomjean 6y agoFor those that don’t know. DSLR or Digital Single Lens Reflex. When you look through the viewfinder your looking through the lens due to a mirror and a prism that sits on top of the camera. When you take a picture the mirror flips out of the way and the image goes straight onto the film/sensor (after the shutter opens for a precise amount of time). There was some interesting tricks with light path to the the autofocus sensor. The prism is great because it un reverses the image. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_single-lens_reflex_camera https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_single-lens_reflex_c... Because of digital you can read the sensor and now show the image in a small screen in the viewfinder instead.
- rythie 6y agoThe ones Sony have discontinued recently, actually have a fixed mirror, known as SLT (though they can also be still called DSLRs).
- brudgers 6y agoTypical SLR cameras use a pentaprism which reverses both top and bottom and left and right optical paths to orient the image in the viewfinder to match the orientation we experience without it. However, single lens reflex cameras without a pentaprism are not unknown. [1] They typically correct top-bottom orientation leaving left-right reversed. They are simpler, needing only a single mirrored surface. Most twin-lens reflex cameras also operate this way. Though SLR designs became popular, rangefinder cameras avoid a great deal of the complexity and bulk of SLR designs at the potential expense of parallax issues. On the positive side, a rangefinder camera will typically allow seeing elements outside of the film area and tend to be more compact. One reason for Lecia cameras popularity. [1]: The Graflex reflex cameras are an example, http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Graflex_reflex_models http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Graflex_reflex_models
- neogodless 6y agoIn the early 2000s, digital cameras were a wonder for me, and given the cost, it wasn't hard to look upmarket just a bit and get a DSLR and go down the rabbit hole looking for lenses. But I think DSLR manufacturers were buoyed by consumer digital camera sales, which evaporated once smartphone cameras got good enough. Now DSLR usage is either professional or niche (more so). I know I only reach for my Pentax K3-II for special occasions or special uses, like trying to capture wildlife (which is too far away and too fast for most smartphone captures.) But Pentax seems to be a (nearly) dead brand in this space. If I wanted to keep doodling in the hobby, I'd probably eventually have to switch to mirrorless or switch to the Canon/Nikon duopoly. I would greatly miss the rugged feel, durability and weather resistance in my Pentax body and lenses.