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I'm moderately convinced that this is all about manufacturing costs. SLRs are complex beasts with mechanical parts that need to be made to very tight tolerances
by azalemeth 5y ago
I'm moderately convinced that this is all about manufacturing costs. SLRs are complex beasts with mechanical parts that need to be made to very tight tolerances and eventually wear out. The physicist in my knows that numerical aperture, the various inevitable trade-offs made in lens design and ultimately sensor size are really what limits optical performance. Going mirrorless means that you can spend the budget on these components rather than the mirrorbox and pentaprism / pentamirror on the top and the associated electronics with the viewfinder. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is above all a business decision and not really a scientific one.
I personally like my [pentax] dSLR a lot -- the batteries last for ever as a consequence of the fact that most of the time all the power-hungry electrical components are off. The optical compensation with the viewfinder and my eye works perfectly, and I like the fact that, unlike an EVF, it will give me a human representation of how bright or dark a scene is. Put a long telephoto lens on, and watch everything get darker. I very much "feel" that the process of pressing the shutter button connects me with the physics of what I am doing in a very visceral way.
- xdennis 5y agoHow so? Aren't DSLRs cheaper than mirrorless cameras?
- pas 5y agoAre they cheaper on a cost basis or cheaper due to current supply-demand? (Ie mirrorless is in demand, DSLRs are not.)
- to11mtm 5y agoManufacturing costs are a big part of it. Its safe to assume the AF Sensors for a given segment (often as much a differentiator as megapixels in DSLRs) are fairly custom/proprietary widgets and thus more expensive, compared to Sensors where often costs are more amortized (i.e. Nikon using Sony sensors.)
- Tagbert 5y agoCost and customer preference for a more compact camera.
- jacquesm 5y agoAnd quite importantly: lighter, and longer battery life. Displays, CPU, RAM, flashlights and storage use a ton of power, anything that can save on that is useful.
- azalemeth 5y agoIronically, those are all arguments against a mirrorless camera and towards a DSLR, swapping an EVF's circuitry and screen for five lightweight mirrors. My Pentax is built like a brick and quite sturdy, but a modern low-end Canon DSLR is amazingly light and really quite surprisingly so: the 250D is 419 g.
- jacquesm 5y agoInteresting, yes, that is a good point if the camera is 'on' more than off between shots. The DSLrs that I'm familiar with all have whopping large batteries vs the mirrorless ones that come with puny little cells.
- cozzyd 5y agoDSLR's have longer battery life unless you're constantly taking pictures (and consequently are lighter since the battery can be smaller), since the sensors is typically off (whereas in mirrorless it's constantly going to the EVF). The majority of the size of the camera is going to be in the lens anyway. Mirrorless is not going to make your telephoto any smaller· The two advantages mirrorless really has over DSLR (other than... lack of a mirror which makes it cheaper) is faster photo rates (since you don't have to move the sensor, though modern DSLRs have liveview anyway, though not through the VF), and the fact that the EVF shows the effects of ISO/exposure/etc (though again, modern DSLRs have liveview, though not through the VF).
- starky 5y agoOf course it is about costs, which was driven by the fact that the technology for on sensor phase detect autofocus got good enough that the separate phase detect array was no longer required to achieve high performance cameras (the DSLRs days were numbered when the Sony A6000 was released), and probably today would result in worse performance.