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I do think times have changed though, DPReviews fortunes arguably have mirrored the fortunes of the ILC (interchangeable lens camera) market. The site (along wi

by giobox 4y ago

I do think times have changed though, DPReviews fortunes arguably have mirrored the fortunes of the ILC (interchangeable lens camera) market. The site (along with flickr.com...) was a daily visit for me 15 years ago at the height of the DSLR boom, but I honestly now can't remember the last time I checked. ILC/DSLR annual sales volume peaked in ~2010 I believe, and has rapidly declined ever since really, another victim of the rapid pace of improvement in smartphones. If we are being blunt, Amazon bought dpreview to use as a sales funnel for DSLRs and cameras, which they simply don't sell so much of anymore. A sad day though. I know dpreview covers cameras beyond ILCs, but ILC reviews where always by far the most popular content on the site - in the DSLR boom/Phil Askey years it simply was the gold standard in DSLR reviews. I still remember pouring over the classic battle between Canon's 300D and Nikon's D70 for entry level 6mp DSLR supremacy constantly on dpreview circa 2003/4.

asdff 4y ago
The thing is, there's another boom currently going on. The mirrorless boom, and this site is the gold standard for that one as well. Now there is no home, and its much harder to gleam the differences that are actually meaningful between these many mirrorless cameras (and new dslrs that do get made).
- bradlys 4y ago
  a "boom" is an overstatement. The camera industry overall is dying and struggling. We're down to something like 10% of camera sales from 2010. There is no boom. There is a transition from DSLR to mirrorless for the few existing dedicated camera photographers out there.
  - cozzyd 4y ago
    10% camera sales or 10% ILC sales? The point and click market is obviously irrelevant for a mirrorless boom.
    - klodolph 4y ago
      Point and shoot peaked in 2010, I think. Camera sales have dropped by something like 90% since 2010, if you exclude smartphones. Any “boom” is just consumers shuffling around within a collapsing market.
  - noncoml 4y ago
    Definitely not a boom, but there is still a sizable niche community that I would thought to be big enough to support a good website. For example there is no boom of home audio systems anymore, but there are enough audiophiles to support a number of sites and magazines
  - johnvanommen 4y ago
    I have a $600 DSLR that I bought at Costco on a whim, fifteen years ago. Once in a blue moon I look at my old photos and realize they just look night and day better than anything I've taken in the last decade. Camera phone lenses do alright when it's sunny outside, but DSLRs kill it when it comes to medium and low light.
    - FollowingTheDao 4y ago
      The only people who think Smartphone Cameras take better pictures than SLRs are not photographers. It is not just low light, it is depth of field, exposure control, the minimization or absence of computed exposures. I have an iPhone 13 Pro Max and only shot in RAW mode. That is the best I can do. Saving money fro a mirrorless camera so i can start shooting again.
      - tonyarkles 4y ago
        > The only people who think Smartphone Cameras take better pictures than SLRs are not photographers. Amateur photographer here, currently have a Canon 80D and a 20-year collection of medium-quality lenses. You're completely right. The photos that this thing takes are miles ahead of my iPhone 12 Pro; you just can't beat a sensor with big pixels and an aperture that's 10-100x (? I don't know the actual ratio) larger than a smartphone lens. But the one nuance is the old saying "the best camera in the world is the one you've got with you"; I have some beautiful shots from this camera, and the 20D before it, and the Rebel XT before it, but some of my absolute favourites were shot on a smartphone because it was in my pocket at the right time and the DSLR was at home in the bag.
      - astrange 4y ago
        SLRs don't take "better" photos, they take more detailed photos. The best photo is the one you actually took because you had the camera on you and didn't miss the shot. And if you want the most detailed photo, SLRs are not the highest quality cameras either when you could rent a Fujifilm GFX 100.
        WWLink 4y ago
  - asdff 4y ago
    Its enough of a boom for a small company like fujifilm to justify producing more cameras and lenses and even start up and grow a medium format mirrorless ecosystem. Fujifilm in particular struggles to keep up with demand which is probably not easy given global shortages, but it goes to show there is a market. It's not the market it was in 1995 or 2005, but its a market no less because there's always a demand for the best image technolgy can do. Phone cameras will always look worse than their contemporary full size counterparts just due to physics, so the pros and prosumers will always be in demand of a dedicated rig even if their iphone looks like a spider on the back. Not to mention even today just from an OS standpoint, no phone has feature parity with even the first dslr released since phone manufacturers "childproof" camera features that pro camera manufacturers assume you don't need your hand held to use. Usually you have to resort to a third party app if you want to set a manual exposure, you know, something any photographer since 1860 could do that we now deem to be "too advanced" for modern humans.
    - bydo 4y ago
      Fujifilm is a twenty billion dollar company. Imaging is just a hobby for them. Though I agree that if it were truly hemorrhaging them money, they'd have sold it (like Minolta or Pentax) or spun it out into its own entity (like Olympus).
  - arghwhat 4y ago
    The point-and-shoot market collapsed, but the dslr market is not nearly as dramatically affected with 2010 numbers not too far off 2018 numbers based on statista charts[1]. On the other hand, mirrorless is starting to show growth[2]. Looking at the overall camera-sales are misleading, especially considering that it largely shuffled numbers around within big companies: A Samsung point-and-shoot with a Samsung sensor became a Samsung smartphone with a Samsung sensor, selling even more units with the camera still being a primary selling point. --- [1]: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4242091-why-nikon-and-canon-should-lower-prices-of-lenses-and-camera-accessories https://seekingalpha.com/article/4242091-why-nikon-and-canon... [2]: https://petapixel.com/2023/02/15/2022-was-officially-the-year-of-the-mirrorless-camera/ https://petapixel.com/2023/02/15/2022-was-officially-the-yea... (using CIPA data)
    - asdff 4y ago
      Also, certain camera brands are less affected than others. Fuji is probably doing better than its ever done these days and has trouble keeping inventory in stock from demand, whereas nikon is at a historic low.
    - dukeyukey 4y ago
      I'm kinda curious why though, and I'm speaking as someone who bought a mirrorless camera (I think my first camera ever?) about a year ago.
  - gsich 4y ago
    And with good reason. While I like shooting with DSLM some software and hardware parts are just bad. No GPS. The cheapest Android phone from 5 years ago has this. I don't want to use the shitty app to get geoinformation. Yes, battery lifetime - no need to enable it by default. No embedded storage. With SSD prices cheap as now, add some 64 or 128GB storage. Keep the card slot. More computational stuff, no need for enabling it by default, but stuff like taking 10 pictures, then selecting the best one automatically (or whatever the camera thinks is best). Additional: enable better tethering. On my Nikon Z7 I still can't set everything from the computer. Some settings depend on the mode (P,A,S,M) - why? Nobody knows. If no flash, at least have some light.
    - Lammy 4y ago
      They exist! My YN455 interchangeable-lens Android camera has all of those things. It uses the same 20MP MFT sensor as my PEN-F and I love it a lot: https://www.yongnuomall.com/product/detail/16254 https://www.yongnuomall.com/product/detail/16254
      - outofpaper 4y ago
        Does that have a cell modem? An m4/3 camera with wifi and cell data sounds amazing?
        Lammy 4y ago
        Yes, I use it on Mint (T-Mobile). Some screenshots I took just now: https://imgur.com/a/x8TU7o3 https://imgur.com/a/x8TU7o3 It's picky about certain zooms, but it is fantastic with all of my primes (Lumix 20mm F1.7 ASPH and SIGMA 56mm F1.4 DC DN being my favs) and with any of my cine lenses. It's fine for stills as long as I can stand the e-shutter, but I love it for video. Unfortunately I can't seem to share an accurate video sample because Youtube's recompression is adding a ton of horrible choppiness that isn't in the actual camera output: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCbnbKvNZlg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCbnbKvNZlg (Shot on LAOWA 6mm T2.1 Zero-D Cine. Warning: loud!!)
  - JenrHywy 4y ago
    And yet, popular cameras like the Fujifilm X100V are selling for above retail because demand is outstripping supply.
- adrr 4y ago
  It isn't a boom. It is just a transition from DSRL/video cameras to mirrorless. Market is consolidating around mirrorless for everything from photography to video. Hire a wedding photography and a wedding videographer today, they may have the same equipment.
  - thomasjb 4y ago
    I believe that TLRs are going to make a resurgence and wipe out this mirrorless fad
    - Krisando 4y ago
      I have yet to see a TLR in real life.
- WWLink 4y ago
  Yea now we're going to have to put up with youtubers trying to build a brand and shove their personality into every review they make. :(
pjc50 4y ago
Gloomy prediction: based on Samsung Moongate, the next logical step after the smartphone camera replacing the DSLR is AI replacing the smartphone camera. Or at least substituting for underlying camera quality. Take a 10MP image and have the AI fill in the detail. Or remove detail (see the google advert for editing people out of your holiday photos). Or put in some detail that wasn't there.
- constantlm 4y ago
  This is already the case with cameras in consumer phones.
- layer8 4y ago
  Smartphone photos are already heavily ML-processed, with actual details and colors being replaced by what the model thinks looks best. The moon thing was just the most blatant example.
  - foldr 4y ago
    I haven’t noticed any invented details or colors in smartphone photos that I’ve taken myself. Most of the claims of this that I’ve seen online are not very convincing. Of course you sometimes get artifacts from sharpening and de-Bayering, but those can occur with any digital camera.
  - astrange 4y ago
    No kind of camera sees "actual colors", and neither do your eyes; the actual colors are the same day or night but that doesn't mean you can see them at night. When there is light, the colors you see depend on how well you're adapted to its white point.
- dylan604 4y ago
  new from Samsung. it's a black box perfectly square just to make Jobs turn over in his grave. there are no lenses, but it's the most incredible camera you've ever seen. it has a microphone where you tell it the image you want... "I want to see a picture with me at the Grand Canyon with nobody else in the shot at sunset after storm has just passed with a rainbow in the background" waits a few seconds, boom. post to social, get lots of envious comments about my cool vacation.
Zak 4y ago
Consumer fixed-lens cameras are much more dead as a market than ILCs, and those made up the bulk of camera sales. Almost everyone who isn't doing photography as a profession or serious hobby is satisfied with smartphone cameras now.
- op00to 4y ago
  I used to shoot only medium and large format film. Maybe 3-4 years ago, I realized I can do everything I want with my phone camera.
  - antisthenes 4y ago
    If you honestly think your phone camera is a valid replacement for medium/large format film, then you were never serious about photography in the first place. For all their improvements, smartphones are still extremely limited by sensor size and the size of optics. Those are terrible, compared to even the entry level DSLRs. I'm glad it works for your use case (although I can't imagine what that is), but any decent photographer will be able to tell a smartphone picture from a picture taken with good optics and a DSLR. It's just that the market for those photos has also shrunk and the masses are happy with their instagram filter drivel.
    - acyou 4y ago
      The best camera is the one you have ready.
    - silisili 4y ago
      The vast, vast, vast majority of pictures are viewed on a 6ish inch screen. You'll have real trouble telling much difference there. Now if you're blowing things up into a poster, it becomes much more apparent, granted, but it's not a common use case.
      - modzu 4y ago
        not only that, but Google magic eraser made my holiday photos appear like i had my own private island and yacht and i was always happy and smiling and looking at the camera and the sunset and skies, oh my! it just lights up my instas. i don't get what real cameras even do, they have something to do with reality? seriously though, not all the kids will be coopted into this, and will find cameras are still instruments for artistic expression. but for that we hardly need dpreview and its obsession with optical sharpness and perpetually reviewing every camera in existence as "almost good enough"
taude 4y ago
Yeup, I used to be a regular at dpreview a long time ago, certainly before I bought my first DSR the Canon 20d. But even before that when I was still buying point-and-shoots. I probably haven't been back since about 2014, though, when I upgraded to a Fuji XT mirrorless system, which I haven't even used in five or six years now....
visarga 4y ago
Hey there, been reading the same page around the same time. The 300D was the last DSLR I bought not because it was bad, but because it was so good. Even 15 years later phones could not compare.
vwoolf 4y ago
I'm seeing a lot of people discussing sales numbers; here is one article showing the decline in terms of both lens and interchangeable lens cameras shipped: https://bythom.com/newsviews/real-camera-economics.html https://bythom.com/newsviews/real-camera-economics.html. Lenses appear to have declined by about 66% from 2012 to 2022. Cameras, by a little under 50%. This decline makes sense to me. I have a Fuji XT4 which I like a lot, but, also, starting around the iPhone 13, phones got really good. Their automatic exposure in sunlight, for example, is often (not always) great. At the same time, the software quality in pretty much all cameras leaves much to be desired: I can go on a rant about the number of clicks necessary to wirelessly transfer from camera to phone but would rather not, and people have been ranting about that topic for at least a decade.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- cameldrv 4y ago
  Look again at that chart. It's even worse for cameras. It's almost a 75% decline.
- georgemcbay 4y ago
  > starting around the iPhone 13, phones got really good. ILC cameras also got really good. I'm not at all doubting that smartphones are the primary cannibalization vector, but even for people who prefer to use cameras with significantly larger sensors than can be put into a smartphone I think the cameras themselves reached a point years ago where it became difficult even for ILC enthusiasts to justify upgrades on a regular basis because what people already owned was "Good Enough". I reached this point with the Sony A7R Mk3 and other people probably reached this point sooner. For years it felt like Canon and Nikon were kind of aware this would happen with ILCs and were dragging their feet on camera body tech making incremental upgrades behind where the technology should have been if they were competing full speed, and then other vendors like Sony just came smashing in without being part of this implicit agreement and pushed camera body tech along extremely quickly for a few years (with Canon/Nikon having to follow along to some degree to keep up) and it didn't take many iterations of this pushing the technology to where it could be for ILC camera bodies to be something you feel no itch to upgrade from year to year because the shiny new thing is an extremely marginal upgrade. So the cannibalization of the market probably had two fronts, the larger one from smartphones, and a smaller but still significant one from "Good Enough" (which is an issue smartphones are starting to run into as well).
RobotToaster 4y ago
I would've thought with everyone wanting to be youtubers camera sales would've picked up.
- enlyth 4y ago
  Faking the image quality through software is becoming more powerful than actually taking a good image, and people don't seem to care if the pixels on the screen are really what the optics saw. They just want to take a pretty photo, and look at a pretty photo.
ghaff 4y ago
I still use my Fujifilm XE-3 from time to time but use my Canon DSLR rarely--mostly for situations that benefit from very wide angle or telephoto lenses. And, yeah, if I'm going on a trip where I'm mostly only going to take some snaps, much less a local hike, I'll almost certainly just take my smartphone. And this is someone who still has a Flickr Pro subscription and used to spend many many hours in the darkroom. I can imagine buying a new Fujifilm body but not sure I can imagine getting a new Canon at least so long as my current one works.
vvrm 4y ago
> another victim of the rapid pace of improvement in smartphones It's not just the pace of improvement, but also the marketing spin. I find the strengths of smartphone camera and ILCs pretty complementary. Smartphone cameras work pretty well outdoors where there is enough light. DSLR and mirroless are hard to beat indoors in low light conditions. Coincidentally it is also easier to find your ILC indoors at home when you need it, rather than lugging it around on a hike. When we didn't have kids, we used to spend more time outdoors and so most of our memorable pictures are from a phone. Now that we have restless young kids and are spending more time indoors, almost all of the memorable photos are from a mirrorless camera. But the marketing spin makes it seem like ILCs are completely redundant.
- akho 4y ago
  > Smartphone cameras work pretty well outdoors where there is enough light. DSLR and mirroless are hard to beat indoors in low light conditions. I find the opposite. Proper cameras are much more flexible and plain better when there's enough light. Inside, without a flash, you'll not get a great photo anyway, so might as well benefit from “computational” fakery.
  - radicaldreamer 4y ago
    Lots of software tricks make it easy to take low light photos on phones today but require quite a bit of manual tweaking on a DSLR.
    - digitallyfree 4y ago
      The thing about this is that the manual tweaking allows you to take the picture you're envisioning. Whereas the processing on the phone provides a clear picture in poor conditions, but it's not necessarily the picture I want. For instance a phone can do a great job in a backlit scenario by intelligently cutting the highlights and boosting the shadows. The resulting image shows both the subject and background clearly but it doesn't represent the real-word lighting conditions. As a result it's great for a quick snapshot but is less useful in an artistic sense.
novok 4y ago
What I don't get is why not spin off vs. just close?
Aeolun 4y ago
Not sure, I bought my camera from Amazon a few months ago as a result of dpreviews.
hulitu 4y ago
> another victim of the rapid pace of improvement in smartphones The only think which improved on smartphones was the marketing. Cameras on smartphones are still crap. (see Samsung moon shots).

by giobox 4y ago

asdff 4y ago

The thing is, there's another boom currently going on. The mirrorless boom, and this site is the gold standard for that one as well. Now there is no home, and its much harder to gleam the differences that are actually meaningful between these many mirrorless cameras (and new dslrs that do get made).

bradlys 4y ago
a "boom" is an overstatement. The camera industry overall is dying and struggling. We're down to something like 10% of camera sales from 2010. There is no boom. There is a transition from DSLR to mirrorless for the few existing dedicated camera photographers out there.
- cozzyd 4y ago
  10% camera sales or 10% ILC sales? The point and click market is obviously irrelevant for a mirrorless boom.
  - klodolph 4y ago
    Point and shoot peaked in 2010, I think. Camera sales have dropped by something like 90% since 2010, if you exclude smartphones. Any “boom” is just consumers shuffling around within a collapsing market.
- noncoml 4y ago
  Definitely not a boom, but there is still a sizable niche community that I would thought to be big enough to support a good website. For example there is no boom of home audio systems anymore, but there are enough audiophiles to support a number of sites and magazines
- johnvanommen 4y ago
  I have a $600 DSLR that I bought at Costco on a whim, fifteen years ago. Once in a blue moon I look at my old photos and realize they just look night and day better than anything I've taken in the last decade. Camera phone lenses do alright when it's sunny outside, but DSLRs kill it when it comes to medium and low light.
  - FollowingTheDao 4y ago
    The only people who think Smartphone Cameras take better pictures than SLRs are not photographers. It is not just low light, it is depth of field, exposure control, the minimization or absence of computed exposures. I have an iPhone 13 Pro Max and only shot in RAW mode. That is the best I can do. Saving money fro a mirrorless camera so i can start shooting again.
    - tonyarkles 4y ago
      > The only people who think Smartphone Cameras take better pictures than SLRs are not photographers. Amateur photographer here, currently have a Canon 80D and a 20-year collection of medium-quality lenses. You're completely right. The photos that this thing takes are miles ahead of my iPhone 12 Pro; you just can't beat a sensor with big pixels and an aperture that's 10-100x (? I don't know the actual ratio) larger than a smartphone lens. But the one nuance is the old saying "the best camera in the world is the one you've got with you"; I have some beautiful shots from this camera, and the 20D before it, and the Rebel XT before it, but some of my absolute favourites were shot on a smartphone because it was in my pocket at the right time and the DSLR was at home in the bag.
    - astrange 4y ago
      SLRs don't take "better" photos, they take more detailed photos. The best photo is the one you actually took because you had the camera on you and didn't miss the shot. And if you want the most detailed photo, SLRs are not the highest quality cameras either when you could rent a Fujifilm GFX 100.
      - WWLink 4y ago
- asdff 4y ago
  Its enough of a boom for a small company like fujifilm to justify producing more cameras and lenses and even start up and grow a medium format mirrorless ecosystem. Fujifilm in particular struggles to keep up with demand which is probably not easy given global shortages, but it goes to show there is a market. It's not the market it was in 1995 or 2005, but its a market no less because there's always a demand for the best image technolgy can do. Phone cameras will always look worse than their contemporary full size counterparts just due to physics, so the pros and prosumers will always be in demand of a dedicated rig even if their iphone looks like a spider on the back. Not to mention even today just from an OS standpoint, no phone has feature parity with even the first dslr released since phone manufacturers "childproof" camera features that pro camera manufacturers assume you don't need your hand held to use. Usually you have to resort to a third party app if you want to set a manual exposure, you know, something any photographer since 1860 could do that we now deem to be "too advanced" for modern humans.
  - bydo 4y ago
    Fujifilm is a twenty billion dollar company. Imaging is just a hobby for them. Though I agree that if it were truly hemorrhaging them money, they'd have sold it (like Minolta or Pentax) or spun it out into its own entity (like Olympus).
- arghwhat 4y ago
  The point-and-shoot market collapsed, but the dslr market is not nearly as dramatically affected with 2010 numbers not too far off 2018 numbers based on statista charts[1]. On the other hand, mirrorless is starting to show growth[2]. Looking at the overall camera-sales are misleading, especially considering that it largely shuffled numbers around within big companies: A Samsung point-and-shoot with a Samsung sensor became a Samsung smartphone with a Samsung sensor, selling even more units with the camera still being a primary selling point. --- [1]: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4242091-why-nikon-and-canon-should-lower-prices-of-lenses-and-camera-accessories https://seekingalpha.com/article/4242091-why-nikon-and-canon... [2]: https://petapixel.com/2023/02/15/2022-was-officially-the-year-of-the-mirrorless-camera/ https://petapixel.com/2023/02/15/2022-was-officially-the-yea... (using CIPA data)
  - asdff 4y ago
    Also, certain camera brands are less affected than others. Fuji is probably doing better than its ever done these days and has trouble keeping inventory in stock from demand, whereas nikon is at a historic low.
  - dukeyukey 4y ago
    I'm kinda curious why though, and I'm speaking as someone who bought a mirrorless camera (I think my first camera ever?) about a year ago.
- gsich 4y ago
  And with good reason. While I like shooting with DSLM some software and hardware parts are just bad. No GPS. The cheapest Android phone from 5 years ago has this. I don't want to use the shitty app to get geoinformation. Yes, battery lifetime - no need to enable it by default. No embedded storage. With SSD prices cheap as now, add some 64 or 128GB storage. Keep the card slot. More computational stuff, no need for enabling it by default, but stuff like taking 10 pictures, then selecting the best one automatically (or whatever the camera thinks is best). Additional: enable better tethering. On my Nikon Z7 I still can't set everything from the computer. Some settings depend on the mode (P,A,S,M) - why? Nobody knows. If no flash, at least have some light.
  - Lammy 4y ago
    They exist! My YN455 interchangeable-lens Android camera has all of those things. It uses the same 20MP MFT sensor as my PEN-F and I love it a lot: https://www.yongnuomall.com/product/detail/16254 https://www.yongnuomall.com/product/detail/16254
    - outofpaper 4y ago
      Does that have a cell modem? An m4/3 camera with wifi and cell data sounds amazing?
      - Lammy 4y ago
        Yes, I use it on Mint (T-Mobile). Some screenshots I took just now: https://imgur.com/a/x8TU7o3 https://imgur.com/a/x8TU7o3 It's picky about certain zooms, but it is fantastic with all of my primes (Lumix 20mm F1.7 ASPH and SIGMA 56mm F1.4 DC DN being my favs) and with any of my cine lenses. It's fine for stills as long as I can stand the e-shutter, but I love it for video. Unfortunately I can't seem to share an accurate video sample because Youtube's recompression is adding a ton of horrible choppiness that isn't in the actual camera output: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCbnbKvNZlg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCbnbKvNZlg (Shot on LAOWA 6mm T2.1 Zero-D Cine. Warning: loud!!)
- JenrHywy 4y ago
  And yet, popular cameras like the Fujifilm X100V are selling for above retail because demand is outstripping supply.
adrr 4y ago
It isn't a boom. It is just a transition from DSRL/video cameras to mirrorless. Market is consolidating around mirrorless for everything from photography to video. Hire a wedding photography and a wedding videographer today, they may have the same equipment.
- thomasjb 4y ago
  I believe that TLRs are going to make a resurgence and wipe out this mirrorless fad
  - Krisando 4y ago
    I have yet to see a TLR in real life.
WWLink 4y ago
Yea now we're going to have to put up with youtubers trying to build a brand and shove their personality into every review they make. :(

pjc50 4y ago

Gloomy prediction: based on Samsung Moongate, the next logical step after the smartphone camera replacing the DSLR is AI replacing the smartphone camera. Or at least substituting for underlying camera quality. Take a 10MP image and have the AI fill in the detail. Or remove detail (see the google advert for editing people out of your holiday photos). Or put in some detail that wasn't there.

constantlm 4y ago
This is already the case with cameras in consumer phones.
layer8 4y ago
Smartphone photos are already heavily ML-processed, with actual details and colors being replaced by what the model thinks looks best. The moon thing was just the most blatant example.
- foldr 4y ago
  I haven’t noticed any invented details or colors in smartphone photos that I’ve taken myself. Most of the claims of this that I’ve seen online are not very convincing. Of course you sometimes get artifacts from sharpening and de-Bayering, but those can occur with any digital camera.
- astrange 4y ago
  No kind of camera sees "actual colors", and neither do your eyes; the actual colors are the same day or night but that doesn't mean you can see them at night. When there is light, the colors you see depend on how well you're adapted to its white point.
dylan604 4y ago
new from Samsung. it's a black box perfectly square just to make Jobs turn over in his grave. there are no lenses, but it's the most incredible camera you've ever seen. it has a microphone where you tell it the image you want... "I want to see a picture with me at the Grand Canyon with nobody else in the shot at sunset after storm has just passed with a rainbow in the background" waits a few seconds, boom. post to social, get lots of envious comments about my cool vacation.

Zak 4y ago

Consumer fixed-lens cameras are much more dead as a market than ILCs, and those made up the bulk of camera sales. Almost everyone who isn't doing photography as a profession or serious hobby is satisfied with smartphone cameras now.

op00to 4y ago
I used to shoot only medium and large format film. Maybe 3-4 years ago, I realized I can do everything I want with my phone camera.
- antisthenes 4y ago
  If you honestly think your phone camera is a valid replacement for medium/large format film, then you were never serious about photography in the first place. For all their improvements, smartphones are still extremely limited by sensor size and the size of optics. Those are terrible, compared to even the entry level DSLRs. I'm glad it works for your use case (although I can't imagine what that is), but any decent photographer will be able to tell a smartphone picture from a picture taken with good optics and a DSLR. It's just that the market for those photos has also shrunk and the masses are happy with their instagram filter drivel.
  - acyou 4y ago
    The best camera is the one you have ready.
  - silisili 4y ago
    The vast, vast, vast majority of pictures are viewed on a 6ish inch screen. You'll have real trouble telling much difference there. Now if you're blowing things up into a poster, it becomes much more apparent, granted, but it's not a common use case.
    - modzu 4y ago
      not only that, but Google magic eraser made my holiday photos appear like i had my own private island and yacht and i was always happy and smiling and looking at the camera and the sunset and skies, oh my! it just lights up my instas. i don't get what real cameras even do, they have something to do with reality? seriously though, not all the kids will be coopted into this, and will find cameras are still instruments for artistic expression. but for that we hardly need dpreview and its obsession with optical sharpness and perpetually reviewing every camera in existence as "almost good enough"

taude 4y ago

Yeup, I used to be a regular at dpreview a long time ago, certainly before I bought my first DSR the Canon 20d. But even before that when I was still buying point-and-shoots. I probably haven't been back since about 2014, though, when I upgraded to a Fuji XT mirrorless system, which I haven't even used in five or six years now....

visarga 4y ago

Hey there, been reading the same page around the same time. The 300D was the last DSLR I bought not because it was bad, but because it was so good. Even 15 years later phones could not compare.

vwoolf 4y ago

I'm seeing a lot of people discussing sales numbers; here is one article showing the decline in terms of both lens and interchangeable lens cameras shipped: https://bythom.com/newsviews/real-camera-economics.html https://bythom.com/newsviews/real-camera-economics.html. Lenses appear to have declined by about 66% from 2012 to 2022. Cameras, by a little under 50%. This decline makes sense to me. I have a Fuji XT4 which I like a lot, but, also, starting around the iPhone 13, phones got really good. Their automatic exposure in sunlight, for example, is often (not always) great. At the same time, the software quality in pretty much all cameras leaves much to be desired: I can go on a rant about the number of clicks necessary to wirelessly transfer from camera to phone but would rather not, and people have been ranting about that topic for at least a decade.

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cameldrv 4y ago
Look again at that chart. It's even worse for cameras. It's almost a 75% decline.
georgemcbay 4y ago
> starting around the iPhone 13, phones got really good. ILC cameras also got really good. I'm not at all doubting that smartphones are the primary cannibalization vector, but even for people who prefer to use cameras with significantly larger sensors than can be put into a smartphone I think the cameras themselves reached a point years ago where it became difficult even for ILC enthusiasts to justify upgrades on a regular basis because what people already owned was "Good Enough". I reached this point with the Sony A7R Mk3 and other people probably reached this point sooner. For years it felt like Canon and Nikon were kind of aware this would happen with ILCs and were dragging their feet on camera body tech making incremental upgrades behind where the technology should have been if they were competing full speed, and then other vendors like Sony just came smashing in without being part of this implicit agreement and pushed camera body tech along extremely quickly for a few years (with Canon/Nikon having to follow along to some degree to keep up) and it didn't take many iterations of this pushing the technology to where it could be for ILC camera bodies to be something you feel no itch to upgrade from year to year because the shiny new thing is an extremely marginal upgrade. So the cannibalization of the market probably had two fronts, the larger one from smartphones, and a smaller but still significant one from "Good Enough" (which is an issue smartphones are starting to run into as well).

RobotToaster 4y ago

I would've thought with everyone wanting to be youtubers camera sales would've picked up.

enlyth 4y ago
Faking the image quality through software is becoming more powerful than actually taking a good image, and people don't seem to care if the pixels on the screen are really what the optics saw. They just want to take a pretty photo, and look at a pretty photo.

ghaff 4y ago

I still use my Fujifilm XE-3 from time to time but use my Canon DSLR rarely--mostly for situations that benefit from very wide angle or telephoto lenses. And, yeah, if I'm going on a trip where I'm mostly only going to take some snaps, much less a local hike, I'll almost certainly just take my smartphone. And this is someone who still has a Flickr Pro subscription and used to spend many many hours in the darkroom. I can imagine buying a new Fujifilm body but not sure I can imagine getting a new Canon at least so long as my current one works.

vvrm 4y ago

> another victim of the rapid pace of improvement in smartphones It's not just the pace of improvement, but also the marketing spin. I find the strengths of smartphone camera and ILCs pretty complementary. Smartphone cameras work pretty well outdoors where there is enough light. DSLR and mirroless are hard to beat indoors in low light conditions. Coincidentally it is also easier to find your ILC indoors at home when you need it, rather than lugging it around on a hike. When we didn't have kids, we used to spend more time outdoors and so most of our memorable pictures are from a phone. Now that we have restless young kids and are spending more time indoors, almost all of the memorable photos are from a mirrorless camera. But the marketing spin makes it seem like ILCs are completely redundant.

akho 4y ago
> Smartphone cameras work pretty well outdoors where there is enough light. DSLR and mirroless are hard to beat indoors in low light conditions. I find the opposite. Proper cameras are much more flexible and plain better when there's enough light. Inside, without a flash, you'll not get a great photo anyway, so might as well benefit from “computational” fakery.
- radicaldreamer 4y ago
  Lots of software tricks make it easy to take low light photos on phones today but require quite a bit of manual tweaking on a DSLR.
  - digitallyfree 4y ago
    The thing about this is that the manual tweaking allows you to take the picture you're envisioning. Whereas the processing on the phone provides a clear picture in poor conditions, but it's not necessarily the picture I want. For instance a phone can do a great job in a backlit scenario by intelligently cutting the highlights and boosting the shadows. The resulting image shows both the subject and background clearly but it doesn't represent the real-word lighting conditions. As a result it's great for a quick snapshot but is less useful in an artistic sense.

novok 4y ago

What I don't get is why not spin off vs. just close?

Aeolun 4y ago

Not sure, I bought my camera from Amazon a few months ago as a result of dpreviews.

hulitu 4y ago

> another victim of the rapid pace of improvement in smartphones The only think which improved on smartphones was the marketing. Cameras on smartphones are still crap. (see Samsung moon shots).