4 ms·

DSLRs have just dropped off the wagon a long time ago, when it comes to software and especially meaningful UX innovation. As an anecdote, I have a Sony a7r and

DSLRs have just dropped off the wagon a long time ago, when it comes to software and especially meaningful UX innovation. As an anecdote, I have a Sony a7r and operating it via its mobile app is one of the worst user experiences I have had in a while. Same goes to the surrounding ecosystem of software. E.g. Adobe's Lightroom is full of obsolete paradigms and weird usability choises.

Mashimo 2y ago
Yes, same for my Sony A6000 and A6400. I just wanted to take some selfies and it's exhausting to use the remote app.
- kookamamie 2y ago
  Yes, it's mind-bogglingly difficult and complicated.
  - to11mtm 2y ago
    At the time of release of the A6000, having a mobile app to take a picture (and not having to buy an adapter like some other brands) was cool enough that you could deal with the (at the time, relatively minor) jank. Biggest thing is they never really improved the mobile apps... and in some cases IMO they got worse.
wongarsu 2y ago
Most hardware companies are just terrible at software in general. Camera makers are pretty average in that regard. Usability of the camera hardware and software ecosystem is another matter. I think the common wisdom is that most paying users don't want beginner-friendly, they want powerful and familiar. So everything emulates the paradigms of what came before. DSLRs try to provide an interface that would be familiar to someone used to a 50 year old SLR camera, and Lightroom tries to emulate a physical darkroom. Being somewhat hostile to the uninitiated might even be seen as a feature.
- kookamamie 2y ago
  Yes, fully agreed. However, the way the companies currently approach this - catering for the ever-reducing niche, will end up killing the DLSRs over time. They just don't offer enough over phones, and the UX/SW being so crappy alienates the potential new userbase completely.
  - throwanem 2y ago
    > They just don't offer enough over phones You can achieve maybe a quarter of the kinds of shots on a phone that an interchangeable-lens camera will let you make. That's an extremely important quarter! For most people it covers everything they ever want a camera to do. But if you want to get into the other 75%, you're never going to be able to do it with the enormous constraints imposed by a phone camera's strict optical limits, arising from the tight physical constraints into which that camera has to fit.
    - genewitch 2y ago
      I had two phones with 108MP sensors and while you can zoom in on the resulting image the details are suggestions rather than what I would consider pixels. Whereas a $1500 Nikon 15MP from 20 years ago is real crisp, and I can put a 300mm lens on it if I want to "zoom in". Even my old nikon 1 v1 with its cropped sensor 12MP takes "better pictures" than the two 108MP phone cameras. But there are uses for the pixel density and I enjoyed having 108MP for certain shots, otherwise not using that mode in general.
      - throwanem 2y ago
        Yeah, that's the exact tradeoff. 108MP (or even whatever the real photosite count is that they're shift-capturing or otherwise trick-shooting to get that number) on a sensor that small is genuinely revolutionary. But only giving that sensor as much light to work with as a matchhead-sized lens can capture for it, there's no way to avoid relying very heavily on the ISP to yield an intelligible image. Again, that does an incredible job for what little it's given to work with - but doing so requires it be what we could fairly call "inventive," with the result that anywhere near 100% zoom, "suggestions" are exactly what you're seeing. The detail is as much computational as "real." People make much of whatever Samsung it was a couple years back, that got caught copy-pasting a sharper image of Luna into that one shot everyone takes and then gets disappointed with the result because, unlike the real thing, our brain doesn't make the moon seem bigger in pictures. But they all do this and they have for years. I tried taking pictures of some Polistes exclamans wasps with my phone a couple years back, in good bright lighting with a decent CRI (my kitchen, they were houseguests). Now if you image search that species name, you'll see these wasps are quite colorful, with complex markings in shades ranging from bright yellow through orange, "ferruginous" rust-red, and black. In the light I had in the kitchen, I could see all these colors clearly with my eyes, through the glass of the heated terrarium that was serving as the wasps' temporary enclosure. (They'd shown a distinct propensity for the HVAC registers, and while I find their company congenial, having a dozen fertile females exploring the ductwork might have been a bit much even for me...) But as far as I could get the cameras on this iPhone 13 mini to report, from as close as their shitty minimum working distance allows, these wasps were all solid yellow from the flat of their heart-shaped faces to the tip of their pointy butts. No matter what I did, even pulling a shot into Photoshop to sample pixels and experimentally oversaturate, I couldn't squeeze more than a hint of red out of anything without resorting to hue adjustments, i.e. there is no red there to find. So all I can conclude is the frigging thing made up a wasp - oh, not in the computer vision, generative AI sense we would mean that now, or even in the Samsung sense that only works for the one subject anyway, but in the sense that even in the most favorable of real-world conditions, it's working from such a total approximation of the actual scene that, unless that scene corresponds closely enough to what the ISP's pipeline was "trained on" by the engineers who design phones' imaging subsystems, the poor hapless thing really can't help but screw it up. This is why people who complain about discrete cameras' lack of brains are wrongheaded to do so. I see how they get there, but there are some aspects of physics that really can't be replaced by computation, including basically all the ones that matter, and the physical, optical singlemindedness of the discrete camera's sole design focus is what liberates it to excel in that realm. Just as with humans, all cramming a phone in there will do is give the poor thing anxiety.
Sharlin 2y ago
Sony is famous for having the worst interfaces of all the big camera manufacturers. Lightroom most likely has “obsolete paradigms” for the same reason Photoshop does: because professionals want to use what they know rather than what is fashionable. Reprogramming their muscle memory is not something people want to be doing. Anyway, I find Lightroom’s UI very nice to work with.
- throwanem 2y ago
  Lightroom is very intuitive, once you've spent a few years learning how everything works.
  - Sharlin 2y ago
    I don't know, I think the learning curve is pretty gentle. Like all complex software, it may be difficult to master, but getting started felt easy enough as far as I remember.
    - throwanem 2y ago
      I found it incredibly frustrating at first, so much so that a Loupedeck became a wise and necessary investment to keep the anticipation of editing burden from beginning to depress my interest in photography. I still have the Loupedeck, on one of the shelves behind my desk. I think I might have used it twice last year.
  - colejohnson66 2y ago
    S̶o̶,̶ ̶i̶t̶'̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶i̶n̶t̶u̶i̶t̶i̶v̶e̶?̶ ̶I̶f̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶t̶a̶k̶e̶s̶ ̶y̶e̶a̶r̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶l̶e̶a̶r̶n̶,̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶'̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶"̶s̶i̶m̶p̶l̶e̶"̶.̶
    - throwanem 2y ago
      That's the joke, yes.
daneel_w 2y ago
Over the past 15-20 years I've used both Sonys, Canons and Nikons, and I absolutely feel that Nikon puts a lot more effort, with much better results, into the usability of their pro/prosumer cameras - and, really, even their $500-$1000 consumer range - both in terms of the on-display UI and the ergonomics and handling of the actual camera. What always stood out most for me compared to Canon was Nikon's larger viewfinders, letting you commit to actual photography rather than being stuck with a feeling of peeping through a keyhole, and placement of buttons on the camera body allowing for maintained control of the most necessary functions (shutter speed, aperture and even ISO) without having to change your grip or move the camera away from your face.
- throwanem 2y ago
  Nikon bodies are designed by photographers, and in the F-mount line, also by the same guy who did the Ferraris that made that brand's name. Canon bodies are designed by engineers, who all had to prove they could palm a cinder block in order to get hired. Sony bodies are designed by the cinder block.
  - stas2k 2y ago
    Only Nikons I own are 35mm film FM2 and F4. The bodies feel like tactile bliss. FM2 has a dry lubricated system with crazy titanium honeycombed etched shutter and F4 is the last pro DSLR they made with no menu system. On the digital front I found Fuji X-Txx series to be like tiny Nikons in their usability with all common controls on dials.
    - throwanem 2y ago
      I'm (at least) a third-generation Nikon shooter, and I still have my grandfather's FTn. For its era, predating CNC and CAD, it is very comfortable to use, but the leather "eveready" case shell is welcome. (One reason I shoot Nikon is because I can still shoot his glass on modern bodies. Indeed, that's what my D5300 spends a lot of its time wearing these days.) True revolutions in consumer imaging excepted, I doubt I'll feel more than an occasional gadget fan's urge to replace my D850 and D500 as my primary bodies. Oh, the Z series has features, I won't disagree, even if I'm deeply suspicious of EVFs and battery life. But the D850 is a slightly stately, super-versatile full-frame body, and the D500 is a light, 20fps APS-C, that share identical UIs, lens and peripheral lineups, and (given a fast card to write to) deep enough buffers to mostly not need thinking about. For someone like me who cares very little about technical specs, and a great deal for the ability to hang a camera over their shoulder and walk out the door and never once lose a shot due to equipment failure, there really isn't much that could matter more. I may have 350 milliseconds to get a flight shot of a spooked heron, or be holding my breath and focusing near 1:1 macro with three flash heads twelve inches away from a busily foraging and politely opinionated hornet. In those moments, eye and hand and machine and mind and body all must work as one to get the shot, and having to think at all about how to use the camera essentially guarantees a miss. Hence the five years of work I've put into not having to think about that. I suppose I could've done more than well enough with any system, sure. But my experiences with others have left me usually quite glad Nikon's is the system I invested in.
girvo 2y ago
Fujifilm is no better haha, they're on their third (I think) mobile app this time for X-Series camera control, and it's still terrible.' Amusingly, their Instax control app is actually pretty good!
- neogodless 2y ago
  There are 8+ Instax apps made by Fujifilm in the app store. Which one is pretty good for controls?
  - girvo 2y ago
    "instax mini EVO" specifically, because thats the Instax I have these days :)
    - neogodless 2y ago
      Thanks! I realized later it was a "dumb" question as I don't have an Instax but a different Fujifilm (just got yesterday) that uses the standard "X" app that sort of works but is not great.
      - girvo 2y ago
        XApp is bad, but its still wayyyy better than Camera Remote at least haha. It's shocking how miserable their software is!
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  The one for my 2016 era fuji is crap. Camera remote. Usually the connection fails between my phone and the cameras own wifi network it connects to but this failure takes a good 2 minutes to happen. So many artificial software limits with this camera, some removed in newer versions. Why can’t this one tether though? It is literally a digital camera no? Anyone know of any fujifilm firmware jailbreaks fwiw?
  - girvo 2y ago

Mashimo 2y ago

Yes, same for my Sony A6000 and A6400. I just wanted to take some selfies and it's exhausting to use the remote app.

kookamamie 2y ago
Yes, it's mind-bogglingly difficult and complicated.
- to11mtm 2y ago
  At the time of release of the A6000, having a mobile app to take a picture (and not having to buy an adapter like some other brands) was cool enough that you could deal with the (at the time, relatively minor) jank. Biggest thing is they never really improved the mobile apps... and in some cases IMO they got worse.

wongarsu 2y ago

Most hardware companies are just terrible at software in general. Camera makers are pretty average in that regard. Usability of the camera hardware and software ecosystem is another matter. I think the common wisdom is that most paying users don't want beginner-friendly, they want powerful and familiar. So everything emulates the paradigms of what came before. DSLRs try to provide an interface that would be familiar to someone used to a 50 year old SLR camera, and Lightroom tries to emulate a physical darkroom. Being somewhat hostile to the uninitiated might even be seen as a feature.

kookamamie 2y ago
Yes, fully agreed. However, the way the companies currently approach this - catering for the ever-reducing niche, will end up killing the DLSRs over time. They just don't offer enough over phones, and the UX/SW being so crappy alienates the potential new userbase completely.
- throwanem 2y ago
  > They just don't offer enough over phones You can achieve maybe a quarter of the kinds of shots on a phone that an interchangeable-lens camera will let you make. That's an extremely important quarter! For most people it covers everything they ever want a camera to do. But if you want to get into the other 75%, you're never going to be able to do it with the enormous constraints imposed by a phone camera's strict optical limits, arising from the tight physical constraints into which that camera has to fit.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    I had two phones with 108MP sensors and while you can zoom in on the resulting image the details are suggestions rather than what I would consider pixels. Whereas a $1500 Nikon 15MP from 20 years ago is real crisp, and I can put a 300mm lens on it if I want to "zoom in". Even my old nikon 1 v1 with its cropped sensor 12MP takes "better pictures" than the two 108MP phone cameras. But there are uses for the pixel density and I enjoyed having 108MP for certain shots, otherwise not using that mode in general.
    - throwanem 2y ago
      Yeah, that's the exact tradeoff. 108MP (or even whatever the real photosite count is that they're shift-capturing or otherwise trick-shooting to get that number) on a sensor that small is genuinely revolutionary. But only giving that sensor as much light to work with as a matchhead-sized lens can capture for it, there's no way to avoid relying very heavily on the ISP to yield an intelligible image. Again, that does an incredible job for what little it's given to work with - but doing so requires it be what we could fairly call "inventive," with the result that anywhere near 100% zoom, "suggestions" are exactly what you're seeing. The detail is as much computational as "real." People make much of whatever Samsung it was a couple years back, that got caught copy-pasting a sharper image of Luna into that one shot everyone takes and then gets disappointed with the result because, unlike the real thing, our brain doesn't make the moon seem bigger in pictures. But they all do this and they have for years. I tried taking pictures of some Polistes exclamans wasps with my phone a couple years back, in good bright lighting with a decent CRI (my kitchen, they were houseguests). Now if you image search that species name, you'll see these wasps are quite colorful, with complex markings in shades ranging from bright yellow through orange, "ferruginous" rust-red, and black. In the light I had in the kitchen, I could see all these colors clearly with my eyes, through the glass of the heated terrarium that was serving as the wasps' temporary enclosure. (They'd shown a distinct propensity for the HVAC registers, and while I find their company congenial, having a dozen fertile females exploring the ductwork might have been a bit much even for me...) But as far as I could get the cameras on this iPhone 13 mini to report, from as close as their shitty minimum working distance allows, these wasps were all solid yellow from the flat of their heart-shaped faces to the tip of their pointy butts. No matter what I did, even pulling a shot into Photoshop to sample pixels and experimentally oversaturate, I couldn't squeeze more than a hint of red out of anything without resorting to hue adjustments, i.e. there is no red there to find. So all I can conclude is the frigging thing made up a wasp - oh, not in the computer vision, generative AI sense we would mean that now, or even in the Samsung sense that only works for the one subject anyway, but in the sense that even in the most favorable of real-world conditions, it's working from such a total approximation of the actual scene that, unless that scene corresponds closely enough to what the ISP's pipeline was "trained on" by the engineers who design phones' imaging subsystems, the poor hapless thing really can't help but screw it up. This is why people who complain about discrete cameras' lack of brains are wrongheaded to do so. I see how they get there, but there are some aspects of physics that really can't be replaced by computation, including basically all the ones that matter, and the physical, optical singlemindedness of the discrete camera's sole design focus is what liberates it to excel in that realm. Just as with humans, all cramming a phone in there will do is give the poor thing anxiety.

Sharlin 2y ago

Sony is famous for having the worst interfaces of all the big camera manufacturers. Lightroom most likely has “obsolete paradigms” for the same reason Photoshop does: because professionals want to use what they know rather than what is fashionable. Reprogramming their muscle memory is not something people want to be doing. Anyway, I find Lightroom’s UI very nice to work with.

throwanem 2y ago
Lightroom is very intuitive, once you've spent a few years learning how everything works.
- Sharlin 2y ago
  I don't know, I think the learning curve is pretty gentle. Like all complex software, it may be difficult to master, but getting started felt easy enough as far as I remember.
  - throwanem 2y ago
    I found it incredibly frustrating at first, so much so that a Loupedeck became a wise and necessary investment to keep the anticipation of editing burden from beginning to depress my interest in photography. I still have the Loupedeck, on one of the shelves behind my desk. I think I might have used it twice last year.
- colejohnson66 2y ago
  S̶o̶,̶ ̶i̶t̶'̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶i̶n̶t̶u̶i̶t̶i̶v̶e̶?̶ ̶I̶f̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶t̶a̶k̶e̶s̶ ̶y̶e̶a̶r̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶l̶e̶a̶r̶n̶,̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶'̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶"̶s̶i̶m̶p̶l̶e̶"̶.̶
  - throwanem 2y ago
    That's the joke, yes.

daneel_w 2y ago

Over the past 15-20 years I've used both Sonys, Canons and Nikons, and I absolutely feel that Nikon puts a lot more effort, with much better results, into the usability of their pro/prosumer cameras - and, really, even their $500-$1000 consumer range - both in terms of the on-display UI and the ergonomics and handling of the actual camera. What always stood out most for me compared to Canon was Nikon's larger viewfinders, letting you commit to actual photography rather than being stuck with a feeling of peeping through a keyhole, and placement of buttons on the camera body allowing for maintained control of the most necessary functions (shutter speed, aperture and even ISO) without having to change your grip or move the camera away from your face.

throwanem 2y ago
Nikon bodies are designed by photographers, and in the F-mount line, also by the same guy who did the Ferraris that made that brand's name. Canon bodies are designed by engineers, who all had to prove they could palm a cinder block in order to get hired. Sony bodies are designed by the cinder block.
- stas2k 2y ago
  Only Nikons I own are 35mm film FM2 and F4. The bodies feel like tactile bliss. FM2 has a dry lubricated system with crazy titanium honeycombed etched shutter and F4 is the last pro DSLR they made with no menu system. On the digital front I found Fuji X-Txx series to be like tiny Nikons in their usability with all common controls on dials.
  - throwanem 2y ago
    I'm (at least) a third-generation Nikon shooter, and I still have my grandfather's FTn. For its era, predating CNC and CAD, it is very comfortable to use, but the leather "eveready" case shell is welcome. (One reason I shoot Nikon is because I can still shoot his glass on modern bodies. Indeed, that's what my D5300 spends a lot of its time wearing these days.) True revolutions in consumer imaging excepted, I doubt I'll feel more than an occasional gadget fan's urge to replace my D850 and D500 as my primary bodies. Oh, the Z series has features, I won't disagree, even if I'm deeply suspicious of EVFs and battery life. But the D850 is a slightly stately, super-versatile full-frame body, and the D500 is a light, 20fps APS-C, that share identical UIs, lens and peripheral lineups, and (given a fast card to write to) deep enough buffers to mostly not need thinking about. For someone like me who cares very little about technical specs, and a great deal for the ability to hang a camera over their shoulder and walk out the door and never once lose a shot due to equipment failure, there really isn't much that could matter more. I may have 350 milliseconds to get a flight shot of a spooked heron, or be holding my breath and focusing near 1:1 macro with three flash heads twelve inches away from a busily foraging and politely opinionated hornet. In those moments, eye and hand and machine and mind and body all must work as one to get the shot, and having to think at all about how to use the camera essentially guarantees a miss. Hence the five years of work I've put into not having to think about that. I suppose I could've done more than well enough with any system, sure. But my experiences with others have left me usually quite glad Nikon's is the system I invested in.

girvo 2y ago

Fujifilm is no better haha, they're on their third (I think) mobile app this time for X-Series camera control, and it's still terrible.' Amusingly, their Instax control app is actually pretty good!

neogodless 2y ago
There are 8+ Instax apps made by Fujifilm in the app store. Which one is pretty good for controls?
- girvo 2y ago
  "instax mini EVO" specifically, because thats the Instax I have these days :)
  - neogodless 2y ago
    Thanks! I realized later it was a "dumb" question as I don't have an Instax but a different Fujifilm (just got yesterday) that uses the standard "X" app that sort of works but is not great.
    - girvo 2y ago
      XApp is bad, but its still wayyyy better than Camera Remote at least haha. It's shocking how miserable their software is!
kjkjadksj 2y ago
The one for my 2016 era fuji is crap. Camera remote. Usually the connection fails between my phone and the cameras own wifi network it connects to but this failure takes a good 2 minutes to happen. So many artificial software limits with this camera, some removed in newer versions. Why can’t this one tether though? It is literally a digital camera no? Anyone know of any fujifilm firmware jailbreaks fwiw?
- girvo 2y ago