- Canon was first to market with an affordable DSLR. Nikon may have had the first mainstream pro model (the D1), but Canon was first to the prosumer market with the D30. With everyone soon transitioning to digital, this would prove to be a key market (and soon dominated by Canon's 5D series).
- Canon was also first to strike big with a competent video DSLR, the 5D MkII. This would spawn a whole new market for video professionals and people getting into video, with Nikon playing catch up (even today still, Canon's AF for video is unmatched).
Actually it goes back to before optical stabilization. Nikon was first to market with auto focus (F3AF) but that was pretty clunky and only two compatible AF lenses were manufactured. By the time its successor, the F4, was released Nikon was competing with Canon's EOS-1.
Canon and Nikon took very different approaches. Canon used a brand new lens mount with high torque motors in the lenses. Nikon abandoned in-lens motors and went for in-body motors and reused the existing F mount. There were (and still are) pros and cons to the different approaches, but at the end of the day the EOS-1's autofocus was better for birding and sports than the F4's. That's when you saw pros start to abandon Nikon en masse. Image stabilization and digital were just insult to injury.
I think the biggest thing hobbling Nikon is the way they design and build their their products. The guy that runs lensrentals.com tests and disassembles lenses and blogs about it. Canon tends to use modular, easier to repair (and presumably easier to assemble in a factory with precision) components. Nikon's stuff still looks almost handmade and far more finicky.
They aren't pushing features like video to their consumer lineups very aggressively, because they don't want to cannibalize the sales of their cine lineup (where a $50k body is almost entry-level). At one point, a lot of the innovation was happening via the Magic Lantern project, which is an open-sourced firmware replacement emerging from the community, and it seemed that Canon was (understandably) not really interested in helping.
In that classic echo of Canon moving into the electronic/autofocus niche that Nikon left underserved, Sony was perfectly happy to move into the video niche that Canon left underserved. Sony's MILCs started as niche products, but they've gotten better and better, their consumer cameras are 99% as good as Canon/Nikon's best but a fraction of the price, and their flagship stuff is just off the charts.
About 5 years back, Sony added on-sensor phase-detect pixels, which have put them into contention with DSLR-class products, if not actually better. For stills, they perform virtually on par with in-prism phase-detect sensors. They are much better than contrast-detect AF. For video, they can actually autofocus while shooting, which a DSLR cannot do (if the mirror is up, no light can get to the sensors in the prism to focus) and DSLRs must fall back to contrast-detect, which is quite slow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up8K_xd_iwU&t=628
On top of that, it's quite a bit cheaper to ditch the mirror box and viewfinder (or go electronic), and it lets you build a much smaller camera. DSLRs are fundamentally limited by their register distance (sensor-to-mount distance), MILC has no mirror so the register distance can be much smaller.
Canon's MILC products are hot garbage, they tried a token product a couple years ago but they were timid to avoid cannibalizing their DSLR and video lineups. So it was a terrible product, combining the worst characteristics of every system on the market. Small sensor, terrible AF, late to market, tiny selection of lenses. I haven't been following too closely but maybe they will make a more serious attempt next time. For the time being though, they have effectively ceded a niche that is growing in importance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO7rxitFLZg
To put it in a nutshell, MILCs are now "Good Enough", and Canon has missed the boat. SLRs have inertia but they won't forever, there are really only a handful of places where they have a legitimate advantage, and those are fading quickly. Meanwhile, they are more expensive than MILCs for an equivalent amount of capability.
As for sensors, Canon may have iterated faster earlier, but they haven't kept up lately. Sony's sensors are flat-out better: higher-resolution, better high-ISO performance, PDAF pixels, etc. Nikon's products are actually technically superior to Canon's at this point, because they're using Sony sensors and Canon insists on using their own in-house slop.
Sony, meanwhile, has slapped their sensor on a shake table and now has in-body IS/VR like Pentax (which admittedly is not as good as in-lens VR, but you can always disable in-body VR if your lens supports in-lens VR). And their high-ISO stuff is just godly, we're talking about shooting at ISO 102k or 204k and getting a pretty decent image/video out of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVLBHMbRMW4
It's that classic story of a company that becomes too entrenched in its existing revenue streams and can no longer innovate out of fear of cutting its own throat... and then another company goes ahead and does it anyway, and the slumbering giant has no response prepared. Just like when Nikon let Canon take a foothold.
(edit: looks like Canon released a new MILC a month ago that is at least a reasonable effort, although it has some quirks, really lacks any unique/compelling features, and is about 5 years late to the party)
The main mirror is semi-transparent and reflects most of the light to the viewfinder prism. A smaller part goes through and is reflected by a sencodary mirror to the af sensor in the bottom.
Mirrorless interchangeable-lens camera
Also a great point about R&D budget during the digital transition. Canon definitely was going "in house" for digital whereas Nikon viewed digital almost as Kodak did--a different film back.
I think it would be great to see some Canon or Nikon tech in smartphone cameras, but they should've tried to do it like 5 years ago. I'm not even sure they'd have that much to offer smartphone makers at this point, for the same reason Intel wouldn't have too much to offer to Qualcomm in the smartphone market at this point - these companies already have all the expertise and experience they need in the markets they already dominate.
Smartphones have already almost completely wiped out the compact camera and "amateur" market for DSLRs. The predominance of ML accelerators in smartphones and new innovations (like using multiple cameras, or light-field tech, which Google may still use in future Pixels) is going to take smartphone cameras to the next level in the next 10 years.
Smart phone is on a different market that they inherently have no experience or incentive to pursue.
Drone and creative creator are what they should always be looking for in the first place.
It used to be that people would have a phone and a compact camera. Nowadays there's almost parity between phones and compact cameras (at least low-end compacts), so if you want to get a second camera you get a DSLR or a mirrorless, rather than a compact camera. To add to that, DSLRs and mirrorless cameras are now cheaper than ever.
I bought a Nikon DSLR (Most expensive purchase till then), thinking that I would take it around whenever I go out for fun trips.
I did take it out often. I had some great pictures with it. No problems, not even today.
But after I got the Pixel 2 XL, the pain points with DSLRs are obvious for regular shooting. They need to be charged, the SD card needs to be put in a computer to transfer files, and they're bulky so carrying them is a problem.
So now, when I want to take a nice quick photo, I wish I had my DSLR, but I take the photo with my phone anyway, and I don't think much about it.
I'm not saying DSLR are going to be completely irrelevant. But they're getting so close to the ideal picture quality for normal photos (i.e. no shutter speed or focus requirements) they're just fine. And the problem is they're getting better.
They won't replace the full-frame cameras with have large ecosystems around them, but they'll make people like me think twice before buying a DSLR.
This is true for all phones, no matter the cost. They simply can't compete with much cheaper but dedicated cameras for one vital reason: the sensor and lenses sizes plus noise. Phones need to be thin and they can devote only a small part of their area to a sensor plus lens. That lens also must follow a certain width/depth ratio to minimize image distortion, so if it's thin it also must be narrow, followed by a narrow sensor as well. Since a narrow sensor is exposed to less light than a larger one, to obtain the same level it has to be pushed to higher sensitivity to cope with lesser light, hence the higher noise.
The picture taking I do on my phone is very different I do on my dslr. As for battery life maybe I'm not shooting enough but I've literally never "had" to charge it. I don't even bother bringing the charger anymore, the damn battery refuses to die. I just charge it after a trip or once a month at home. Fat SD card means same for memory.
Are you shooting in raw and editing your photos?
Yep, I do the whole works. All of them in RAW, spending an hour or so editing in Lightroom (with favorite presets), have a flickr (like every other DSLR owner). But it stopped being fun after seeing that so many people do the same 'artistic' stuff, it doesn't feel like I'm doing something 'worthwhile' anymore. Now I just want to take photos and videos with friends. I find them more important.
I used to care about the right focus, shutter speed etc. But with a phone, if you use the portrait mode, you get something like f/1.5, and if you don't, you get something like f/18. So that almost takes care of the focus problem for a lot of cases.
When it comes to shutter speed, I use the high shutter speed when there are faster moving objects. That's a problem with a phone, but with enough photos taken quickly, one of them usually turns out good. People use low shutter speed only for long exposure shots like nightsky, waterflow, etc. which isn't a 'normal' photo.
Low light is one place I guess where a phone can't exactly do as well, but as I said, it just needs to be good enough, and not perfect.
About the battery of DSLR, often I don't take it out anymore, and between uses, the battery is so low that I have to charge it. So it leave it, and next time, its pretty much dead. Poor maintenance, but it again ties into if it is worth it.
Unfortunately for DSLRs for my purposes, the joy of shooting one is vastly outweighed by the inconvenience of transporting it.
Once ICEs are dramatically less convenient than electric vehicles, I suspect I’ll give up stick shift too. Hoping that day is a long way away.
Going beyond that, innovative ideas light the extreme mult-lens systems from Light start to offer features a DSLR can’t reproduce in a form factor closer to a smartphone. Disruptive innovation comes from flipping orthodoxies and that is exactly what we’re seeing.
- Canon came out with Image Stabilization lenses first and had a 3 to 4 year head start on Nikon. (Arguably, Nikon invented VR Vibration Reduction first but they didn't beat Canon to market by making professional lenses immediately.) This started the mass exodus of professionals to Canon and caused the "sea of white lenses" you see at every sports event.[1]
- Canon bet on in-house CMOS technology for sensors instead of Nikon's strategy of partnering with Sony (and Kodak). Canon iterated faster on their digital cameras. In 2002, Canon had a very well-received 1ds full-frame digital while Nikon only offered a body for Kodak's horrible Dcs Pro 14n. Nikon didn't have their own full-frame camera until 2007. In technology races, 5 years is an eternity. Although the most expensive camera is never the best-selling product, any leadership position in the top-of-the-line camera can be leveraged and its features can trickle down to the cheaper mass-market cameras.
- Canon was the bigger company with other profitable product domains outside of cameras such as photocopiers, video camcorders, printers, etc. (E.g. Canon made the imaging engine for both Apple LaserWriter and HP LaserJet.) This allowed them to plow more capital and investments back into the camera division. Nikon also some other domains such as scientific microscopes and film scanners but they were less profitable.
In the film days, Nikon definitely had the perception of being the "Ferrari" of cameras but the shift to digital allowed Canon to take the lead.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q="telephoto+lenses"+sports+ev...