I'm sorry, but you are completely off base here. Nikon always had the lead in flash exposure, yes. But in AF and lenses especially? Canon was the first to completely break compatibility with their older (FD mount) lenses which allowed them to have lightning fast autofocus (Ultrasonic line), which took Nikon more than a decade to catch up to. Same with exposure zones and metering accuracy combined with extremely fast drives - this basically meant that Canon took over sports photography in the mid 90s.
EDIT to add about auto exposure: the EOS-1N, released in 1995, had a monochrome 16-segment evaluative meter. The Nikon F5, released in 1996, had a 1,005 segment color-sensitive evaluative meter, which also incorporated focus distance from the lens. Essentially it took a 1 kilopixel digital photo in order to set the film exposure.
I've had one for fifteen years plus. To this day, the only camera I've owned which is actually a physical experience to shoot; the AF and film drive motors are actually strong enough for you to feel the torque they develop as you shoot.
(The F5 could officially shoot 8fps; on a fresh set of batteries you would often get nine; this thing could focus, evaluate the exposure, advance the film, stop down the aperture and trigger the shutter _nine_ times a second.)
The metering system can only be described as exquisite; after a few dozen rolls on the F5 I actually got into the (bad!) habit of not bracketing most of my color positive shots - the metering was spot on just about all the time, regardless of tricky conditions.
I think I'll take it out for a shooting session tomorrow, it's been a few months since it last saw any use. Thanks for the reminder!
They weren’t pro mainly because they didn’t have an extensive range of lenses ands accessories, and the lenses were mainly slow zooms.
Their real problem was dropping into and out of the pro market at irregular intervals. Every time the put together a killer, truly professional-level body system, the market reaction was, "yeah, I don't want to invest in a system that's going to be orphaned next week," which led to it being orphaned the next week. I'd already moved on to medium and large format when the Maxxum/Dynax/Alpha hit, but it was still maddening to see my old favourite shooting themselves in the foot over and over again.
Variable Field Curvature.
this can't be digitally recreated.
its a really interesting lens and the reason why I may yet fall back into my Kodak habit of yore.
Flash, on the Maxxum/Dynax AF cameras, from the get go, was incredible. Focus distance is critical for flash exposure. Minolta pioneered AF. Thry also played sloppy with a Honeywell patent, when we feared trade deficit to Japan, remember 4GL, 5GL... Originally Japanese manufacturers claimed solidarity. Then Minolta was left standing alone, stood up, and stupidly didn't settle. This was widely attributed to Minoru Tashima, he of Machinery and Industrial OpticAL Tashima. Reality, bad legal gamble lost to international politics. The punitive $100MM fine, hurt MINOLTA horribly, hence erratic pro equipment development.
On the contrary to the above comments assertion, Minolta had mire fast glass than anyone.
Edit, I used professionally almost every single MINOLTA camera and certainly every serious lens, from the SRT102b, to the last pre Sony, all home grown Dynax 7D...
if you're curious, just find a good store with a Sony A99II on display. This is the model that'sgoing to demonstrate the ability of a camera to be a genuinely delightful experience, above even the A9. If you can afford it, my experience of the A9, I challenge anyone to take a technically bad photo with it. The A99II is a serious machine too, but it caters to a old school crowd and the new models, the reason why they have a all new lens mount, again, is the lenses are designed for use with in camera software correction of distortion and vignetting etc. I personally dislike that change, not that i can criticize the results, but, strikingly demarked by the A9, we have entered the software supremacy era. Its incredible.
That said, Canon has historically been the winner with their lens selection, and IMO UX. Sony is quickly catching up, or even surpassing them though with e-mount, especially now that more 3rd party lens manufacturers are killing it (Sigma). I also like EVFs more than OVFs since you get a better exposure preview and focus peeking for manual focus. I really, really, really wanted to buy a Sony a7, but I ended up buying a Canon 6d due to lens selection a few years ago (and the Canon beat them on price). I'm a huge fan of mirrorless tech and I'm actually surprised that SLRs are still around.
The camera body is being commoditized. I'm a canon fan and hope they catch up with a full frame mirrorless, my buddy who follows the tech more said he's heard rumors that they are releasing one next year?
I, too, surprised myself by recently purchasing a 6D (I, not II -- why increase weight and dark noise?) on both lens-selection/lock-in and quickness concerns. I was surprised to find that I loved being able to leave the camera switched on all day in the mountains and draw/shoot/stow in seconds, with 1000+ images on one battery. Barring substantial advancements in sensor/display power consumption, no mirrorless camera can match that property. Furthermore, it is an instrument I can handle/adjust quickly and reliably with gloves on in harsh conditions. For a week at temperatures between -20 and -30 C, the 6D (and iPhones kept warm) operated normally while friends with mirrorless cameras suffered shutdowns.
The three things, from my perspective, that Canon really lacks are 0.5-1 stops of dynamic range in the sensor (SNRs are competitive across all brands, an underappreciated fact), silent electronic shutter, and Sony's incredible array of on-plane focus sensors and focus algorithms (Canon's DPAF may actually compete, if turned loose/optimized further). Sony's eye-detection AF must be a game-changer for portrait photographers.
I'm not at all unhappy with my choice to get the 6d. It's a great camera, and Canon's lenses have all been great. Even though I've always wanted a smaller full frame, any size improvement to the body is negated by the glass unless you get a fixed pancake lens. Good point about mirrorless battery life as well, I don't usually consider it that much since its easy to carry a spare, but I had an eos-m a while back and the battery life was frustrating. Unfortunately, it got trashed in reviews which I think set mirrorless back a bit for canon. Sure the autofocus was garbage, but the 22mm f/2 kit lens for it was amazing (one of the best I've used) and it was the smallest inexpensive camera with the best IQ/$ imo, and it had an aps-c sensor. The rest of the competition was doing m4/3. I remember you could pick up the kit for around $250 or so shortly after it came out.
I'm reasonably convinced that DPAF will probably work out better than Sony's approach in the long run – every photosite essentially doubling as a PDAF sensor seems more future proof than scattering 100+ dedicated PDAF sensors over the chip.
The problem with the latter is that if Canon can develop the software to really exploit DPAF (there's no reason in principle that you couldn't, say, let users chain together an arbitrary number of pixels into selectable AF points placed wherever they want outside of the extreme edges of the sensor), there's no good response with dedicated PDAF, because the more dedicated sensors you place on the chip, the more pixel gaps you create, and the more demosaicing algorithms are forced to infer pixel colours with missing mosaic values. There comes a point where the visual quality will suffer.
This is clearly not due to the nature of mirrorless technology though, so I don't think it's fair to criticize the technology based on that.
Picked up a NEX 5N, 18-55, 55-210, and 16mm for $200AU (~$160US).
Next stop: A6000.
It's worth noting that Canon has moved to on-chip ADC and that there's now only around a stop difference in noise between their sensors and Sony's, but from 2010-2016ish, Sony was certainly far ahead of the game.
This reminds me when the first “affordable” DSLRs from canon and Nikon arrived - both 6 megapixel models (the Canon 300D/Digital Rebel and the Nikon D70). The D70 was the better camera in a great many ways, but many buyers still chose the 300D to get access to the incredibly good for the time low noise CMOS sensor. I can’t count the number of discussions I had with friends looking to get a first DSLR debating the relative merits of those two landmark cameras. A later firmware hack for the 300D that gave it almost all the features of the more expensive 10D made this debate very interesting as well.
The past 5 years are less impressive though, for sure, with the great sensor hardware from Sony etc.
Only starting in 2010-2011 did they stagnate in image quality for a time.
Market share. The estimates I've seen are that between Canon, Nikon, and Sony DSLRs, Canon currently has the largest single share of the market.
Prior to Canon's work with CMOS sensors in the early 2000s, Nikon had the SLR and DSLR market share lead over Canon. (And basically no Sony bodies at all back then.)
The reason why Canon doesn't make a film SLR that includes the features that bring their cameras ahead of Nikon is because they don't think enough people will want to pay for them. And that's probably right.
Anyway (D)SLR use phase detect autofocus in which you don’t have to figure out much at all.
Mirrorless is another thing.
Last time I looked the digital back for a Hasselblad was ~$30k.
A digital back can improve workflow, but quality is still better with film at those sizes. These are studio cameras through and through; and I was able to connect a Hasselblad to some el cheapo Chinese lighting setup I bought on Amazon a year ago. That’s backwards compatibility.
At the end of the day Hasselblad is only 6x6 (i.e the negative size), but there are many bigger format (in medium format) cameras available like Mamiya 6, Mamiya 7, GW690III (which is 6x9, twice the negative size of Hasselblad H1's 6x4.5).
If you are looking for the ultimate medium format system camera, the obvious answer is Fuji GX680. It's waay bigger than the Hassy, and you can also put digital backs on it. The only downside is it's electronic camera, not mechanical.
(Not to mention the cost of 4x5 or (shudder!) 8x10 processing; B&W is eminently doable in the home, but IMHO where LF really, really shines is with dias film - developing that at home is not for the faint of heart.)
Put another way, if over night Canon had won 100% market share of all film cameras it would not be noticeable in the next quarterly earnings report.
Heck, I'd say "in the grand scheme of things", if you look at some of the data available (https://petapixel.com/2017/03/03/latest-camera-sales-chart-r...), stand-alone digital cameras "don't matter market-wise" compared to what has replaced them for a lot of people -- smartphones. Not that all stand alone digital cameras will disappear anytime soon (especially in segments like the DSLR market where the lenses can offer advantages for certain pictures), but the general purpose "compact digital camera" is probably doomed.
I paid more for the 'blad than either of my 4x5's.
No autofocus, no auto-exposure, and costs almost $4700 body only. Not something the typical film shooters will use, though :p
I think that because they were the dominant brands in 35mm in the film era, they still have fans today among people who still like to shoot film.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/reflexcamera/reflex-bri...
Canon's decision to put the AF motor in the lens helped them in verticals that use huge telephotos (sports, mostly). But their film cameras lagged Nikon in the sophistication of their AF, their automated exposure control, and especially their flash exposure control. These were all big deals in the era when every frame was precious and mistakes were hidden until it's too late (after the film was developed).
In digital cameras their AF system is now on par, and auto exposure is just less important in general because of the ease of reviewing and post-processing for exposure. They started moving past Nikon about 15 years ago by creating sensors that were cheaper, larger, and had lower noise. Since then they have filled in gaps in their lens lines, and used their expertise in video, to maintain their lead.