Olympus quits camera business after 84 years

Re:Olympus quits camera business after 84 years by sudosysgen on Thursday June 25, 2020 @08:08PM (#23647289)

35mm film already affords you the very maximum in light gathering and blur, though. The kit lens used to be 50 1.8 or 1.4, which really is pretty much the amount of background blur people are looking for today. You didn't complain about lack of aperture or blur because you already had what people today are looking for.

Even medium format and large format had pretty much the same amount of background blur and low-light performance, just at a higher resolution.

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Re:Olympus quits camera business after 84 years by foldr on Friday June 26, 2020 @03:30AM (#23649621)

Yes, but the point is that people rarely if ever used that level of background blur, as it wasn't trendy to, e.g., take portraits where only one eyelash is in focus.

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Re:Olympus quits camera business after 84 years by sudosysgen on Friday June 26, 2020 @11:10AM (#23652839)

Really? Because even really old portraits had huge amounts of background blur: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/aU4oh69TPgC0JrujNVvk... for example.

Now of course, it wasn't trendy to take portraits with only one eyelash in focus, but the vast majority of people even on FF don't do that. On my 50 1.4 (a lens made for film cameras, btw) if you want to take a picture with such an extreme amount of blur you need to have your subject quite close to you. And there is virtually no one with a lens faster than f/1.4 nowadays.

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Re:Olympus quits camera business after 84 years by slantyyz on Friday June 26, 2020 @05:01PM (#23657005)

People today shoot and chimp, which was impossible back in the day. If you wanted a preview, you needed to have a polaroid around.

Film and processing cost money, and took from an hour or to days to get back, so people would set the aperture in a more reasonable range.

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