The camera manufacturers seem to be set in their ways. Wouldn't it be cool if you could load a sim card into your smart-camera & use android apps for cool features, like proper HDR (not the manual bracketing stuff), maybe apply some casual third-party filters, or instant streaming and sharing on social platforms. But maybe the target market, the professional photographers, are also the older generation that care more about a tiny amount of lens diffraction than the possibilities of new tech. There could also be the aspect of job security, since new tech could lower the barrier for newcomers.

This discussion crops up every so often: "Wouldn't it be nice if a camera had a full OS behind it".

Personally, I'm very pleased that my camera (a Nikon D850) boots instantly (approx 0.2 seconds) and has a shutter lag of 0.05 seconds (when pre-focused). It essentially never unexpectedly hangs when I need to take a shot. For my preferred subjects (wildlife) a consistently instant response is far more important than arbitrary functionality. If I want to share pictures or do other things, I can use the built-in wi-fi or Bluetooth to shunt pictures to my SmartPhone.

Exactly! Consider how incredibly slow it is to take a photo on a phone. And how short the battery life is. And how few capabilities the phone photo editing has compared to desktop photo processing where CPU, RAM and battery life are not constraints.

Why would I ever want any of that in a DSLR?

A DSLR can go from sitting on the shelf to having taken a focused photo in less than a second. The battery life is measured in weeks (unless using built-in flash). No comparison how much better experience it is.

The reason phones have those issues is because they have to compensate. I have a FF camera that runs android, and it lasts on standby for a month, takes a picture in 0.023 seconds, and so on. It's just that phone cameras are not optimized for latency and phones in general are not designed to be cameras.

Your camera doesn't actually boot in 0.2 seconds, it just wakes up from sleep.

My Sony runs Android and never hangs nor has an shutter lag. Instant response in everything. It can be done.

How did you measure the shutter lag? .05s is like a couple hummingbird wing flaps.

Using test equipment, I'd imagine the way to do it would be to sync a microphone and a logic analyzer and then short the shutter button. For the Sony A7 Mark I it's around 0.023 seconds : https://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/sony-a7/sony-a7A6.HTM

Granted, it's not "no shutter lag", but 2.3ms might as well not exist.

> How did you measure the shutter lag? .05s

I looked at the camera specs online.

I disagree. I think Samsung tried to do a "smart camera" with one of their mirrorless lines. It didn't really sell well. Besides, most pros will still want to use Photoshop, Capture One, Lightroom, or whatever to edit their photos, not apps. The utility of apps is to upload quick to your social media photo sharing sites.

Also, what you're asking for is already available in most flagship smartphone these days. Instead of moving apps to cameras, they moved a good enough camera to a phone where all your apps are available.

Oh god please no. The fewer "smart" things to deal with the better. Smartphones have already massively overstepped their calling.

There have been a bunch of those but none of them caught on, because their target market already has a smartphone.

The idea I really liked was Sony that made "smart lenses" that was basically a decent sensor and a decent lens that you clipped onto your phone and connected via Bluetooth/WiFi and used the phone as a display and storage

IMHO, no. What would be a great would be even better live integration with phones and other devices (although you can do quite a bit with tethering etc with many modern cameras). They're better devices for editing-like things from an UI perspective, have independent battery and heat budgets (already an issue with cameras with the move to mirrorless), have ecosystems better designed for regular updates, ... whereas in a camera, for me this is all an add-on. I want the core of the camera to be simple and fast, and only move whats necessary for efficient capture in them (e.g. accelerometers for stabilization in post-processing would be something that would need to be added to the camera). And for pros, the reliability etc is even more important, and for the majority of their use cases, capturing and editing are clearly split. You're not going to sit down at a wedding, conference or in the wilderness and try tweak a picture on the back of the camera - and for doing it later a tablet or computer is better suited. And in the studio they tether to a full-size computer with larger screen etc, again the more powerful option.

I suspect another aspect to it is that camera manufacturers didn't even really want to go digital at all. They had a nice revenue stream in the form of "selling rolls of film" that would have kept them happy indefinitely. It isn't easy to obsolete your main lifeline.

If I’m not mistaken Canon, Nikon, etc. only ever sold camera’s, not film. And photographers changed camera’s a lot less often in the analogue days. With digital the customers suddenly got on an upgrade schedule similar to that of computers. So from a commercial standpoint the move to digital must have been pretty attractive for the manufacturers.

Not only that, but the Big Three in film (Kodak, Fuji and AGFA) were at the forefront of digital photography when it was still barely a thing. Of them, only Fuji was making "serious" cameras for general photography (medium format rangefinders and the studio beast GX680, along with Fujinon optics for large format and enlargers).

Huh. Today I learned.

I read your comment and felt like I was doing magic mushrooms