The Electro-Optic Camera – The World's First DSLR

Re:The Electro-Optic Camera – The World's First DSLR by tgb on Wednesday May 28, 2014 @11:49AM (#7810873)

Somewhat OT: I don't know much about photography but had always known DSLRs as the gold standard for digital photography. I was surprised to learn that there's actually a bit of a shift going on away from DSLRs towards "mirrorless cameras". If you haven't heard about them, the differences are pretty interesting. Basically, DSLRs are still like the one in this article - digital sensors crammed into an SLR. Mirrorless cameras take more liberties, as if they were imagining a digital camera from the ground up rather than starting with an SLR. Eg: http://photographylife.com/mirrorless-vs-dslr

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Re:The Electro-Optic Camera – The World's First DSLR by georgemcbay on Wednesday May 28, 2014 @02:46PM (#7812039)

Photography is a hobby of mine. I currently use 2 camera bodies, one is a DSLR (Canon 70D) and the other is mirrorless (Sony A7).

The Sony A7 has a full-frame sensor, which is pretty crazy considering how relatively small it is (much smaller than the 70D body which holds a smaller 1.6 crop APS-C sensor) and under ideal conditions it produces better image quality than the Canon 70D (slightly higher megapixels, but really the physical size of the sensor is what puts it ahead with less noise, plus the Sony sensor technology has better dynamic range).

The Sony A7 is the first camera I've used where the electronic viewfinder is bright enough and fast enough that I can stand using it over an optical viewfinder. And having reached that point it really opens up some great abilities that you can't get with purely optical, like focus peaking (real-time contrast/edge detection to show you which parts of the frame have the sharpest focus) and high zoom in the viewfinder (both of which are really useful especially when using older manual focus lenses which really shine on this camera). Also, just plain seeing the image exactly like the sensor does in terms of depth of field is a real game changer... and yes, you could previously do these with liveview cameras on a bigger LCD attached to the back, but the high-res, bright viewfinder is a really big deal for me as I hate holding the camera away from me while looking at an LCD since it is much harder not to cause sharpness-killing movement that way than when using your face and arms as a sort of bio-tripod.

All that aside, DSLRs still currently win for fast autofocus. Pure phase detect autofocus is just so much faster than the contrast autofocus used by mirrorless cameras. For a lot of photos this doesn't matter, but for some it does. See, eg:

http://gmcbay.com/slideshow?postId=d80f062f-46e1-44c0-81e7-9...

That is a photo I took last weekend with my Canon 70D. I often carry both bodies (70D and Sony A7) with me when hiking, but there's no way I would have gotten those hummingbird photos with the A7 (regardless of which lens I was using on it) unless I was using manual focus and got really lucky with my timing.

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Re:The Electro-Optic Camera – The World's First DSLR by DanBC on Wednesday May 28, 2014 @12:09PM (#7811012)

Even with analogue SLRs there were times when rangefinders (also mirrorless) had advantages. You didn't have the massy mirror to move, just the shutter, so there were timing and noise benefits.

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Re:The Electro-Optic Camera – The World's First DSLR by thisjepisje on Wednesday May 28, 2014 @11:57AM (#7810929)

With a digital camera you can use the CCD output for the viewfinder, so you don't really need a mirror.

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Re:The Electro-Optic Camera – The World's First DSLR by miahi on Wednesday May 28, 2014 @03:04PM (#7812137)

In the past, the DSLRs sensors were quite sensitive to long exposures. As I remember it, during long exposures the sensor could get so hot that it could actually burn the color filter - so the color accuracy decreased over time. This was why you could not use live-view on a DSLR camera when all the P&S cameras could do it. The new sensors use less current, so they don't get that hot during a long (live view, movie mode) exposure.

The DSLRs still have a few advantages over low-end mirrorless cameras: faster reaction time, faster focusing time (usually because they use phase-detection and not contrast-detection focus sensors), better ergonomics. But they are bulky and have more things that can break (the mirror box is quite complex). We will probably continue to see DSLRs in the professional usage, but a mirrorless camera looks better for the consumer market.

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