Ricoh officially discontinues Pentax K-series DSLRs after 23 years, ending production as the last major DSLR maker pivots to an entirely new concept. K-mount stays.
I feel like things have been trending this way for a while now. DSLR is a lot clunkier than modern options like mirrorless. I own a decent one, but at this point, I’ll usually just shoot with my phone for convenience. Trying to hike or whatever with a big camera and lenses swinging around is a hassle.
I doubt know what Pixel does for compression but they certainly ruin their photos the second they’re saved. It looks great in the viewer, then even raws look smeary.
I have a moto and the photos indeed do suck compared to my DSLR. But I’m a hobbyist, not a professional photographer. If I were taking pictures at an important event or something, yeah, I’d probably pack my DSLR for that. When it comes to day to day pictures, just capturing memories, it’s not worth it for me anymore.
I would love to get a mirrorless eventually though, seems like the best of both worlds.
Zoom is better than what it used to be and not outright a lie. I still have a dual camera phone (pixel 7, standard camera and superwide), and the picture is reasonable at 2.5x. It’s a 50mp sensor that, by default, only takes ~16mp pictures by only using certain sensor cells. Zooming uses a tighter group of those cells while still making a 16mp picture. But yes, zoomed pictures absolutely lose quality as the cropping starts hitting the limits of a tiny piece of do-all glass. My phone goes to 8x. Meanwhile, the flagship phones with an additional mild-zoom cameras bump up the baseline further. Still, only equivalent to like 40-50mm on a DSLR full frame sensor. Not enough for me, not for the price, so I still lug my DSLR around occasionally, as my eye tends to prefer framing with my phone above 3x - or about 50-85mm on a crop sensor.
The limiting factor with zoom is often stability. There’s no way to hold a phone steady enough for a long zoom, and I don’t think any phone has proper optical image stabilisation.
I’m not sure what you mean by “proper” image stabilisation, but they certainly have at least so.me optical stabilisation. The lens slides around. If you turn it on and look at the camera while tilting it, you can see it move a bit inside the cover. It’s minor movement and was much more obvious when I had the outer lens off, but it’s a tiny camera. From experience with how it tracks objects when zoomed, I beleive it also slides around the active pixel region for digital stabilisation, if you will.
It does depend on the type of sensor, the comment above was close but a bit incomplete/imprecise. Many modern sensors use a technique called binning where the final image’s pixels are calculated by combining a 2x2 grid of sensor pixels via some signal processing, halving resolution in both dimensions but improving sensitivity and allowing for many DSP-based capabilities; whether they are actual improvements over the raw image is implementation-dependent and partially subjective. When shooting at 2x digital zoom though, you bypass the binning and use the sensor pixels directly, resulting in an image with the same “true” (non-upscaled) resolution as a 1x shot, minus the signal processing. Any other digital zoom, whether between 1x and 2x or above, is indeed a crop of a larger image.
Well, it’s why we distinguish “optical zoom” and “digital zoom”. In its broader meaning, “zoom” means magnification and nothing more. I do agree with you that optical zoom is superior in every way, but if you shoot a 2x digital zoom image on a binning sensor its resolution will not be an upscaled “lie” as is the case for digital zoom generally.
I am not trying to defend marketing deceptions or pretend that optical and digital zoom are alike. I just wanted to mention this piece of technical information so that someone that cares can know that if you do want to zoom beyond the optical capabilities of your phone (provided it has a binning sensor, basically every “50MP” phone does*), exactly 2x is the way to go, as it is indeed higher quality than shooting at 1x and cropping to 2x afterwards.
*Admittedly this point is kind of moot because most phones have a dedicated telephoto camera that uses a different, smaller sensor when you switch to 2x. This only applies if your tele is 3x or higher or you have a single lens with a sensor >>12.5MP
An OM-3 or a Lumix GM5 are both absolutely portable, even more so than typical mirrorless bodies.
Unfortunately, the OM-3 is a flagship camera, and the GM5 has turned into a collector’s item, so both are expensive.
Point and shoot and mirrorless camera are trending again. People realized that it is not about the technical quality of the image, but the experience of actually taking a picture. Cameras don’t have algorithmically tailored infinite content scrolling, and that alone is a plus for a lot of people.
At the same time, dedicated cameras still blow phones out of the water the moment you try to see the pictures in anything larger than a 6" screen. People are also starting to explore the fact that taking 5 thousand pictures that you are never going to see, share or enjoy again is dumb. Instead creating dedicated spaces and ocassions where fewer, higher quality, more sentimental value pictures can be appreciated. Phone’s are woefully inadequate for that purpose, the shadows are always a mess, values are compressed -even when they are shooting fake RAW- and now a lot of fine detail is AI generated. Which looks awful when shown even on the most modest TV screen.
EDIT: Not to mention that phone taken photos look awful when printed. With physical media making a come back, people want better quality images to print and share.
I feel like things have been trending this way for a while now. DSLR is a lot clunkier than modern options like mirrorless. I own a decent one, but at this point, I’ll usually just shoot with my phone for convenience. Trying to hike or whatever with a big camera and lenses swinging around is a hassle.
What kind of phone? Every phone I’ve tried, pixel, iPhone, moto… Sucks the moment you look close and zoom is a lie.
I doubt know what Pixel does for compression but they certainly ruin their photos the second they’re saved. It looks great in the viewer, then even raws look smeary.
I have a moto and the photos indeed do suck compared to my DSLR. But I’m a hobbyist, not a professional photographer. If I were taking pictures at an important event or something, yeah, I’d probably pack my DSLR for that. When it comes to day to day pictures, just capturing memories, it’s not worth it for me anymore.
I would love to get a mirrorless eventually though, seems like the best of both worlds.
Zoom is better than what it used to be and not outright a lie. I still have a dual camera phone (pixel 7, standard camera and superwide), and the picture is reasonable at 2.5x. It’s a 50mp sensor that, by default, only takes ~16mp pictures by only using certain sensor cells. Zooming uses a tighter group of those cells while still making a 16mp picture. But yes, zoomed pictures absolutely lose quality as the cropping starts hitting the limits of a tiny piece of do-all glass. My phone goes to 8x. Meanwhile, the flagship phones with an additional mild-zoom cameras bump up the baseline further. Still, only equivalent to like 40-50mm on a DSLR full frame sensor. Not enough for me, not for the price, so I still lug my DSLR around occasionally, as my eye tends to prefer framing with my phone above 3x - or about 50-85mm on a crop sensor.
The limiting factor with zoom is often stability. There’s no way to hold a phone steady enough for a long zoom, and I don’t think any phone has proper optical image stabilisation.
I’m not sure what you mean by “proper” image stabilisation, but they certainly have at least so.me optical stabilisation. The lens slides around. If you turn it on and look at the camera while tilting it, you can see it move a bit inside the cover. It’s minor movement and was much more obvious when I had the outer lens off, but it’s a tiny camera. From experience with how it tracks objects when zoomed, I beleive it also slides around the active pixel region for digital stabilisation, if you will.
Using less of the sensor to take a picture and calling it zoom is a lie. That’s just cropping the picture to be smaller not zooming.
It is a clear step above cropping a 16mp sensor to 2mp for zoom
The lie is the same regardless of the resolution.
It does depend on the type of sensor, the comment above was close but a bit incomplete/imprecise. Many modern sensors use a technique called binning where the final image’s pixels are calculated by combining a 2x2 grid of sensor pixels via some signal processing, halving resolution in both dimensions but improving sensitivity and allowing for many DSP-based capabilities; whether they are actual improvements over the raw image is implementation-dependent and partially subjective. When shooting at 2x digital zoom though, you bypass the binning and use the sensor pixels directly, resulting in an image with the same “true” (non-upscaled) resolution as a 1x shot, minus the signal processing. Any other digital zoom, whether between 1x and 2x or above, is indeed a crop of a larger image.
I get what you are saying but zoom is a function of the lens. Calling anything else zoom is a lie.
Well, it’s why we distinguish “optical zoom” and “digital zoom”. In its broader meaning, “zoom” means magnification and nothing more. I do agree with you that optical zoom is superior in every way, but if you shoot a 2x digital zoom image on a binning sensor its resolution will not be an upscaled “lie” as is the case for digital zoom generally.
I am not trying to defend marketing deceptions or pretend that optical and digital zoom are alike. I just wanted to mention this piece of technical information so that someone that cares can know that if you do want to zoom beyond the optical capabilities of your phone (provided it has a binning sensor, basically every “50MP” phone does*), exactly 2x is the way to go, as it is indeed higher quality than shooting at 1x and cropping to 2x afterwards.
*Admittedly this point is kind of moot because most phones have a dedicated telephoto camera that uses a different, smaller sensor when you switch to 2x. This only applies if your tele is 3x or higher or you have a single lens with a sensor >>12.5MP
If you are going to split hairs on it not being a lie then I am going to split hairs on it not being magnification.
Please do, I’ll gladly read your argument.
An OM-3 or a Lumix GM5 are both absolutely portable, even more so than typical mirrorless bodies. Unfortunately, the OM-3 is a flagship camera, and the GM5 has turned into a collector’s item, so both are expensive.
Point and shoot and mirrorless camera are trending again. People realized that it is not about the technical quality of the image, but the experience of actually taking a picture. Cameras don’t have algorithmically tailored infinite content scrolling, and that alone is a plus for a lot of people.
At the same time, dedicated cameras still blow phones out of the water the moment you try to see the pictures in anything larger than a 6" screen. People are also starting to explore the fact that taking 5 thousand pictures that you are never going to see, share or enjoy again is dumb. Instead creating dedicated spaces and ocassions where fewer, higher quality, more sentimental value pictures can be appreciated. Phone’s are woefully inadequate for that purpose, the shadows are always a mess, values are compressed -even when they are shooting fake RAW- and now a lot of fine detail is AI generated. Which looks awful when shown even on the most modest TV screen.
EDIT: Not to mention that phone taken photos look awful when printed. With physical media making a come back, people want better quality images to print and share.
I’ll still shoot birds with my DSLR, but the phone has replaced 90% of my vacation photography