[Pål Jensen]

The optical viewfinder's days are numbered, there is no doubt in my mind. Both Sony and Olympus seem to have completely abandoned them.

..and the customers have abandoned Sony and Olympus . Could it be a connection?

Incidentally, Sony boasted being No.2 in the DSLR world within a few years after the Minolta buyout. It has failed miserably. Olympus too is a fading star. Perhaps they are barking up the wrong tree?

[Pål Jensen]

You didn't read my argument very well. The price of a camera, or any good, is determined by what people are willing to pay as dictated by supply and demand. How much it costs to manufacture is irrelevant. Either the overhead allows for a profit or it does not.

.

No. This is how buying things on the used market work. If people aren't willing to pay for what a product cost, the manufacturer won't make it. If they do make it and have to take a loss, it is unintentional and due to bad research.

[konraDarnok]

No. This is how buying things on the used market work. If people aren't willing to pay for what a product cost, the manufacturer won't make it. If they do make it and have to take a loss, it is unintentional and due to bad research.

You're not disagreeing with my argument. Just being disagreeable. Besides, there are things called "loss leaders," which are quite deliberate.

[konraDarnok]

..and the customers have abandoned Sony and Olympus . Could it be a connection?

Incidentally, Sony boasted being No.2 in the DSLR world within a few years after the Minolta buyout. It has failed miserably. Olympus too is a fading star. Perhaps they are barking up the wrong tree?

We don't have access to their internal numbers. But it's not unreasonable to say fewer customers buying a cheaper to manufacture product is a better business model for them. Popularity is not how capitalism works either, just look at Myspace or Facebook.

[Winder]

The reason why no one is buying the A99 has nothing to do with the EVF and more the fact that there is almost no FF lens support other than legacy minolta glass. No one is going to buy a 3k camera and put used glass on it. Pentax at least has a couple FF lenses still in production.

Are you on crack?

B&H shows
23 Sony/Zeiss FF lenses currently in production
21 Sigma FF lenses
12 Tamron FF lenses
2 Schneider lenses

Almost 60 A-mount FF lenses currently in production......

[Pål Jensen]

But it's something of a misplaced analogy, as the context of my reply was with Moore's law. Eyeglasses and buggy whips are not progressing the way semi-conductors are.

Moores law isn't applying to viewfinders.

One analogy is watches. Digital watches was going to take over the world. No moving parts and much cheaper. I saw a Seiko (or Citizen or whatever) brochure around 1980 and there was one analog watch in there (for the luddites presumably) among all the digital. Now you're lucky to find any digital watches except for niche watches. As with viewfinders, watches are for looking at (or through for viewfinders) and the old way was much more intuitive in spite of higher cost and more moving parts. Also, mechanical watches have increased in popularity in spite of old technology, incredible level of precision, lots of mechanical parts and significantly higher cost. .

[tclausen]

Moores law isn't applying to viewfinders.

Caveat lector, I'm not disagreeing with Pål (just in case it sounds as if I am).

I have wondered if I should jump in or not, but what the heck...

The underlying phenomenon that was observed by Moore was, that constant advancements in semiconductor design and manufacturing allowed packing /more/ transistors with /lower/ switching latency on a piece of silicon.

Moore stated this phenomenon as an observed relationship between "time" and "speed" - but this must be understood in the context of a time when the chase for "speed" was primordial: remember the days when we thought an 8 MHz CPU was snappy?

That same underlying phenomenon, however, allows building "just as fast as status quo, but less power-hungry" semiconductors. Given that embedded and/or portable devices become more and more prevalent, shaving a quarter of a Watt off of the power consumption becomes (in scale and autonomy) a Big Deal.....and that's the trend that we've started to see in the past, ohh, 5 or so years - and that trend shows no signs of changing. Every semiconductor (& even discrete circuit) design I see (& most ICs that I see built) is presented with energy efficiency as the key performance parameter, rather than "computational speed"....improvements in the former are design requirements, whereas when presented with improvements to the latter they're met with "so, can we underclock it to save a picoWatt..."

So Pål is completely right: Moore's law doesn't apply, as it was expressed by Moore, to viewfinders.

The underlying phenomenon may apply, however, to the circuitry behind viewfinders -- but we're more likely to see that translated into "lower energy consumption for larger autonomy on the same battery". Driving an electronic screen (regardless of technology - if we ignore eInk...) is extremely power-hungry as it is already, guys. And then, there's heat dispersion in all this, that factors in to such designs....

Moore's law is often (mis-)quoted and (mis-)understood in Internet arguments. This thread is no exception.

What's the name of the law that states that regardless of what Pentax releases, the conclusion is that "Pentax is Doomed"?

[IchabodCrane]

This a common misunderstanding of how capitalism works. The costs of a camera are not passed on or saved by the consumer. The market prices the camera, not how much it costs to make. If you can't make the camera for the price the market is willing to bear, you go out of business (or at the very least lose money) No doubt the A99 costs less to make than the D800; therefore Sony makes more profit per unit sold, which is why Sony is doing this. Mirror boxes are expensive to manufacture, engineer, and support. For all I know all FF digital cameras are loss leaders as an excuse to sell profitable glass.

"Advantages" also have nothing to do with how capitalism works. This is where digital cameras came from in the in the first place. Early digital cameras were inferior to film in almost every respect. Resolution, color, lag, you name it, it was terrible, but a digi cam is cheap -- no springs, no gears, no complex film transport mechanisms. You just print a board and put in a plastic box. Competition in that market is what improved image quality and the user experience to what it is today. It's all about making a buck.

I have a rather keen understanding of capitalism. In a competitive market... if the price reflects what the market will pay but if few buy the product, what does that tell us? If the manufacturer has much greater capacity than sales (and behaves rationally), then it indicates costs are higher than their competition.

[Uluru]

Moores law isn't applying to viewfinders.

One analogy is watches. Digital watches was going to take over the world. No moving parts and much cheaper. I saw a Seiko (or Citizen or whatever) brochure around 1980 and there was one analog watch in there (for the luddites presumably) among all the digital. Now you're lucky to find any digital watches except for niche watches. As with viewfinders, watches are for looking at (or through for viewfinders) and the old way was much more intuitive in spite of higher cost and more moving parts. Also, mechanical watches have increased in popularity in spite of old technology, incredible level of precision, lots of mechanical parts and significantly higher cost. .

:

Yes, because not necessarily people want to carry an "emblem of the cheap and disposable", and be proud of it.
They too want an object beautifully crafted, and to behold.

Deep in subconscious of their minds, people still know that a proven concept like a beautifully crafted SLR or a Leica rangefinder will outlive them, and have more lasting value they are ready to admire. A trusted bow, trusted spear, trusted sword, etc. -- we are creatures that fetishise and admire tools that make us invincible and lasting.

[derekkite]

:

Yes, because not necessarily people want to carry an "emblem of the cheap and disposable", and be proud of it.
They too want an object beautifully crafted, and to behold.

Deep in subconscious of their minds, people still know that a proven concept like a beautifully crafted SLR or a Leica rangefinder will outlive them, and have more lasting value they are ready to admire. A trusted bow, trusted spear, trusted sword, etc. -- we are creatures that fetishise and admire tools that make us invincible and lasting.

And the rest of us look at our phone.

[Uluru]

And the rest of us look at our phone.

I personally wouldn't touch any today's phone than an iPhone, because I already know — by feel, looks, how it works — that in it, went 5x more thought and passion than in any copycat device out there. Although I like it better, I still feel the phone is a necessary evil — at any moment someone may interrupt me through it and my time is gone.

Camera, to me, means an escapism from everyone else's attention. A peace of mind, creative recollection.

PS. I also like old phones, some of them superbly made. I still keep them.

[Kunzite]

I personally wouldn't touch any today's phone than an iPhone, because I already know — by feel, looks, how it works — that in it, went 5x more thought and passion than in any copycat device out there.

You mean marketing.

[mecrox]

:

Yes, because not necessarily people want to carry an "emblem of the cheap and disposable", and be proud of it.
They too want an object beautifully crafted, and to behold.

Deep in subconscious of their minds, people still know that a proven concept like a beautifully crafted SLR or a Leica rangefinder will outlive them, and have more lasting value they are ready to admire. A trusted bow, trusted spear, trusted sword, etc. -- we are creatures that fetishise and admire tools that make us invincible and lasting.

If you want an object "beautifully crafted, and to behold" then find a good local craftsman and commission a dining table or a coffee table in the best wood, a fine stained glass window, things like that. They should still be perfectly serviceable in three hundred years. Items from the world of consumer electronics may show excellence of industrial design and production standards as well as extraordinary ingenuity but chances are they will be fit for scrap within 10-15 years at most, probably much less. They are built to a price and not to last - electronics and capacitors will blow out, moving parts will wear out with no replacements any longer, technological changes will render the entire thing ancient history. And, of course, the makers will deliberately "obsolete" them in order to try to force you to discard them.

Yes, we do still want that trusted sword but manufacturers have become adept at selling us the massed produced version courtesy of a factory in China, and we have become adept at kidding ourselves we are buying the real thing. That's one reason I'd be wary of spending large sums on modern lenses. Unlike the lenses from the analogue era, which do last a long time as we know, they are are often packed with electronics which are unlikely to last all that long.

[falconeye]

Consider a quantum camera. It doesn't rely on lenses, it creates images by reading the quantum state of light.

It is always a pitty if non-physicists read things like this and start believing everything could become possible. Nope.

Quantum optics is using the exact same law of nature (photons are the quants of a quantum field) where Heisenberg's law applies and where you need large or many lenses to achieve good resolution. However, I think a many lenses approach (think of thousands of small lenses) may change things in the future. Quantum optics which relies on changing the quantum field near a subject to have an effect to be recorded far of it doesn't solve a single photographic problem. It is a nice quantum entanglement experiment though.

As for quantum computing: I am personally convinced that taking the interaction of energy density with quantum fields into account (aka as quantum gravity theory, a theory still to be discovered) will break the strict linearity of quantum mechanics thereby destroying the possibility of a larger scale quantum computer and resolving the Schrödinger's Cat paradox.

As for resolution and optical VF: Actually, I always found the resolution of OVFs a bit lacking. It was the most disturbing fact I noticed when looking through my MX VF at the time. It is caused by the ground glass texture which should be more fine grain to produce a full resolution image. The dSLR ground glasses are a bit better at the expense of more difficult manual focussing.

[Digitalis]

caused by the ground glass texture which should be more fine grain to produce a full resolution image. The dSLR ground glasses are a bit better at the expense of more difficult manual focussing.

Therein lies the compromise - the grainier the viewfinder is the better the focusing "snap" is, but the finer grained the ground glass becomes the harder it is to see the immediate area of focus (without manual focusing aids) however the upshot of having with fine grained ground glass makes the images brighter. Minolta used to make truly excellent focusing screens for their cameras, they found the optimal point between brightness and focus snap.