[beholder3]

Mirrorless can mean (see Nikons sad attempt):

• old lovely lens compatibility is gone: Nikon has a crippled mount on their adapter and all screw drive lenses stop working, so much fewer AF lens options.
• if you want native mount lenses for your mirroless it even gets worse. The manufacturer choice is tiny and 3rd party makers such as Sigma have stated that they currently have no plans for Z mount.

Its naive to assume mirroless enhances lens options if you want even basic AF. Mirrorless cripples AF lens choice.

There is a good reason why over years and years mirrorless customer numbers have not grown. It's still a dinosaur with new clothes.

[Trickortreat]

old lovely lens compatibility is gone: Nikon has a crippled mount on their adapter and all screw drive lenses stop working, so much fewer AF lens options.

Nikon users dont really care about legacy and that's why (In my opinion) the best DSLR they made - DF was a market failure.

if you want native mount lenses for your mirroless it even gets worse. The manufacturer choice is tiny and 3rd party makers such as Sigma have stated that they currently have no plans for Z mount.

That's Z mount problem - they dont open their specs so 3rd party currently have no interest in developing lenses that require great engineering involvement for a small user base.
Sony E mount is open and for that reason it has great 3rd party lens support.

Its naive to assume mirroless enhances lens options if you want even basic AF. Mirrorless cripples AF lens choice.

Not true - Sony works pretty well with both 3rd party, native and Canon lenses over adapter.

[MatKus]

No EVF is as real-time as an OVF and it can never be. All EVFs suffer from pixel shutter and read time lag. At best they can to reduce that lag by cranking up the ISO gain but then the result is a grainy EVF image that still has lag relative to an OVF. And that lag triggers nasty side-effects (eye-strain, headache, & nausea) in about 30% of the population.

Plus, DSLR manufacturers avoid all the wasted electrical power (and noise-inducing sensor heat) that MILCs have from unnecessarily running the sensor full-time just so the photographer can frame the image, pick the right zoom-focal length, focus on the subject, measure/decide the exposure setting, track the subject, and wait for the decisive moment.

I don't believe EVF it can't be done right some day. I'm sure someone will invent sensor going to ISO 100 000 without much noise and electronics able to transver image from sensor to display in less than 0.01s.
And all this electronics will use less and less power.
But we still need years for this. How many? hard to say, maybe 5, maybe 50, you never know when will come someone who does not know it's impossible and will simply do it.

And even then, if i have choice to switch EVF/OVF (as possible with latest Ricoh patents) i will prefere to have option than not to have it.

[reh321]

Mirrorless can mean (see Nikons sad attempt):

• old lovely lens compatibility is gone: Nikon has a crippled mount on their adapter and all screw drive lenses stop working, so much fewer AF lens options.
• if you want native mount lenses for your mirroless it even gets worse. The manufacturer choice is tiny and 3rd party makers such as Sigma have stated that they currently have no plans for Z mount.

Its naive to assume mirroless enhances lens options if you want even basic AF. Mirrorless cripples AF lens choice.

There is a good reason why over years and years mirrorless customer numbers have not grown. It's still a dinosaur with new clothes.

This analysis depends entirely on the importance of AF to you. I have the same three native Q-mount lenses I had when I purchased my Q-7 almost four years ago. Those lenses are enough for most anything I do - but I have adapted various other lenses from various other mounts, and I can make good use of them because "focus peaking" makes manual focusing entirely doable.

Ultimately, like most issues involving photography, this is a personal choice based on personal values.

[reh321]

Mirrorless can mean (see Nikons sad attempt):

• old lovely lens compatibility is gone: Nikon has a crippled mount on their adapter and all screw drive lenses stop working, so much fewer AF lens options.
• if you want native mount lenses for your mirroless it even gets worse. The manufacturer choice is tiny and 3rd party makers such as Sigma have stated that they currently have no plans for Z mount.

Its naive to assume mirroless enhances lens options if you want even basic AF. Mirrorless cripples AF lens choice.

When researching another issue yesterday, I discovered that when I went to the B&H site and listed Nikon cameras by "best selling", five of the top ten entries are some form of Z-6 or Z-7. If we could combine all entries to eliminate 'duplicates', Z-7 would be either first or second to the D850. I don't know how long this will continue, but right now sales figures don't agree with labeling Nikon's MILC products as a "sad attempt".

Canon's experience is also instructive. They may have lost customers when they made all of their "lovely old FD lenses" obsolete, but in a short time they became the dominant provider of camera bodies. Today, all of their EF-mount lenses are fully functional {including AF} on both their M-mount and their R-mount MILCs, and today they are the leader in MILC sales in Japan based solely on M-mount camera sales. I would call that a "happy attempt"

[photoptimist]

This isnt true - there are a lot of people who prefer EVF. So its all up to an end user. I'd say its an even 50-50 split.

Yes, some people prefer an EVF. But they also have to be willing to put up with the image quality degradation and short battery life created by running a hot sensor full time.

This is also far from truth - there are applications where OSPDAF is better (video, tracking, hi precision fast AF) and where it isnt (where absolute IQ is a paramount)

Quite true. I should have clarified that high-IQ is what I meant in terms of "demanding applications." The problem with OSPDAF is you can't turn-off the effects of it on the photographic image because some tens or hundreds of thousands of the sensor's pixels simply don't collect light like their neighboring pixels do.

[taktoon]

A question here: Are all current (or recently introduced) SONY sensors with OSPDAF?

[reh321]

Yes, some people prefer an EVF. But they also have to be willing to put up with the image quality degradation and short battery life created by running a hot sensor full time.

Quite true. I should have clarified that high-IQ is what I meant in terms of "demanding applications." The problem with OSPDAF is you can't turn-off the effects of it on the photographic image because some tens or hundreds of thousands of the sensor's pixels simply don't collect light like their neighboring pixels do.

I don't question your theory, but I wonder how much difference, if any, this makes to the average photographer.

In the age of film, I shot Kodachrome. I made maybe one or two prints over a thirty year period - most of the time we looked at my slides projected on a screen. Today I still don't make prints - we look at my images displayed on a screen.

Last Friday, we stopped in McComb MS on our way back from New Orleans and visited a local RR museum there, where their cars are displayed under a roof {see photo below}. Taking photos with my K-30 was tricky, because the cars were so much darker than the grass, and some grass would invariably show up in a photo to confuse the exposure determination, so I ended up using 'M' mode and bracketing. At the very end, "just for laughs", I took one photo of the orange and brown passenger car with my Q-7, using 'P' mode. When I got home and displayed photos on my computer screen, the 12mp Q-7 photo looked just as good as the best 16mp K-30 photo.


added: I really believe this is a "rabbit trail" - Pentax might provide a 'K-02' as an entry-level camera, but it is beyond my {very active} imagination that they would replace the K-3ii by an MILC.

[beholder3]

This analysis depends entirely on the importance of AF to you.

We are talking about what a company like Ricoh should sensibly do. There only the majority requirement is important. That in 2018 is the existence of autofocus in a lens.

[photoptimist]

I don't believe EVF it can't be done right some day. I'm sure someone will invent sensor going to ISO 100 000 without much noise and electronics able to transver image from sensor to display in less than 0.01s.
And all this electronics will use less and less power.
But we still need years for this. How many? hard to say, maybe 5, maybe 50, you never know when will come someone who does not know it's impossible and will simply do it.

And even then, if i have choice to switch EVF/OVF (as possible with latest Ricoh patents) i will prefere to have option than not to have it.

Currently, the sensors are near the physical limits.

Even if someone made electronics with zero lag in the transfer from sensor to display, the EVF would still have lag imposed by the time the sensor needs to gather light to form an image.

Even if some could make totally noise-free electronics, the low-lag image would still be grainy because scenes on planet Earth simply have too few photons to create a clean image with a short shutter speed.

As for power, the "less and less power" trend in electronics is created by making smaller and smaller semiconductor features. That's excellent for digital electronics and can even be done with some kinds of analog electronics. But the only way to apply that strategy to image sensors is to make smaller format sensors. Thus a 24 MPix smartphone sensor is the "low-power" version of the 24 MPix FF sensor. But if you want to keep the sensor big, then the power requirements stay high. Oh, and the other way to reduce sensor power is to slow down the frame-rate. But that performance dimension is going in the wrong direction in MILCs -- the better the EVF experience, the hotter the sensor!

[reh321]

We are talking about what a company like Ricoh should sensibly do. There only the majority requirement is important. That in 2018 is the existence of autofocus in a lens.

Pentax should make K-mount cameras - if they make an MILC, it should be K-mount. They have demonstrated an inability to produce a whole new set of lenses in a 'reasonable' period of time.

But, as I said in my last post, I really believe this is a "rabbit trail" - Pentax might provide a 'K-02' as an entry-level camera, but it is beyond my {very active} imagination that they would replace the K-3ii by an MILC.

[Trickortreat]

- if they make an MILC, it should be K-mount.

I hope they dont. We all remember how that went last time.
Besides, there are good reasons all the companies are making mirrorless from ground up.

[Rondec]

Currently, the sensors are near the physical limits.

Even if someone made electronics with zero lag in the transfer from sensor to display, the EVF would still have lag imposed by the time the sensor needs to gather light to form an image.

Even if some could make totally noise-free electronics, the low-lag image would still be grainy because scenes on planet Earth simply have too few photons to create a clean image with a short shutter speed.

As for power, the "less and less power" trend in electronics is created by making smaller and smaller semiconductor features. That's excellent for digital electronics and can even be done with some kinds of analog electronics. But the only way to apply that strategy to image sensors is to make smaller format sensors. Thus a 24 MPix smartphone sensor is the "low-power" version of the 24 MPix FF sensor. But if you want to keep the sensor big, then the power requirements stay high. Oh, and the other way to reduce sensor power is to slow down the frame-rate. But that performance dimension is going in the wrong direction in MILCs -- the better the EVF experience, the hotter the sensor!

People have this impression that technology is like magic, that is to say that it has no limits. The reality is that there is a maximum of what performance you can get from a given size sensor and we are about there. The same seems to be true for EVFs. The tiny screens that are in the viewfinder can probably get some better, but as far as read out speed and graininess in low light situations, they probably aren't going to get a whole lot better.

Faster read out does come with some cost and the sensors in the A7 III and A9 perform worse at low iso than the sensor in the K-1.

[reh321]

I hope they dont. We all remember how that went last time.
Besides, there are good reasons all the companies are making mirrorless from ground up.

The K-01 was one of several MILCs built with LCD only - all were "disappointing";

Sony and Canon persisted, and created much more popular cameras once they added EVF.

But, as I keep saying, I really believe this is a "rabbit trail" - Pentax might provide a 'K-02' as an entry-level camera, but it is beyond my {very active} imagination that they would replace the K-3ii by an MILC.

[str8talk83]

Mirrorless can mean (see Nikons sad attempt):

• old lovely lens compatibility is gone: Nikon has a crippled mount on their adapter and all screw drive lenses stop working, so much fewer AF lens options.
• if you want native mount lenses for your mirroless it even gets worse. The manufacturer choice is tiny and 3rd party makers such as Sigma have stated that they currently have no plans for Z mount.

Its naive to assume mirroless enhances lens options if you want even basic AF. Mirrorless cripples AF lens choice.

There is a good reason why over years and years mirrorless customer numbers have not grown. It's still a dinosaur with new clothes.

What about Canon, Fuji and Sony mirrorless?