Is continuous shooting the new megapixels?

neostyles · 01-29-2016, 06:00 PM

Is it just me or has the mirrorless rage touched off an arms race with continuous shooting speeds? I mean, mirrorless brought a lot to the table, giving you 10+ fps in a very cheap body. And this is fine.These things come in handy. Ever since the d500 and d5 were announced Ive been suspecting that DSLRs are trying to be like their mirrorless counterparts. It just seems like canon/niikon arent ready to invest in the mirrorless side of things so of course they try to copy them. The canon 1dx II's specs just leaked. 16 fps. 16. All fine and good but do we really need that much? And i mean, with a dslr its going to sound like a scene from black hawk down or something. These things work with mirrorless because there is no mirror flapping around. I

It seems like cameras are all specs now and no refinement. Instead of giving us more, it should be smarter and easier to integrate into our lives. The canon 1dx II weighs 1300 grams and that is the body alone. I wouldnt want to be the person stuck at a wedding shoot for 8 hours with that thing. Maybe what this proves is that as much as canon.nikon want us to think that they are giving us everything we love about mirrorless in a time honored dslr, it still cant beat the main point of their cousins that lack mirrors, and that is saving all that weight and bulk. Flash sync speeds have long since been a limitation, I wish that would get tackled instead of unnecessarily huge buffers and the burst rate to go along with.

**jatrax** · 01-29-2016, 06:02 PM

Originally posted by neostyles

All fine and good but do we really need that much?

I'm good with 1 fpm. Well maybe 5 fpm would be OK. fps? I can't think that fast.

stillshot2 · 01-29-2016, 06:53 PM

I find the 6 fps I get from my K30 to be enough for just about anything. I used to have a Sony a55 that could do 10fps and it was just too much to sort through afterwards. It sure sounded great firing all those shots off though

Adam · 01-29-2016, 06:56 PM

Sports photographers love high FPS, because they can just cut loose and increase their chances of freezing the action at the right time (compared to trying to time the shot). Certainly newer cameras shouldn't have slower framerates than older ones, right? Hence the constant "specs race".

Adam
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bertwert · 01-29-2016, 06:58 PM

You have to have better FPS, MP, ISO, etc.. than the previous camera... always... in the Spec Wars

derekkite · 01-29-2016, 07:16 PM

These specs enable you to get shots you couldn't get previously, or reliably get those shots. Not everyone needs that capability and yes some people will take hundreds of shots unnecessarily. Shot discipline is something to learn.

But there was a situation the other day when the quick fps of the K3 was very useful. A ram started doing something interesting and I managed to capture something interesting in the multiple exposures. A friend has a canon and shooting small birds taking off from a perch manages to get twice as many in the frame as I do. So instead of the rare shot where simply a capture is of interest, he could choose from many and find one that was interesting, even artistic.

15 fps is halfway to full sensor video.

pinholecam · 01-29-2016, 11:34 PM

Do it fast enough and its called video

tuco · 01-30-2016, 12:16 AM

Isn't that Canon's sports camera? Perhaps a lot of us here can get by just fine with much less than 16 FPS but that shouldn't stop the technology in action photography from advancing.

**Rondec** · 01-30-2016, 04:19 AM - **1 Like**

The problem, in general, isn't frames per second, it is having tracking auto focus that can keep up with action. A lot of cameras can shoot pretty fast if focused on a particular spot, but following a running back through the line and down the field and keeping him in focus is really tough. That is where cameras for sports and wildlife excel -- and are quite expensive to boot.

If all you shoot is landscapes, or portrait sessions, or even weddings, then having super-high frame rates is probably wasted. No one really wants to get to the end of a wedding session with 5000 photos to sort through and have to delete 70 percent of them.

wildman · 01-30-2016, 05:05 AM - **1 Like**

Originally posted by neostyles

should be smarter and easier to integrate into our lives.

For most people isn't that exactly what happened with the switch from PS to phones?

But your main point is well taken - most "serious" cameras are still huge clumsy overly complex impractical affairs that often have little to do with the way I use a camera.

philbaum · 01-30-2016, 01:52 PM

Originally posted by Adam

Sports photographers love high FPS, because they can just cut loose and increase their chances of freezing the action at the right time (compared to trying to time the shot). Certainly newer cameras shouldn't have slower framerates than older ones, right? Hence the constant "specs race".

Thats not the case with the FF however, an interesting anomaly. While the A6000 was at 11 fps and the Nex 6 was even at 10 fps, the Sony A7X were at generally 5fps. Nikon FF were similarly down graded to 5 fps in most cases, except for perhaps D4. The D4 was at 14fps and D5 appears to be even faster. I don't know where the Canon machines are at.

So what happened to the higher frame rates in FF cameras. I'm guessing that the manufacturers didn't have the suitable chips to process the larger file sizes any more quickly. I think Nikon uses 2 processors in some of their cameras, one for tracking and one for processing files. I doubt that Sony can cram a lot more processing power in their small A7x bodies with their small battery power and heat issues. Compact cameras have their down sides.

As to what frame rate is suitable. I used the K3 frame rate of 8.3fps to shoot an actor who was jumping high for this promo shot. The director wanted to see him as high off the ground as possible. So i held the shutter down and panned as he ran past me. One shot showed him just leaving the ground, the second shot showed him at the highest 4 feet in the air, and the 3rd shot showed him approaching the ground again. So 8.3 fps was only good enough to give me 1 shot at maximum altitude. Director was happy however. But i realized why some people want higher frame rates than even 8.3 fps

rawr · 01-30-2016, 04:56 PM - **1 Like**

High fps is also handy for panorama mode shooting, which every device from smart-phones to pro FFs offers today.

High fps is also handy or required for HDR modes, various extended bracketing features (including some of the drive modes offered by Pentax like 'Interval Composite' or 'Multi-Exposure'), plus Sony burst shooting modes like 'Handheld Twilight', 'Anti-Motion Blur' and 'Multi-frame NR', which rely on rapidly capturing a burst of images and combining them in camera.

So high fps is not just for sports shooting.

Rupert · 01-30-2016, 08:02 PM

I see the need for sports shooters and some wildlife shooting......though I seldom need it. Most shots of Otis would work at one frame per hour.

Regards!

biz-engineer · 01-31-2016, 01:01 AM

Originally posted by Adam

Sports photographers love high FPS, because they can just cut loose and increase their chances of freezing the action at the right time (compared to trying to time the shot). Certainly newer cameras shouldn't have slower framerates than older ones, right? Hence the constant "specs race".

Originally posted by derekkite

These specs enable you to get shots you couldn't get previously, or reliably get those shots. Not everyone needs that capability and yes some people will take hundreds of shots unnecessarily. Shot discipline is something to learn.

Yes, I agree. For sports or wildlife, high FPS helps. For example ice skating dance spinning, there is no way you can get the right capture without burst mode and in that case 8 or 10 FPS helps a lot. That being said, while I find it useful to be able to shot a burst of 10 frames, I don't find having a buffer of 200 frames (=D500) as useful as I also don't want to have my SD cards full of rubbish shots and I don't like to spend the time to figure out a few relevant frames lost in 1000 frames. So, for me, the K-3 specifications are good enough. What's just lacking a bit for the K-3 are the lenses to match the camera AF performance, although the sensor of the K-3 potentially deliver better IQ (...vs sensor of the 7DII). I don't know if that's only me, but I find that there is no single camera specification that just make perfect sense. K-3 ok , but no fast AF and fast AF lenses to go with it. 7DII great cam and lenses, but sensor sucks. D7200 , great AF and lenses, but 6 FPS. D500, great AF, FPS and lenses, but this large buffer is luxury and camera is expensive for an apsc sized sensor, Sony mirroless 10 FPS ok, but with what lenses and can AF tacking follow at 10 FPS?

**Rondec** · 01-31-2016, 04:28 AM

Originally posted by philbaum

Thats not the case with the FF however, an interesting anomaly. While the A6000 was at 11 fps and the Nex 6 was even at 10 fps, the Sony A7X were at generally 5fps. Nikon FF were similarly down graded to 5 fps in most cases, except for perhaps D4. The D4 was at 14fps and D5 appears to be even faster. I don't know where the Canon machines are at.

So what happened to the higher frame rates in FF cameras. I'm guessing that the manufacturers didn't have the suitable chips to process the larger file sizes any more quickly. I think Nikon uses 2 processors in some of their cameras, one for tracking and one for processing files. I doubt that Sony can cram a lot more processing power in their small A7x bodies with their small battery power and heat issues. Compact cameras have their down sides.

As to what frame rate is suitable. I used the K3 frame rate of 8.3fps to shoot an actor who was jumping high for this promo shot. The director wanted to see him as high off the ground as possible. So i held the shutter down and panned as he ran past me. One shot showed him just leaving the ground, the second shot showed him at the highest 4 feet in the air, and the 3rd shot showed him approaching the ground again. So 8.3 fps was only good enough to give me 1 shot at maximum altitude. Director was happy however. But i realized why some people want higher frame rates than even 8.3 fps

I think the issue is the file sizes involved. Sports cameras, whether full frame or APS-C, don't usually push the envelope when it comes to megapixels. Both the D500 and D5 are 20 megapixels and for that reason they are able to push their frame rates up a lot higher than if they were 36 or 42 megapixels.

I suppose it all comes back to the fact that all cameras are compromises and if you need faster frame rates, you are willing to have smaller file sizes and fewer megapixels as a result.

01-29-2016, 06:00 PM	#1
neostyles Veteran Member Join Date: Jul 2013 Posts: 445	Is continuous shooting the new megapixels? Is it just me or has the mirrorless rage touched off an arms race with continuous shooting speeds? I mean, mirrorless brought a lot to the table, giving you 10+ fps in a very cheap body. And this is fine.These things come in handy. Ever since the d500 and d5 were announced Ive been suspecting that DSLRs are trying to be like their mirrorless counterparts. It just seems like canon/niikon arent ready to invest in the mirrorless side of things so of course they try to copy them. The canon 1dx II's specs just leaked. 16 fps. 16. All fine and good but do we really need that much? And i mean, with a dslr its going to sound like a scene from black hawk down or something. These things work with mirrorless because there is no mirror flapping around. I It seems like cameras are all specs now and no refinement. Instead of giving us more, it should be smarter and easier to integrate into our lives. The canon 1dx II weighs 1300 grams and that is the body alone. I wouldnt want to be the person stuck at a wedding shoot for 8 hours with that thing. Maybe what this proves is that as much as canon.nikon want us to think that they are giving us everything we love about mirrorless in a time honored dslr, it still cant beat the main point of their cousins that lack mirrors, and that is saving all that weight and bulk. Flash sync speeds have long since been a limitation, I wish that would get tackled instead of unnecessarily huge buffers and the burst rate to go along with.

01-30-2016, 05:05 AM - 1 Like	#10
wildman Veteran Member Join Date: Jun 2008 Location: Flyover America Posts: 4,469	Originally posted by neostyles should be smarter and easier to integrate into our lives. For most people isn't that exactly what happened with the switch from PS to phones? But your main point is well taken - most "serious" cameras are still huge clumsy overly complex impractical affairs that often have little to do with the way I use a camera. Last edited by wildman; 01-30-2016 at 05:30 AM.

01-31-2016, 01:01 AM	#14
biz-engineer Pentaxian Join Date: Feb 2015 Photos: Gallery Posts: 12,224	Originally posted by Adam Sports photographers love high FPS, because they can just cut loose and increase their chances of freezing the action at the right time (compared to trying to time the shot). Certainly newer cameras shouldn't have slower framerates than older ones, right? Hence the constant "specs race". Originally posted by derekkite These specs enable you to get shots you couldn't get previously, or reliably get those shots. Not everyone needs that capability and yes some people will take hundreds of shots unnecessarily. Shot discipline is something to learn. Yes, I agree. For sports or wildlife, high FPS helps. For example ice skating dance spinning, there is no way you can get the right capture without burst mode and in that case 8 or 10 FPS helps a lot. That being said, while I find it useful to be able to shot a burst of 10 frames, I don't find having a buffer of 200 frames (=D500) as useful as I also don't want to have my SD cards full of rubbish shots and I don't like to spend the time to figure out a few relevant frames lost in 1000 frames. So, for me, the K-3 specifications are good enough. What's just lacking a bit for the K-3 are the lenses to match the camera AF performance, although the sensor of the K-3 potentially deliver better IQ (...vs sensor of the 7DII). I don't know if that's only me, but I find that there is no single camera specification that just make perfect sense. K-3 ok , but no fast AF and fast AF lenses to go with it. 7DII great cam and lenses, but sensor sucks. D7200 , great AF and lenses, but 6 FPS. D500, great AF, FPS and lenses, but this large buffer is luxury and camera is expensive for an apsc sized sensor, Sony mirroless 10 FPS ok, but with what lenses and can AF tacking follow at 10 FPS? Last edited by biz-engineer; 01-31-2016 at 01:07 AM.

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01-29-2016, 06:02 PM	#2
jatrax Site Supporter Join Date: May 2010 Location: Washington Cascades Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 12,991	Originally posted by neostyles All fine and good but do we really need that much? I'm good with 1 fpm. Well maybe 5 fpm would be OK. fps? I can't think that fast.

01-29-2016, 06:53 PM	#3
stillshot2 Pentaxian Join Date: Sep 2013 Location: Phoenix, AZ Photos: Albums Posts: 1,070	I find the 6 fps I get from my K30 to be enough for just about anything. I used to have a Sony a55 that could do 10fps and it was just too much to sort through afterwards. It sure sounded great firing all those shots off though

01-29-2016, 06:56 PM	#4
Adam Administrator Site Webmaster Join Date: Sep 2006 Location: Arizona Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 51,593	Sports photographers love high FPS, because they can just cut loose and increase their chances of freezing the action at the right time (compared to trying to time the shot). Certainly newer cameras shouldn't have slower framerates than older ones, right? Hence the constant "specs race". Adam PentaxForums.com Webmaster (Site Usage Guide \| Site Help \| My Photography) PentaxForums.com server and development costs are user-supported. You can help cover these costs by donating or purchasing one of our Pentax eBooks. Or, buy your photo gear from our affiliates, Adorama, B&H Photo, KEH, or Topaz Labs, and get FREE Marketplace access - click here to see how! Trusted Pentax retailers:

01-29-2016, 06:58 PM	#5
bertwert Veteran Member Join Date: Jun 2015 Location: Golden, BC Posts: 15,173	You have to have better FPS, MP, ISO, etc.. than the previous camera... always... in the Spec Wars

01-29-2016, 07:16 PM	#6
derekkite Pentaxian Join Date: Sep 2011 Location: Nelson B.C. Posts: 3,782	These specs enable you to get shots you couldn't get previously, or reliably get those shots. Not everyone needs that capability and yes some people will take hundreds of shots unnecessarily. Shot discipline is something to learn. But there was a situation the other day when the quick fps of the K3 was very useful. A ram started doing something interesting and I managed to capture something interesting in the multiple exposures. A friend has a canon and shooting small birds taking off from a perch manages to get twice as many in the frame as I do. So instead of the rare shot where simply a capture is of interest, he could choose from many and find one that was interesting, even artistic. 15 fps is halfway to full sensor video.

01-29-2016, 11:34 PM	#7
pinholecam Pentaxian Join Date: Oct 2009 Location: North Photos: Gallery Posts: 4,706	Do it fast enough and its called video

01-30-2016, 12:16 AM	#8
tuco Pentaxian Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: Pugetopolis Posts: 11,019	Isn't that Canon's sports camera? Perhaps a lot of us here can get by just fine with much less than 16 FPS but that shouldn't stop the technology in action photography from advancing.

01-30-2016, 04:19 AM - 1 Like	#9
Rondec Loyal Site Supporter Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Gladys, Virginia Photos: Gallery Posts: 27,650	The problem, in general, isn't frames per second, it is having tracking auto focus that can keep up with action. A lot of cameras can shoot pretty fast if focused on a particular spot, but following a running back through the line and down the field and keeping him in focus is really tough. That is where cameras for sports and wildlife excel -- and are quite expensive to boot. If all you shoot is landscapes, or portrait sessions, or even weddings, then having super-high frame rates is probably wasted. No one really wants to get to the end of a wedding session with 5000 photos to sort through and have to delete 70 percent of them.

01-30-2016, 01:52 PM	#11
philbaum Veteran Member Join Date: Oct 2007 Location: Port Townsend, Washington State, USA Posts: 3,659	Originally posted by Adam Sports photographers love high FPS, because they can just cut loose and increase their chances of freezing the action at the right time (compared to trying to time the shot). Certainly newer cameras shouldn't have slower framerates than older ones, right? Hence the constant "specs race". Thats not the case with the FF however, an interesting anomaly. While the A6000 was at 11 fps and the Nex 6 was even at 10 fps, the Sony A7X were at generally 5fps. Nikon FF were similarly down graded to 5 fps in most cases, except for perhaps D4. The D4 was at 14fps and D5 appears to be even faster. I don't know where the Canon machines are at. So what happened to the higher frame rates in FF cameras. I'm guessing that the manufacturers didn't have the suitable chips to process the larger file sizes any more quickly. I think Nikon uses 2 processors in some of their cameras, one for tracking and one for processing files. I doubt that Sony can cram a lot more processing power in their small A7x bodies with their small battery power and heat issues. Compact cameras have their down sides. As to what frame rate is suitable. I used the K3 frame rate of 8.3fps to shoot an actor who was jumping high for this promo shot. The director wanted to see him as high off the ground as possible. So i held the shutter down and panned as he ran past me. One shot showed him just leaving the ground, the second shot showed him at the highest 4 feet in the air, and the 3rd shot showed him approaching the ground again. So 8.3 fps was only good enough to give me 1 shot at maximum altitude. Director was happy however. But i realized why some people want higher frame rates than even 8.3 fps

01-30-2016, 04:56 PM - 1 Like	#12
rawr Veteran Member Join Date: Jun 2009 Posts: 11,913	High fps is also handy for panorama mode shooting, which every device from smart-phones to pro FFs offers today. High fps is also handy or required for HDR modes, various extended bracketing features (including some of the drive modes offered by Pentax like 'Interval Composite' or 'Multi-Exposure'), plus Sony burst shooting modes like 'Handheld Twilight', 'Anti-Motion Blur' and 'Multi-frame NR', which rely on rapidly capturing a burst of images and combining them in camera. So high fps is not just for sports shooting.

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01-30-2016, 08:02 PM	#13
Rupert Veteran Member Join Date: Sep 2006 Location: Texas Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 25,123	I see the need for sports shooters and some wildlife shooting......though I seldom need it. Most shots of Otis would work at one frame per hour. Regards!

01-31-2016, 04:28 AM	#15
Rondec Loyal Site Supporter Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Gladys, Virginia Photos: Gallery Posts: 27,650	Originally posted by philbaum Thats not the case with the FF however, an interesting anomaly. While the A6000 was at 11 fps and the Nex 6 was even at 10 fps, the Sony A7X were at generally 5fps. Nikon FF were similarly down graded to 5 fps in most cases, except for perhaps D4. The D4 was at 14fps and D5 appears to be even faster. I don't know where the Canon machines are at. So what happened to the higher frame rates in FF cameras. I'm guessing that the manufacturers didn't have the suitable chips to process the larger file sizes any more quickly. I think Nikon uses 2 processors in some of their cameras, one for tracking and one for processing files. I doubt that Sony can cram a lot more processing power in their small A7x bodies with their small battery power and heat issues. Compact cameras have their down sides. As to what frame rate is suitable. I used the K3 frame rate of 8.3fps to shoot an actor who was jumping high for this promo shot. The director wanted to see him as high off the ground as possible. So i held the shutter down and panned as he ran past me. One shot showed him just leaving the ground, the second shot showed him at the highest 4 feet in the air, and the 3rd shot showed him approaching the ground again. So 8.3 fps was only good enough to give me 1 shot at maximum altitude. Director was happy however. But i realized why some people want higher frame rates than even 8.3 fps I think the issue is the file sizes involved. Sports cameras, whether full frame or APS-C, don't usually push the envelope when it comes to megapixels. Both the D500 and D5 are 20 megapixels and for that reason they are able to push their frame rates up a lot higher than if they were 36 or 42 megapixels. I suppose it all comes back to the fact that all cameras are compromises and if you need faster frame rates, you are willing to have smaller file sizes and fewer megapixels as a result.