Originally posted by reh321 Many people today don't hold a camera "properly" {as we were taught to do it 30+ years ago when I got my first SLR - a Pentax, incidentally}. Partly because of the need to focus, partly because of the ergonomics of the equipment of the day, we were taught to hold the camera with the right hand and support a long lens with the left hand; today, lots of people seem to want an enormous grip on the camera so they can hold the whole thing with the right hand. To me, that is as dumb as the full "zombie" hold. If you hold one with each hand, you have a very stable hold, it is not awkward at all, and it puts less stress on the mount.
The primary reason for a grip is not for right hand shooting but for better handling. For many photographers, it's just easier, when shooting with a heavy lens, to have a camera with a large grip. When I was doing volunteer photography for the local zoo, I found I was having trouble holding my DA* 300 and Tamy 70-200 steady enough to get tack sharp shots with the K-5. The grip was just too small, especially when shooting in portrait orientation. This had absolutely nothing to do with one-handed shooting, as you can't really shoot one handed with lenses weighing two and a half pounds and not get shake blur in any case. Adding an extra grip solved the problem, and now I occasionally see my photos on bus adds when driving around town.
If you like shooting large lenses on very small camera bodies, that option will always be available, especially for those willing to use adapters; so I'm not sure why anyone considers that an issue. My only point was that if Canon wants to take over the mirrorless market, it might not be such a bad idea to make some high quality small glass for those of us who find that smaller glass handles better on small cameras but who also want to use the very best lenses.
Originally posted by philbaum I think managers of large corporations often lose touch mentally with their customers. Somehow, they start thinking that their customers have the same view of their products as the managers do.
Probably so. But perhaps another issue is that they're listening to the wrong customers. Canon's and Nikon's high end equipment seems geared most toward the needs of professional event photographers. The problem is that professional photographers make up only a very small fraction of even the high-end market; which means the needs of non-professional, non-event photographers are often given short shrift. Mirrorless cameras have helped open things up a little bit by offering the option for much smaller cameras (especially when compared to the big FF pro cams). But they clearly haven't gone far enough. Like Canon and Nikon, the mirrorless brands still seem to believe that their very best lenses must be their fast aperture lenses, even though those of us who are landscape/travel/architecture photographers don't need f2.8 zooms, but might like a zoom lens that's just as good at f8-f11.
I suspect part of the problem is that mirrorless companies are still operating from what is largely a DSLR mindset. In the DSLR world, the best zooms tend to be the big f2.8 monsters. So all the mirrorless companies (except Leica) believe that their best zoom lenses must be f2.8 as well, even though it makes less sense on mirrorless where smaller size and weight are your best selling points. So if you want to shoot with the very best standard zoom lenses from Olympus, Fuji, or Sony, you have to choose the f2.8 option. What about those of us who are landscape or travel photographers and don't need the f2.8 but would like the very best quality?