Originally posted by Wheatfield Every single "improvement" in photographic equipment in the past 75 or so years has been at the expense of quality.
Roll film replaced sheet film, and image quality went down. 35mm replaced roll film, and quality went down.
Colour replaced B&W and image longevity went down.
Digital replaced film and both image quality and image longevity (without major intervention from the user) went down.
Kodak's TMAX being a classic example of what might happen with EVF vs OVF.
T-grained films are a lot cheaper to produce than standard cubic-grained ones so Kodak hyped the crap out of them (I'm sure Wheatfield knows this story, but here it is for the rest of you.) Because it was new technology, Kodak sold it at a premium, as it was meant to be better 'cause it had finer grain. So it was cheaper to make, but sold for more. It was "new."
They did this by replacing some of the silver in the film with dyes coupled to the remaining crystals, just like in C-41 film. Much cheaper.
Unfortunately, it sacrificed a few other things that are equally, if not more, important. A lot of photogs didn't like the tonality, which is the most important trait of BW film. Latitude (especially compared to Tri-X) went down, as did the DR, as the film grains were uniformly small. Cubic-grained films have big and small crystals. Big crystals absorb more light, little ones absorb less. Thus, the big ones let the shadows hold more detail, while the little ones stop the highlights blowing out as much. Incidentally, Fuji uses this exact same principle in their SuperCCDs.
The plan was for Kodak to a) make more money by charging more for this "advanced" film, and b) get the demand for old films to drop off to the point where they be justified in axing them from their product lines. Thus, they both saved money and made money, at the expense of the photographer, but keeping their hands clean the whole time.
Infamously, this didn't happen. TMAX sales went up a bit, until a large chunk of Kodak's consumer base realised they didn't like them, and went back to Tri-X and Plus-X, or back to Ilford or Fuji or wherever. So Kodak was forced to keep the old films on, due to demand. They did axe a shitload of others, though. They keep insisting TMAX is superior to anything out there.
TMAX still costs more than Tri-X, by the way. Even though it's cheaper to make - it's new, after all.
So do I think EVFs will become cheaper in the long run? Probably not, for the same reasons they're slated to be The Next Best Thing. You'll find that the camera companies will be touting them as The Next Best Thing for an alarming period of time, and charging for it. I don't think there'll be some mass democratisation of the format amongst camera lines, not for a good while. There's too much money to be made in the novelty aspect. Does anyone else here really think a blank Blu-Ray disc, for example, cost about a hundred times more than a DVD-R to produce? No. It's just that it's new.
Camera companies will try to milk EVFs for as long as possible. I doubt Olympus is gonna replace its all the prisms in all its DSLRs with EVFs, because then you lose the image that EVFs are more costly (I'm working on the hypothesis that they EVFs become cheaper to make than mirrors and prisms,) and thus they lose the reason to charge a premium for its EVF cameras (granted, they've got only one. Which was an update of a camera they'd released six months before. A Leica manager must've gotten loose in their boardroom.)
This seems to be all the EVIL cameras goals. Not to become a better bog-standard DSLR, but to be a premium point-and-shoot.
Do people need to see
exactly how the image will turn out? No. Enthusiasts (and above) will learn how to judge a scene, and learn how their camera reacts to it. Consumers will say the mantra they've uttered for decades: "That one didn't turn out," and move on.
Originally posted by juu Furthermore, even if the quote were real it would only show how easy it is to underestimate the future advance of technology - something that you, the detractors of EVFs are also doing now.
So overestimating is the answer? Is that it? Being optimistic is right, and being pessimistic about a particular thing, is wrong?
Do you, by any chance, think that nuclear-powered car Ford was showing off in the fifties, was a good idea? It's just as easy to overestimate, which is what you're doing, as it is underestimate, which is what I'm doing.
At the end of the day, they're still estimates, which are basically just guesses with better credentials.