Future of 35 mm SLR

[Andy K]

Can a dSLR do this?

 

[Poisson Du Jour]

[...]
How will Nikon-Canon be able to get punters to buy a new camera every 3 year as they have done during the last decade?
Is there a major paradigm shift in the 35 mm SLR future?

Seriously, I wonder about the sanity of people spending big money on cameras they have little on idea coming to grips with, meaning they have little or no foundation knowledge in photography. This is how consumers fall on their sword: we, as film users, have skills and experience to put cameras to use in any situation, but too often now, skill, knowledge and experience play second fiddle to getting your hands on a fancy piece of MPX hardware.

I think Nikon and Canon, among others, have made a grave mistake in pinning their fortunes on d****. Of course, both marques still have film bodies they wouldn't dream of ditching. Neither Nikon nor Canon are selling any substantial digital stock here in Australia at this time and discounting is heavy with rampant competition. Incredibly, now furniture retailers are calling themselves camera experts. So, too, supermarketss, for so long the place you go for pillows, mincemeat and batteries, have "the best camera for your picture taking". Ugh—!

There is a visible perception that the public are becoming tired of being nobbled for the 'next best thing that does everything better than the last' (read: ever increased levels of automation). The turnover is sluggish and the technology is too overpowering for Mums and Dads who are the first to come in and complain about the camera when in fact the fault is with themselves and lack of education, both at grassroots photography and at the critical interface of computer literacy. In the upper echelons of traditional film based photography, handing over this artform to be usurped by a computer is viewed on a par with shooting Bambi.

Happily, sales of pre-loved 35mm (or all film-based equipment) continue at a steady rate, particularly evident in professional dealerships. There are collectors, folio shooters, artists, students, alternative process practitioners... a large, well-educated market there for the taking. Stagnancy in 5x4 and 6x6 and other formats appears to be because of uncertainty of the availability of film for those niche applications (Fujifilm's discontinuation of 5x4 quickload sounded a warning bell). So sales of film cameras chug along nicely. Why is that so? Because film-based cameras do not have self-disposing obsolescence. What was great in 1990 is still great now. That's something we on APUG know anyway, right?

 

[Jeff Kubach]

I don't care.

I kinda agree! I usually but used equipment.
Jeff

 

[darinwc]

Can a dSLR do this?

Isnt that what Sony is doing digitally with the TX7?

 

[Pumal]

No need. Thanks to the late Mr Adams I already know that. 42.

r

Mats

At 42; you are just a Whipper Snaper. Today I took 3 rolls of B/W with a Kodack IIIc. The Future is Tomorrow.

 

[Sirius Glass]

ZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz ...

 

[steelneck]

Yes i think that there will come a paradigm shift, just like what has happened every time the "zeitgeist" turned to "post" like in postwar, postindustrial, postmodernism and so on. The "era" the western world now slowly aproaches is the postdigital era, when the digital revolution is done and has made its way.

I like to compare with wrist watches. Every one who is old enough to remeber the late seveties and early eighties will remember the hype around "digital watches". This was the electronic revolution. When it was at its peak you where seen as a complete idiot, a backstriving dinosaur if you wanted an ordinary watch with a dial instad of of one with digital numbers (i think my english lacks a bit here..), especially when talking about teenagers, they where made silly by their classmates if they had an analog watch. At first they where only watches, but then they started to play sounds, had alarm, got minicalculators and what not.. But then something happened, in this area the zetgeist turned to post. Look today, most wristwatches have dials and no one gets ridiquled based on what wristwatch they have.

Another thing to draw conclusions from is BW film. When the color film made its revolution exactly "everyone" was supposed to shot in color, and every "sane" person predicted the death of black and white film. Well, as we all know, BW film can still be bought today. When we entered post-color-film the BW film went out of its hype and became judged for what it is on its own terms, not compared to color.

What we actually are talking about is disruptive technology and the characteristics of new technology is that it is not better on what the old technology was good at, or else we would just talk about development of the old technology. The new technology is better at something new. This is the basic reason that old and big companies usually get in troubble under a disruptive shift. The new is good at something new, not the old. Seen in the mirrior descisions usually look very stupid because of this, but it can only be seen in the mirror. Those who do see it on beforehand will be looked upon as crazy uncomfortable radicals, usually stashed away in small development groups with very small budgets.

Hasselblad did see the future, they where very early into digital imaging. Already at the summer olympics in California 1984 they had developed a machine to send images digitally back home around half the globe and already at this time they started to think about having this digital technology in the camera. Their electronic department also became profitable vary quick. But year 2000 they shut down the electronic department and put everything in developing a new analog camera.. They where close to go bankrupt, of course. Today we wonder why, and the answer is easy. They listened on their customers and kept on navigating by the old trusty map. People buying Hasselblad cameras did not ask for cheap digital toys with bad image quality, back in 1999 digital camreras was basicly toys with crappy quality.

Another example is the old maker of mechanical calculators Facit (1909-1998), a global player rivaling IBM at its heydays. They to saw the electronics coming already in the sixties. Ten years later their electronics department even had started to make world class mainframe computers, again rivaling IBM. But when people started to buy minicalculators they listened on their old customers, they did not ask for minicalculators that not even had a paper roll and defenitely not mainframe computers large as houses needing a powerplant. So they kept on developing mechanic calculators.. Tens of thousand got laid off and factories became torned down some years thereafter.

Christian Sandström at the Chalmers university in Gothenburg have a lot on this subject of disruptive innovation, economics and industrial transformation on his website in form of very well made slides he uses in lectures. A lot about how Kodak, Hasselblad, The camera industry has handeled the digital shift and he draws conclusions from comparing with TV makers, Facit, Swiss watch makers and more. Some of you will be sitting for hours with his slides, and it is really educating and very interesting:
http://www.christiansandstrom.org/index.php

So what can we expect? No one knows, we have never before known what will come. But there are lessons to draw from history, and one thing we can see is that old technology usually do not die if it is things that private persons can upheld on a hobby basis. The old technology becomes hobby and sometimes art. With the industrial revolution came factories making clothes, but we can still today buy yarn and such. Facories making furniture has been around for 150 years, but there are still people making furniture with simple hand tools.. So what about SLR cameras? I think they will be around for a very long time to come, but we will not find them in every home just as there are makers of big clocks with pendulums even if we do not find them in every home. Or look at large format cameras, they are still made today 80 years after their time.

 

[waynecrider]

I believe what I have read in the past, that as soon as film makers turn wholly to digital acquire, film production will become a cottage industry. You cannot source chemicals in smaller quantities, and then pay wages and overhead for production without passing on the cost to the consumer, and the consumer will probably not want to pay the bill. As a videographer my tape supplier even speaks of increasingly reduced sales due to digital media.

 

[MattKing]

steelneck:

I'd be careful about using wristwatches as an example.

A very large percentage of people in their 20s and younger:

1) either do not wear a watch, or only wear one as a "fashion accessory"; and
2) cannot read time off an analogue timepiece's face (they require a digital display).

 

[Existing Light]

steelneck:

I'd be careful about using wristwatches as an example.

A very large percentage of people in their 20s and younger:

1) either do not wear a watch, or only wear one as a "fashion accessory"; and
2) cannot read time off an analogue timepiece's face (they require a digital display).

I guess I'm in the minority, then. I'm 23 and can read analog clocks just fine. I dont have a wristwatch because I know I wont be able to keep up with it, so I use the clock on my cell phone (which is digital, obviously, but I'd be perfectly fine if there was a display of a "real" clock on the screen )

 

[keithwms]

You asked for a prophecy so here is mine

(1) Within ~10 years, no more SLRs will be produced.... neither film nor digital. The mirror mechanism will be completely bypassed, in favour of ultrahigh resolution electronic viewfinders (EVFs). The first step towards this - "live view" - is already common to many dslr bodies, and there are already a few quite good bodies that have only EVFs. The resolutions of these screens are decent but actually still quite poor compared to what will soon be possible.

(1b) In terms of body construct, the EVFs will eventually lead to bodies roughly half as thick as they are now, but until foveon-like sensors (with r/g/b stacked at one photosite) are more favourably priced, there will be no incentive to abandon retrofocus designs. The bodies will be thinner than current SLRs but not as thin as a rangefinder.

(2) Also, with the mirror constraints removed, the actual format and orientation will also change dramatically: no more rectangle in landscape orientation! The new format of choice will be square (or even circular!), requiring no body rotation and optimizing the use of the image circle and permitting fine crop adjustments.

 

[darinwc]

Maybe they will ditch the chip alltogether. Instead of using a big expensive chip, there will be a thin strip that is moved at high speed across the image plane.
Like a scan back but at high speed.

 

[clayne]

They'll probably make d*g*t*a* stills cameras for those who don't want to shoot video, then those will be phased out and there will be a minority community mourning the death of 'real' photography.

Where have we seen that before?

Unfortunately in the past every format debate has still, at it's base, been rooted in still photography (or painting for that matter). The nature of motion-based video is a paradigm shift.

Your average consumer doesn't give a squat and just wants to 300,000 frames of Johnny's first step.

It's not photography itself that is the issue - it's the fact that we, as a society, are continually removing all feeling from anything and everything - while at the same time increasingly having less tolerance for that which is not "new."

 

[firecracker]

Wait a minute. I thought the whole trend is shifting towards 3D cameras, TV sets, and whatever else that go with them. So, even in the digital world there's a potential which probably will depart from what we've been so accustomed to.

But for the 3D stuff, who wants to wear the special glass just to see the images in that quality?

So, whether it'll be a SLR with a mirror or without it, probably won't become a issue...

 

[Mats_A]

Very interesting opinions given here. My apologies for almost starting a d...l thread but I ponder about this a lot since I imagine seeing a slight "fed-up-ness" with digital (not only cameras) in western society.

These are of course slow trends and they will never be moving in the direction you wish for or think they will.
What I have read here confirms my suspision that the traditional dSLR is coming to an end. The ultra-high ISO might give it a few more years/upgrades.
What interests me is, what will mr Average, member of Spelunka Photo Club, be using in 5 years? I somehow don't think the video-route will appeal to all.

r

Mats

 

[Naples]

Methinks the 35mm SLR will disappear just like books did after the invention of the personal computer. Go to Amazon.Com; there are just no books anymore.

 

[darkosaric]

Little joke: wait for 2012 - end of digital ... and rebirth of 35mm SLR:

Dead Link Removed

 

[steelneck]

It's not photography itself that is the issue - it's the fact that we, as a society, are continually removing all feeling from anything and everything - while at the same time increasingly having less tolerance for that which is not "new."

shimoda also wrote:

Very interesting opinions given here. My apologies for almost starting a d...l thread but I ponder about this a lot since I imagine seeing a slight "fed-up-ness" with digital (not only cameras) in western society.

It is exactly this that changes when we go into the post-stage. Under the late stages of the industrial revolution everything was about function and what was technically possible. Architects of that time did not even think they where following a style, today, at least in sweden we call the style of that time "funkis", since it was all about functionality. But after the war when society had become all out industrial, things changed. Things like style, feelings, colors, mood, ergonomics became important, it was no longer all about function anymore.

A shift along these lines will probably also happen when we enter the postdigital society. We are not there yet in many years to come and shifts like this occur for decades, quite slow processes. But this also means that we can see it coming.

We can see today that real things, real as in IRL or AFK (Away From Keyboard), has started to get much more value. In the eighties an LP record was quite expensive but going to concerts was cheap. Bands and their promotors saw tours as something necessary to promote records. All this has inverted, today we can sometimes get a CD almost for free bundled together with a newspaper or magazine, but tickets to a concert can cost a fortune. Today the records are starting to be seen as the promotion of live performance.

We can also look at the changes in photography, microstock, how image price dropped more than 10 fold. Again, digital copies goes for almost nothing, but to hire a professional.. But also.. photographers in general have never been able to live on stock alone, stock imagery was always about getting a little extra, enough to maybe buy a new lens. But look at people like Yuri Arcurs making $300000 on microstock, having 400,000 payed downloads per year and he is hardly alone doing figures like this either. The video tour in his studio was seen as simply impossible a couple of years ago when pros complained about the new microstock:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYkNKP96b84

But at the same time, old agencies living by the old book goes belly up, essentially acting just as those old industries i took examples of in my last post in this thread.

And when talking about cameras.. Look at large format. Kodak even released the Ektar film in large format. This move was not even thinkable 4 years ago. We do also see some high profile manufacturers like Zeiss and Voigtländer release new manual focus lenses, at quite high prices. These are small signs that tell us something.

At some point people get fed up and it is no longer possible to get them to buy into more features just because it is possible. Things revert back to basics because after all people are humans with human needs. But reverting back do not mean using old technology and discarding the new, it is that importance of "feeling" and what people needs that gets focus instead of what new features marketing departments can lure us to believe that we need.

 

[stradibarrius]

Unfortunately in the past every format debate has still, at it's base, been rooted in still photography (or painting for that matter). The nature of motion-based video is a paradigm shift.

Your average consumer doesn't give a squat and just wants to 300,000 frames of Johnny's first step.

It's not photography itself that is the issue - it's the fact that we, as a society, are continually removing all feeling from anything and everything - while at the same time increasingly having less tolerance for that which is not "new."

Technology is a very sharp two edged sword!!! Society in general is being "dumbed down" by automation doing everything we once had to have knowledge and skill to do. Calculators do simple arithmetic, Spell check corrects our mistakes, digital cameras set exposure, speed and aperture so that we have less skill to cope on our own.
I have said for quite some time, if there were ever a large global disaster, only those people who had the skills, farming, carpentry, hunting, fishing etc, would be able to survive.

Most people do not take time to think through all of the ramifications of technology. As already stated most people just want to take 100 shots of their kids learning to walk or ride a bike so a camera that does all of the thinking and gives them a reasonably good snapshot makes them happy. A car that will park itself using a GPS to find you way to the local grocery store, blah, blah, blah. The problem is when there are system failures and everything comes to a grinding halt! Air traffic systems controlled by computers get hacked and the world is thrown into a state of chaos.

But then there are people like us who still want to learn and retain skills for things that are basic. I love the advances in things like medicine but long for the past that has smaller towns and villages, governments and the problems that come with expansion.

This is a ramble about technology but is directly related to the the original post. Photography is certainly caught up in the technology swing Soon the disposable camera will just have a chip in it rather than film. I don't really understand the swing toward video in a still camera???? But the marketeers always try to make one product that appeals to the largest group of consumers. A camera that replaces two grabs a segment of both markets.

 

[wblynch]

The Future? !! Digi-Film TLR !!

I can see a "Twin Lens Reflex" camera that has a digital viewer and capture system at the top and a film capture system at the bottom. One could choose to capture on film or on chip. That way they get the best of both worlds !!

 

[alanrockwood]

You asked for a prophecy so here is mine

(1) Within ~10 years, no more SLRs will be produced.... neither film nor digital. The mirror mechanism will be completely bypassed, in favour of ultrahigh resolution electronic viewfinders (EVFs). The first step towards this - "live view" - is already common to many dslr bodies, and there are already a few quite good bodies that have only EVFs. The resolutions of these screens are decent but actually still quite poor compared to what will soon be possible.

(1b) In terms of body construct, the EVFs will eventually lead to bodies roughly half as thick as they are now, but until foveon-like sensors (with r/g/b stacked at one photosite) are more favourably priced, there will be no incentive to abandon retrofocus designs. The bodies will be thinner than current SLRs but not as thin as a rangefinder.

(2) Also, with the mirror constraints removed, the actual format and orientation will also change dramatically: no more rectangle in landscape orientation! The new format of choice will be square (or even circular!), requiring no body rotation and optimizing the use of the image circle and permitting fine crop adjustments.

You have it the nail squarely on the head.

 

[Poisson Du Jour]

The Future? !! Digi-Film TLR !!

I can see a "Twin Lens Reflex" camera that has a digital viewer and capture system at the top and a film capture system at the bottom. One could choose to capture on film or on chip. That way they get the best of both worlds !!

Yes, I agree, something like that is the most likely scenario. Arca-Swiss released a (mega-expensive) hybrid LF digi-film set up which has created waves in professional and artistic circles, providing the timeless quality of LF film with the immediacy of results (instead of Polaroids). If the technology is to trickle down to SLRs, manufacturers must get off the "more megapixels and technology is better" gravy train and put some real value and thought into their products with dual-mode technology, rather than just pander ceaselessly to pretty well stagnant imaging and capture technology.

 

[film_man]

Not sure I understand the original question. If the question is about how Canon and Nikon will get you to buy a new 35mm film camera every 3 years, the answer is simple: they don't care as they don't make one any more. Nikon has a bunch of new F6 bodies to get rid of but that's about it.

If it is about digital, well sensor development will continue until you will be able to shoot 3D video in complete darkness. After that you will get holographic recording and projection and eventually it will all be built into your eye. But if this question is indeed about digital, shouldn't that be posted in FM or DPreview or something?

 

[perkeleellinen]

Lots of emphasis on more and more 'features' and the accompanying marketing to convince people they need those features regardless of cost.

But I think the SLR shape is being squeezed two ways: firstly from 'above' with more tech stuff which will morph cameras into camcorders. But probably more importantly, from 'below' where most people are happy with the camera on their 'phone.

 

[wblynch]

...But probably more importantly, from 'below' where most people are happy with the camera on their 'phone.

In the past, the great majority of people were happy with a plastic Instamatic.

It seems most people are satisfied with mediocrity, sadly.