People will pay $50 for a roll of Velvia, and $30 for processing and ordinary scans. Same folks aren't going to pay over 2 K for a non-Leica new film camera.
It's the Rolex watch crowd now. Made in Germany.
It would be cool to see. You need volume production.
I would have agreed with you several years ago, but the Pentax 17 blew this assumption out of the water I think quite plainly. Which is what made me think along these lines and others. And that was for a camera with almost no distinguishing advantages vs cheap ebay vintage stuff, let alone actual unique new powerful feeatures.
Hardly 'taking the industry storm'
The fact that the resale value of the old DSLRs has since plummeted down to like $200 for most models that used to be 10x that squarely rules otu the hypothesis that "Yeah it's high market share now but only because all the photogs are yearning for and staying with DSLRs" If that were true, then supply drying up + demand staying full would = a huge huge spike UP in DSLR prices, not a crash. Your contention meanwhile that most people switched to film is just not at all true, what? Where'd you get that from? Googling 2025, I get answers hovering around 2.5 billion for film photography, and around 70 billion for digital (which is overwhelmingly mirrorless)
I can visualize a resulting print or slide far more effectively using an optical viewfinder image - which I have decades of experience with - than if presented with the image on what amounts to a very close, very small computer screen.
Your decades of experience would apply equally well to elaborating upon/extrapolating the image in an EVF just like they apply to elaborating upon the image in an OVF. So don't really apply to this
comparison since it cancels out of the equation on both sides. There would have to be something in the EVF that negated the experience from being possible to apply, but there simply isn't any such thing--it's not even possible these days for the large majority of photographers to make out any pixels in EVFs anymore (not that such a subtle thing if you can would make any sense as negating all your experience). The colors starting out closer to what a final slide will look like cannot sensibly be argued to somehow make it harder to visualize further to the exact slide. This is like saying that having a step ladder somehow makes you able to reach less high.
I think part of the friction in this thread boils down to a tendency captured here: to regard one's own, personal preferences as universal.
It's nearly universal based on hard data from the industry, not any assumptions.
- Mirrorless has taken over at least 90% of the new cameras. Pentax still sells one single DSLR line and I think that's it AFAIK, yes?
- The used DLSRs rather than spiking up in price as would happen if demand remained high but supply slumped, have instead done the opposite. Prices have plummeted to single digit fractions of their original, suggesting that demand has fallen even faster than the already steeply falling supply.
- The mirrorless cameras aren't any cheaper, they're about the same (and a new ecosystem on top + any adapters etc pushes it into "more expensive"), so there would be no other incentive for consumers to switch to them other than actually preferring the new tech.
Some (other) people who use film appear to visualize the result they are aiming for mentally and arguably would be hindered or biased by a machine-made preview that does not interpret the scene on the basis of a human emotional response to it.
I am not following your logic here at all. Again this is essentially "a step stool would make it harder for me to reach higher". Obviously something closer to the final result makes it easier to stretch the remaining distance in your head, not harder. And the emotional thing ?? the film itself doesn't respond to your emotions either, so what are you talking about? If you don't actively change settings or location or time of shooting to create the emotions in the image yourself, they ain't getting down on film OR sensor preview. And if you do actively make them show up, then you will see the emotionally relevant changes in the preview as a result of your actions to change the shot, prior to hitting the button. Which clearly makes it harder to whiff on creating the technical conditions you qualitatively consider emotional: you can check and see if you succeeded prior to spending the film. So of course you'd fail less often.
Camera's with electronic viewfinders have been around for decades now. If there would have been merit to a Frankenstein concept that records on film but uses a digital display to approximate the final image, surely, companies would have invested in it.
This is the first time both halves of the equation have been properly viable.
EVFs were absolute garbage until a few years ago, with super low framerates, poor resolution, etc. The modern ones have eliminated whole laundry lists of downsides to zero by not even being able to perceive the pixels anymore for most people, and definitely not being able to physically perceive the sub millisecond lag in normal lighting. While ironing out what features people like in them (peaking, etc). The rise of mirrorless cameras less than one decade ago instead of many decades ago, directly coincides with when EVFs became not garbage, as a causal relationship.
But by that time, the film half of the equation was considered dead. Only just a couple years ago with the Pentax 17 especially has that proven to also be viable, and for the first time, we have both halves viable at once.
One of the key factors in judging DOF is the acuity of human vision to detect blur circles ('blurry'rather than be fooled into assessing a blur circle as a perceived 'dot' ('sharp' enough). It is a know fact that standard 'manufacturer DOF' assumes human visual acuity which is WORSE than what optometrists around the world aim to achieve in correcting our vision...human eyes can detect one half minute of arc! The assumption behind DOF tables and most programs is not 20/20 vision (6/6 in Europe), so they typical DOF table is a LIE vs. the reality of what the person with 20/20 actually sees in an 8x10" photo assessed from a viewing distance of 10". It is well known that the EVF of most cameras presents fewer pixels than our cameras capture...IOW the resolution of the EVF is not as good as it needs to be...the presentation of the CofC in the viewfinder itself is NOT a precise presentation by the limitations of the resolution of the LCD. Admittedly even the OVF of the typical dSLR lies to us, as the coarseness of the standard dSLR screen only permits good assessment of focus equivalent to f/4 lens at best, not the f/1.4 lens which might be mounted.
