Its really a physics thing at a certain point. Smartphones are always worse than their contemporary purpose built camera counterparts because smartphone cameras have to be so small. Meanwhile a pro camera could weigh 10 pounds with a lens the size of your thigh. We simply don't know enough about optics to take that package and put it into a smartphone without compromising quality in some way.
The optics and sensors might be a physics thing, but everything else about standalone cameras really could've done much better at staying competitive.
As others have mentioned, lack of geotagging, wireless connectivity, and other convenience features made them poor competitors to smartphones. And it wasn't just wireless connectivity being behind the times, Canon's T7i (aka 800D) launched in 2017 still made you find a mini USB cable. They were good at optics, but dropped the ball on the rest of the product.
Even though the phone had worse quality pictures, it brought many other things to the table.
Do people really feel like its geotagging and wifi thats holding the market back? To me its just a lack of exposure (no pun intended) to what a camera can do for you among the general class of consumers. knowledge of shutter speed, aperture, metering the scene used to be required to take a photo at all, now its a black box where even if you know what this means your phone doesn't let you at the controls. On top of that consider a prosumer camera. Mine from 10 years ago takes 34mb raws. new ones probably double or triple that. SD card transfers to your workstation make quick work of that, much faster than piddly old wifi or the backing up to cloud services I see mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Imagine uploading 16gb to dropbox while out and about, the camera would never shut off.
Geotagging is a real bummer, I took a trip to Italy years ago and brought an SLR and I wish those photos were geotagged.
"Piddly old wifi" is part of the problem, it's certainly what I'd expect camera vendors to support. You can push multiple gigabits over a good wifi connection these days.
If any camera companies are reading this, you probably read "I wish my camera came with a purpose-built app specific to your brand of cameras manufactured in 2024 (to be EOLed and replaced by a different app next year) and reimplementing an entire photo library with sync to your own subscription services because your manager says you need subscription revenue," but no I'd just like it to join my house's wifi network and give me a button on the computer to copy the files to a folder or add them to my Photos library.
I don't think any of the camera manufacturers have good UX people. They sell engineering, not usability. Even Sony, who makes a bunch of laptops and phones and such, sucks at this compared to the West. Maybe it's just not a strong part of Japanese corporate culture?
They sell tools not toys. Of course the ux is different than what most developers designing for the consumer might be used to. Its brilliant for what it is on a pro camera. Lots of physical buttons, informationally dense displays, instant startup and off, able to use the device without the screen on at all (in the case of a dslr at least). Does exactly what it says on the tin for you and its not going to rearrange how all the menus work every 3 years when a new PM wants to make a name for themselves.
Well, the overall UX isn't just the UI (getting photos geotagged or edited or off the camera, for example, are pain points others have pointed out that they still don't address well). Of course form factor is a (big) part of it too.
Even when discussing just the on-camera UI, there's nothing about "tools for professionals" that says they must never change the UI, or that every setting must be immediately accessible in a flat hierarchy, or that you must use a one-axis scroll wheel to change a 2D focus point, etc.
Yes, it's a great thing that there are features of a standalone camera (like instant on, or physical buttons) that smartphones don't have. However, that doesn't mean the cameras have to disregard all the UX and UI changes other electronics have gone through over the last 10-20 years (some good, some bad, but over the long term they've become more approachable to more people). Meanwhile cameras remained largely unchanged and as a result DSLRs are pretty much a dead segment now. (I too loved the viewfinder and ability to use them without an screen, especially when optical... but not the rest of the experience).
As a former amateur photographer, I eventually sold all my bodies and lenses because it was just such a pain to use them compared to the smartphones and prosumer prime compacts of the day, which were all iterating much faster than the "proper" DSLRs. Back in those days, even just getting the photos off the camera wirelessly was a pain, requiring the use of 3rd-party WiFi SD cards or really old USB cables. I think these days mirrorless is once again trying new things, but I'm out of the hobby now and can't afford to reinvest into it :(
I want back the UX of electronics from twenty years ago, with physical knobs and dials. Spare me the glitchy touch screens on kitchen appliances that can't be operated with wet fingers. Spare me the cheap pseudo buttons without a noticeable click point on washing machines. I don't want to wait multiple seconds after pushing the power "button" to see if the device just lags or if I didn't push hard enough. I don't want a TV that needs minutes to boot android, only to overlay what I want to see with ads benefiting the manufacturer. I don't want to wait a minute after starting the car before I can configure the heating... on a touch screen that first makes me accept the ToS.
> Spare me the glitchy touch screens on kitchen appliances that can't be operated with wet fingers
Well, the person upthread did say "I don't think any of the camera manufacturers have good UX people" (emphasis mine) and the kitchen appliance companies don't either
My Sony a7 mirrorless solves basically all of the issues you have described.
The menu hierarchy isn't flat.
Physical knobs for everything, even customizable. Touch to focus (though I prefer using the ring tbh).
BT/WiFi transfer. A bit slow (2-3 sec for a 50mb raw photo) but fine for what I need. I use a USB-c SD reader for my phone and sync the entire card to an SD card in my smartphone.
Full size HDMI built in.
I don't think I would say that cameras are dead, it's just that it's a hobbyist thing now. Most of my friends would never buy a camera except a cheapy one like an Instax for fun, they're not dropping a grand on an f1.4 35mm.
Thanks for the suggestion! I don't have much money right now, but really miss SLR-like photography. I've long eyed the Alphas with envy, and now that I no longer have any Canon lenses anyway, maybe my next one will be a Sony instead once I can afford one.
Can I ask how your experience with the electronic viewfinder has been? Is it as fast and clear as a traditional dSLR's optical viewfinder?
Yes. Japan had changed a lot in past 10-15 years, but traditionally the culture had been anti-fun, anti-profit, and more recently anti-culturalist. UX engineering looks a borderline indecent activity for people with this set of cultural values. It's seen like how Mycogenian nuns look at beauty salons.
"They sell tools not toys" - no offense, I hate deceptive UX engineering and e14n as the next guy - and vibration motors in Dyson vacuums - but that kinds of denials existed, and IMO had hamstrung Japanese tech products for too long.
The nice part about a pro camera is if you used a pro dslr camera 20 years ago the new one is pretty much turn key for you. It's like bash, could be cleaner perhaps, yet timelessness and knowing that will continue in the future is also a huge feature.
Some of Dyson models make an "aftertaste" vibration when the trigger is let go, and it clearly comes from an extraneous feedback device inside that serves no other purpose. Maybe I shouldn't see it as disingenuous as I feel.
What camera bodies are you using that are 10lbs? Even a 5D with a 70-200 attached is like 5lbs. Most camera bodies are between 1-3lbs unless you’re talking cinema cameras, which are an entirely different beast.
Most people with DSLR’s or mirrorless are working with around 3lbs even with a lens.
But then why hasn't open source stepped into the breach?
This seems like the kind of thing that a single, dedicated hacker could crack wide open.
The pieces are all commodity, no? People can buy lenses independently, so you don't have to design those. Everything else should be COTS--processor, networking/cellular, display, etc.
It might not be super cheap, but it shouldn't exceed $500 on the BOM. And then people can iterate on it over time.
Creating a high performance image processing pipeline requires significant engineering effort and probably a custom SoC or DSP. You need to take care of auto focus and all the other physical configurations (shutter time, aperture, ISO), then you need to add post processing to correct for lens distortion and to do white balancing. I wish there was a FOSS camera, eg with the rather open MFT lens mount, but I don't see it happen any time soon.
