Your next real camera should probably be a mirrorless
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Hey folks. Nice to virtually see you all. The title of the article is not meant to be clickbait but if it works as such, I am ok with that. By real camera, I mean a camera with interchangeable lenses and the ability to control the exposure outcome in means beyond simply squeezing the shutter button or tapping the screen. Please don’t send me email or comments explaining how smartphones are real cameras, because however functional and usable they are, they limit your creativity, much like many point and shoot units. Of course creativity is a choice and one can happily go through life without doing anything particularly creative. Your choice and in the phraseology of Minnesota nice “good for you”
Why mirrorless? This is less a question of technology and more a question of economics. The technology is superb. The tools of photography evolve and for those who desire to leverage that evolution while maintaining their artistry, mirrorless technologically makes a lot of sense. No more mirror slap, actual what you see is what you get viewfinders, less guessing and more time afforded for the user to make creative decisions. My first mirrorless was a Lumix a very long time ago and it wasn’t really usable, despite putting out technically acceptable files. My current mirrorless is a Leica M240, not exactly new either and sans the benefits of autofocus and a really good EVF, although I do have an aging Olympus EVF that mounts to the camera. I get a smaller body, lighter weight, smaller lenses, silence and reduced camera shake.
Oh wait…
The initial precepts of mirrorless being smaller and lighter than a traditional DSLR are over. Look at the current crop of full frame mirrorless cameras and they and their lenses have the same weight and girth of their forebears. So why choose mirrorless if the initial promises are now invalid.
It’s the economy photographer.
The photographic industry has been in a downward spiral for years, long before the impact of pandemics. Many people are very happy with smartphones, orders of magnitude more than were happy in the old days of 110 and 126 film cameras. The majority of people have a camera with themselves all the time. The need for a separate pocket camera has been dead so long it has decomposed. So the revenues to the photographic industry whether in hardware or processing has not diminished, it has vanished.
While not yet gone, brick and mortar camera stores are on a greased slide into oblivion. Their only hope was to attract those who want to practice photography not snapshotting (as that is well and truly resolved by smartphones). The way to do so was to have the same price as an online reseller and the same stock levels as the minimum bar and then create value with intelligent and photographically competent staff. In my own studies I can say that the first goal is achieved, not by creativity on the part of the seller but by the introduction of Minimum Advertised Price created by and enforced by manufacturers and distributors. Can you get a better price in a camera store for a product than you can online? Possibly, but you will usually find that discount bound to your additional purchase of high margin stuff that you don’t actually need such as accessories of questionable quality and extended warranties that you will never use.
The second goal, that having inventory on hand is a fail. The more stores a company has, the more dead inventory that they have. Equipment must be on shelves for demonstration purposes and while they will try to fairly sell it as new, most buyers cringe at this even though the odds of getting a return or repack from an online seller are even higher. Manufacturers do not provide demo gear, the store owners much buy it, at considerably reduced margins, and take the hit on it when it finally is sold or sold off on a demo day. Walk into any brick and mortar store trying to survive on 22% margin and you will see less inventory of quality and more inventory of high margin junk.
The third goal of having intelligent photographically adept staff is a non-starter. For minimum wage, you aren’t going to get a lot in the way of competent photographic or video skills. Those folks can make more money with a crappy YouTube channel. Moreover, some chains think that shopping is a social experience and try to convolute buying a camera into a lifecycle model. One can agree or disagree, the numbers speak for themselves., Camera shopping is not a lifecycle thing, without the added value of photographic knowledge behind the counter, there is no value add, no reason to climb into the car, deal with traffic and head into stores, presuming of course that one actually venture into a store.
These economic realities say that there are very people “selling” cameras and most organizations just taking orders for cameras. And that’s why you are going to go mirrorless.
Manufacturers are in trouble. Some are being sold off, some are shutting down their camera divisions, all are being sustained by other more profitable lines where they exist, and some are in pretty dire financial straits.
This means that no company can long afford to maintain two completely distinct lines. The build out of a DSLR and its lenses is a very different build out of a mirrorless and its lenses. One is based firmly in the past and one has an opportunity for the future. If you are the operator of a publicly traded company, responsible for shareholder value, you have only one option. That option is mirrorless.
Consider what companies are still making DSLRs in any kind of volume. The last orgs standing are Nikon and Canon. In the last year, both have released more mirrorless systems than anything else and worked hard (yet delivered poorly) with tools to protect the investment in lenses of their longer term customers. Yes both have released very high end DSLRs this year, very expensive products of excellent capability built to handle sports and high speed action in hostile working environments. Everything else of note is mirrorless. Nikon is already into the second generation of its mirrorless camera line that does full frame, and Canon is finally shipping the second iteration of its R line which is an improvement on the original in a number of ways. We still don’t see a mirrorless under $1000, and the promise of smaller and lighter is now completely dead. When you can build and ship fewer units, your cost per unit is higher, and so is the price, thus the economic factor means prices have gone up for the new products. This makes it harder for more people to engage, and if the numbers tell the truth, more people are caring less about doing photography as a craft anyway. Look to most camera clubs, or photography shows before they died, and you find most users in middle age and greater. While there are some truly talented young creatives out there, very few of them are prepared to or able to tie up thousands of dollars in camera gear.
If you make less money and can make fewer things and your audience is limited to those with some remaining disposable income, you are going to build more expensive mirrorless bodies and lenses. I don’t expect to see an inexpensive Nikon or Canon mirrorless ever. Panasonic appears to be getting out of the business and Olympus has been sold. Sony has been mirrorless for a very long time, but they abandoned the old lineup in a ditch and all their work has been in the a7 family which while excellent is not inexpensive.
The other economic factor to consider is that video has failed to be the future of creative photography. As an educator, camera club operator and moderator for the KelbyOne Community, interest in video is minimal at best. All the time, money and work put into making the latest generation of mirrorless strong video performers has paid back not at all. Serious video is more than just recording. It is rendering, and storage and bandwidth and cooling and unless you go to a pro level dedicated video camera, you get very little in the current crop of mirrorless cameras. And that numerically is probably ok, since the buyers of these cameras don’t care about video anyway.
The conclusion is simple. If you are a still photographer with the desire to pursue photography as a serious hobby or as your craft, your next camera in all probability and best approach will be a mirrorless. And when you do, do not trade the benefit of better quality high ISO performance in exchange for optically slow lenses. A standard lens of f/4-f/7./1 maximum aperture is a slap in the head with a cold dead fish and those who market that as a good solution should be fed to a larger toothier fish.
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I'm Ross Chevalier, thanks for reading, watching and listening and until next time, peace.
