On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 02:07:42PM -0400, John Francis scripsit: > On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 01:25:30PM -0400, Graydon wrote: > > Note that Panasonic is a consumer electronics company; Pentax (and > > Hoya) are optical companies. They don't want to wander out of the > > area of their strengths into those of the competition, which is what > > moving to an EVF would do. > > I think the driving factor behind moving to an EVF (apart from cost) > is the requirement for HD video - that's going to be a must-have item. > Personally I don't care, but I know that I'm not the target customer.
I'm not sure this is the case. Clearly people want a combined still and video camera -- since this is what their phone does, and everything that isn't a phone camera is a niche camera -- but this may not overlap with the people wanting the best possible stills for the money. So I suspect it's at least as likely that the camera market will split into "art" cameras -- DSLRs and medium format, best-possible-stills -- and video cameras with a decent stills capability than that it will collapse into exclusively stills-and-video cameras. The tradeoffs are significantly different for the hardware design as well as the users. > The capability is already showing up in consumer cameras, although as > yet it isn't always fully integrated (no auto-focus adjustments, say). > But once you have live view and 60fps video, you've already got an EVF. Only if you've got the hardware to record video and play video at the same time. This isn't really a given. Nor are the zoom-to-check-focus, etc. functions of an EVF obviously present in the usual back-of-camera LCD. > If that means venturing into the strengths of Panasonic, so be it; the > alternative is to be left on the sidelines. And, in any case, there's > still a lot of space in front of the sensor for an optics company to > showcase their capabilities. Not really; once you've got the massive data loss involved in the EVF sitting there, there's a bunch of stuff you just can't do, starting with seeing what you're looking at through the lens or seeing it at the actual level of brightness. I'd rather give up photography than go back to an EVF. If there are enough people who think that way, there's a very comfortable niche available. -- Graydon -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
