I care that it is different. Even more so, I care that it is so unintuitive that a bunch of people who use lots of different cameras couldn't figure it out with the camera in hand.
Why? Because I use different cameras as the situation calls for it. I get stuff into muscle memory eventually, but for the first six months at least, I like to have these strange things called "labels" to tell me what to press if I have by chance forgotten how to do that particular thing on this particular camera.
When I've been shooting moving pictures for two weeks with a RED and a GH4, and I need to swap back to shooting stills this morning on a Hasselblad/Canon/Sony/whatever, I don't want the camera to hide the functions from me on unlabelled buttons. That confused DPR staffer will be me, especially for controls I use rarely, like.... well, like changing exposure mode actually. I usually shoot the whole day in Manual, but may head for Aperture priority at golden hour and forego the studio flash for the last hour of the shoot. So I actually change that setting only once or twice a day.
It's even worse if the unlabelled buttons have no tactile differentiation either. Position isn't enough for me to get stuff into muscle memory on a sensible timescale- I need the controls to have a certain feel, too.
For example, the Sony A7RII has two dials on the back at the top of the camera- one does shutter speed or program shift, one does exposure compensation. It is possible to get the wrong one, they are fairly close together, but they feel different, there's a knobbly bulge under the operating thumb for the EC dial whereas the bulge under the thumb for the shutter dial is smooth, and the shutter dial knurling is coarser than the EC dial so they feel different. Which means I can tell I've got my thumb on the wrong dial with the camera to my eye without having to twiddle it, notice it is doing something slightly different from what I expect by processing the math from the viewfinder, turning the dial back, and moving my thumb.
This for me is a good ergonomic feature of the A7RII.
An example of a bad one is the fact that the play and delete buttons are almost in the same place and feel pretty much identical- a pain if I want to queue up a review of the last shot in the EVF with the camera to my eye. Since I never, ever delete shots in the field, I've turned off the delete button (I might put something else there in due course once my muscle memory is much better attuned to the camera).
Although customisation is nice, it doesn't help when you haven't laid hands on the camera in a few weeks and can't remember where the hell the ISO button is on the damn thing.
Ideally I'd like smart buttons, each of which is a mini-screen and displays an icon for what it is currently set to. And I'd like each button and dial (or at least each one in reasonably close proximity on the camera) to have a tactile identifying feature- either a texture, or something next to it with a texture so you can tell which is which with your eyes closed.
But as I said higher in the thread, I'd also like a proper auto ETTR exposure mode- set the exposure such that no more than (user-settable) n% of pixels of any channel clip. And raw histograms in camera.
I'd also like someone to come up with a really well thought-out way to control focus points when you have 400 PDAF points and the camera has picked the wrong one- ideally with the camera to the eye. Touch screens and live view manual focus work just fine in my experience when shooting landscapes, but for my core fetish fashion activity I have to refocus quicker than that, adjusting to a fluid situation as the model poses. Bizarrely, for this use case the single central focus point/recompose and shoot method is the best I've found. It's actually a lot quicker to get the Hasselblad to refocus if it has chosen wrong than it is the A7RII; I ended up crippling my Canon's AF by setting central point AF only for these shoots because at least I *knew* then where I was focussing.
All large rear screens should fully articulate, be of iPhone retina quality and be touch screens, these days.
Menu systems should be designed by someone other than an infinite bunch of monkeys with typewriters (looking at you, Sony).
Zoom in on playback should give you actual 100% resolution (ideally from the RAW- if it has to shoot JPEG as well to achieve that, it should tell you in the damn manual). What do designers imagine we zoom in to 100% for? It is to check critical sharpness and focus, and for no other reason. So if the camera needs to generate a JPEG and render that when I zoom in to 100% on a RAW, it should do it as soon as I hit the zoom in button. I'll take a 0.3 second wait if that's what it takes to deliver me the visual info I need to properly assess the shot.
And many other gripes with the current state of camera ergonomics... none of which are specific to the SL, just illustrations of why I think there is a lot more to good camera UI design in the digital age than ANYONE has really explored yet. Not one digital camera really handles the way a top-flight film camera did. There's more variables, more data to show, more control options, it's a more complex beast altogether. Emulating film cameras is not the way to go, but nor in my opinion is unlabelled smooth control buttons, stacked menu systems, or pure touch screen control.
Cheers, Hywel
