No clue if this is in the right sub - forum?
Hi all,
my name is Andreas and I am very new on this forum, although I am a regular LL vistor since... well, very long.
Before I get into my topic I think you all deserve to understand who am I.
Ok, let's start with what I am NOT. I am not a professional, I would even not quote myself as an Artist. I am just one of those guys who have enjoyed photography since the late 70th (last century, that is).
I am also not a native English speaker and so, at least from a gramatical point of view, there will be errors and sometimes my English wording might lead to missunderstandings.
Ah, yes - I am not a typer, actually my typing is terrible and you will find typos - I still hope the text remains readable.
So with that out of the way, let me start with my topic. Iwas actually very surprised to see all the hype about Nikons new D800 - I really can not understand it, especially from guys like on this site, who are devoted to Landscape, Fine Art etc.
But don't get me wrong, I am not in particular bashing Nikon here and I think that the D800 is probably the best camera in the - well 35mmm heritage shooting gear market place.
But a milestone?
Hang on - something is wrong here.
Let me try to resume what happened in the digital era and let me simply skip the analog stuff.
Well, we had a Milestone when Nikon introduced the D1. It was the first kind-of-affordable professional digital camera at that time and broke the crazy Kodak domination with pricing far out of reach. Great job Nikon.
The next one was doubtless the D30 from Canon. The first camera with a CMOS sensor - did not everybody tell us that CMOS is too noisy and CCD the only way to got?
Well, Canon proofed them all to be wrong - the CMOS in that Canon's dominated the image quality department actually for a long time - up until the Nikon D300 was introduced.
I don't think that any other camera up until the Nikon D90 and Canon 5D Mk.II were Milestones. All that happened was very predictable, better AF, better finder, more resolution, reduction in shutter lag, extended battery life, water and dust resistant, oh yes - dust removal technology and so on. But milestones?
No, it was actually very comparable to Leica's M series: The concept was there, refinements and better (or at least different) user interfaces, improofed (or again at least different) overall ergonomics - but nothing fundamentally new.
D90 and 5D Mk II brought video to the game and changed the market place for some. In fact, the 5D Mk II opened the door top Holliwood for Canon - well done.
A Milestone for sure.
Olympus and Panasonic introduced micro 4/3 - what a great concept! And opposed to Sony (Samsung...) the lenses match the body and mft brought the promise of a more compact system to the market. Nobody else has done that so far (leaving aside the ill - fated Nikon 1 and the jut too new Fuji system for a moment - the latter might change the game again, for reasons I will mention below).
Kudos to them - a true Milestone.
So here we are, it is 2012, everybody is freaking out about a camera that puts 36 million pixels onto a single chip of (roughly) 35 mm. But - and this is my point - nothing has changed:
- We still have a stupid Bayer filter in front of the sensor
- As advanced as it may be - we still do stupid interpolation to get the full color information
- We still live with strange artefacts - or use an AA filter
In other words: This camera is not so much different from the one that my company introduced back in 1998 (it was an industrial camera - I am not in the photographic industry). At that time we had a 1.3 Megapixel sensor with... well, a Bayer filter array.
Sure - I know, the sensitivity, the speed, the resolution, enough said. This is NO milestone, this is like in the old days of the car industry: Nothing betters cubic capacity - well, apart from more cubic capacity....
So Mr. Nikon, Mr. Canon - are you listening? We (well, at least I) are waiting for the better sensor technology! Given the advances in sensors, I see no reason that we could not have something more advanced than Bayer. Foveron shows that it is possible - even the Fujis XTrans is at least a bit more modern.
I for one am sick of this blowing up a device that is essentially flawed.
And by the way: The Nikon D 800 is built to be a highly transportable camera (opposed to medium format or even bigger) - but having 36 Mpixel this concet just does not work that way - every oh so slight movement will show up in the file. As a result you need a tripod (a good one) and lose out your mobility. Where, the heck, is the sense in that?
Well, again - the D 800 is a great camera - but no milestone, just old, falwed technology taken to the next level.