Image courtesy: Personal View.
CIPA published their May camera shipment data. And some nice graph can be seen at Personal View. Compared to May of 2013 DSLR worldwide shipment went down 27% while Mirrorless camera shipment increased by 11%. As usual US is not mirrorless friendly while Asian market are quickly getting away from DSLR. As soon as US (and also Europe) will start to “love” mirrorless things will look even better for Olympus and Panasonic!
84 Responses
Mini 4 thirds hasn’t taken off and will never take off. If people want tiny sensors they’ll get an iPhone, because according to 4 third fanboys the size of the sensor doesn’t matter at all for image quality and light sensitivity. Plus the iPhone has massive depths of field which is why it must be the best. m43: Tiny sensors, overweight cameras and lenses but not so tiny prices. A recipe for success? Not really I’m afraid,
Oh dear – you must live a sad life.
Congrats on your new nick. Your 14th?
You forgot to enlighten us. Which sensor format is large enough? FF and only FF?
This discussion is as stupid as arguing about the best car size or motor size. It is what suits you the best. Or should there be only massive SUV’s and then tiny Mini’s? I really don’t get the point. I own a MFT camera since it’s small enough and has enough iq. I also own a C-segment car because it is large enough for my family. Additionally a small car can cost more than a large one. I guess this is where american car industry got it wrong and built only large cars with huge fuel consumption…
you must feel so inadequate with your tiny 35mm genitals…ooops…sensor. After all, 6×7 s the only real true quality image.
Talking about recipes: you are familiar with the saying ‘anything over a mouthful is wasted’?
I have both system. A Canon 6D and a E-M10. I shoot for 97% with the Olympus. All photographers can’t distinguish if I have shoot with FF or m43! And many of them remain surprised when i tell them i used a m43 camera. And the m.zuiko 75mm 1.8 costs the half of the Canon 85mm 1.2! And the m.zuiko is far away better than the Canon one. I own both lenses! Read the challenge engaged by two great photographers. m43 vs FF. Read day 3: http://www.mu-43.com/showthread.php?t=61610&page=19.
If this is true, which I doubt, then you don’t need a Canon.
To put it a little more harshly: the Canon is wasted on you.
And the Zuiko 75 1.8 has *nothing* to do with the 85 1.2.
“Read the challenge engaged by two great photographers” thanks for the giggles mate.
It’s a waste of time reply to you. 😉
Good response. He’s one of those dense idiots who can’t keep up everytime we try to educate them.
You can educate people? Ok time to wake up, back to cleaning those toilets, chop chop.
My thoughts exactly. Like their thoughts are the summation of all great photographers. TWO DUDES.
Yup… I can’t wait to see Mirrorless figures between companies. I bet M43 is on the bottom.
“All photographers can’t distinguish if I have shoot with FF or m43!”
are the photogs that you speak of partially BLIND? Because that sounds like Un-Truth to me!
I’ve owned a 6D and the photos between that and my M43 cameras were night and day! What are you showing, Jpegs of the 6D against the Raw files of the EM10?
M43 can NEVER come close to the depth and detail of a full frame camera, stop with the nonsense!
M43 fanboys are dillusional…. sad.
I shoot only in RAW. And m43 haters why still here? Are you a sad little boy? You have a big camera because you have to compensate another thing? It’s late.. go to sleep baby.
Did u read the blog :-)? I think no…
Do you know that many PRO are using m43 right now? Selling their reflex gear?
More than the Majority Pros?? No. One here, one there… Noting on the level your feeble imagination is thinking of.
Keep being delusional.
Bye bye sad man!
And I looked at the pics… The M43 aren’t bad, in fact they’re good, BUT the pics from the Canon are Clearly Better. Better color, better separation, better detail. If you can’t see that, I’m sorry… The MkIII Clearly won that!
Strange.. the two photographers that engaged the challenge don’t think so. And they saw the raw files. Very strange. Maybe you have a super sight. And if you can see that only at 200% well.. it is pointless. I don’t see a pics at 200%. And nobody does.
You really must think I’m gullible to think that just because 2 buddy photogs don’t see a difference, that i shouldn’t either? Hahaha! Yeah right.
I’ve shot a music video BTS with my 6D and GX7 and the GX7 tried, but couldn’t compete with the 6D. It couldnt! And low light? Haha! It wasn’t even a contest.
So yeah, keep believing that the cameras are even.. NEWSFLASH! -It’s not even close.
It doesn’t matter anyways, I’ve made the jump to Fuji, so my lens investments will be there. But yeah, keep telling yourself “It’s just as good”.
Ahahah you make me laugh. Canon 6D is the worst VDSRL in canon world! Moire, soft image and many other issue! Read every, and i say every canon 6D review! Every one say the same things i’m telling you. I use BlackMagic pocket camera (700$) and it blow out any Canon camera! And you know that canon make a upscaling in their cameras (except in 5DmkIII)? For this reason images are soft in Canon vdsrl. And GH4 win again 5DmkIII. And here EVERY review, EVERY video maker say that. Philip Bloom say that too.. Oh wait, you have super sight! You are better than Bloom!!! Sorry, i forgot that.
PS. GH3 win against 5DkIII too 😉
It’s easy to see the difference when the title of the photo says “this was taken with a 5D3”. Even for you.
Made the jump to Fuji but still bothering to come here. Hmm. Wonder why. People who are happy with what they have usually won’t do that.
Actually, from the test, I much preferred the results from the 75mm Olympus lens. It had a dreamier quality that suited the story. The Canon may be sharper and have more detail etc etc, but it’s just the wrong feel for me for this set.
I would like to these ‘RAW” files you mention. Oh but I can’t as they have to be converted to JPEG or TIFF to see them. Keep up the nonsense Luca!
Yawn… This troll is boring. Next plz.
Amen! It will be forgotten and not missed LOL
Don;t understand your graph looks flat(ish) for both.
Yep. But don’t worry there will be a different graph along in a couple of months showing the complete opposite.
You mean no more gap or still a gap but the other way around….?
God knows.
Over the last couple of years I have seen comparisons based on total shipments from the factory, actual sales, sales revenue, US-only, Japan-only, global. Some are year on year, some are long term trends etc etc etc. Some show mirrorless are taking off some show they are slumping. And each one has different sections of the fanboys jumping up and down in excitement or indignation.
Total numbers actually sold along with the total sales revenue would show you which type is selling better and which is making a profit. CaNikon have advantages of scale of production but how profitable are they compared to mirrorless. Are DSLRS only selling better because they slashing margins to fight off the size advantage of mirrorless?
I think it’s complicated because it’s a falling market.
My understanding is that in general mirrorless sales across all manufacturers have remained in the same ballpark over the last couple of years (despite the promises of growth) and dSLRs have declined a bit. But as dSLRs had such a lead in sales in the first place they still outsell mirrorless by quite a margin. They’ve both had to slash prices and Canikon remain profitable as they have economies of scale whereas mirrorless are not profitable. Mirrorless may have higher R&D as well as they’ve tried to compete with dSLRs in areas like CDAF focusing,cutting edge EVFs and developing the advantages of the formats plus the cost of building lens systems from scratch.
Canon and Nikon are still profitable in still cameras (through last quarter). No one else is that I know of (Leica claims to be, but is a private company, so the claim can’t be verified).
In the US, retail cash register receipt monitoring (which includes Internet sales as well as brick and mortar and big box) show Canon/Nikon with 95% of the DSLR market with slowly declining overall sales. Sony is #1 in mirrorless by a long shot in the US, with a fairly small level of sales, Nikon is usually #2. Samsung is probably #3, though they vary widely from month to month due to promotions, apparently. Canon/Nikon/Sony have the majority of compact camera sales in the US, and consistently so.
The thing that doesn’t show up in numbers that can be published openly (due to NDAs) is that many of the leading products being sold each month in the US are previous generation models at discount, not current models at suggested list price. What this says to me is that the problem is not nearly solved by the camera makers: we’ll continue to see decline.
And that, by the way, explains the CIPA shipment numbers. They’re declining for compacts and DSLRs because the Japanese camera companies have figured out that they can’t keep stuffing the channel. They fell for mirrorless PRIOR to 2013 because of the same channel stuffing that went on. Note that we don’t have a lot of new low-end mirrorless cameras coming out of the Japanese at the moment. That’s because they just get stuck in the channel and don’t sell. It’s the higher end stuff with faster focus that’s being shipped out of Japan these days IN ANTICIPATION that it will sell better. The data on that assumption aren’t in yet. We’ll see.
Mirrorless is the same camera as a DSLR…but without a giant mirror box. That’s it. Leica is the most profitable camera company if all time. They have been doing mirrorless before the 1920’s. It doesn’t matter if someday all cameras could go mirrorless because EVFs might catch up to OVFs, you will still be able to use the same lenses from your old DSLRs.
I think you have to look the gap between DSRL and DSRM.
DSLR == Canikon. In the US they buy it because their father used to have it and the name sounds familiar.
In the US they buy them because you can get a small, lightweight DSLR like the Nikon 5300 that is faster in operation and focus than mirrorless, that shows the actual scene rather than an electronic tv screen, that has better battery life, much higher resolution than Fuji or Olympus or Panasonic, and better image quality by virtue of its larger format, better dynamic range, better high ISO, better focus tracking…. and most of all is less than half the price of the EM-1 or XT-1 and throws in a zoom lens or two to boot.
Ignorance personified. Unless you like photographing manic children? Focus is faster and much more accurate without the antique mirror slapper. The EVF gives you precisely what you are about to get with absolute exposure precision. A tiny, dark mirror bears no relation to what you hope to capture it’s just a basic gun sight before you rely on chimping every shot!
Mirrorless focus is slower than DSLR focus, and slower to track.
Reflex viewing gives you the exact scene you see, rendered with light rays and without a computer; you can see the scene’s full dynamic range, can see the actual colors, can see the brightest brights and darkest darks at the same time. There is no tearing, no hesitation, no jiggling. There is no arguing whether the little tv is a million pixels or 10 million, because you are not limited by pixels. You have the full true analog range of the scene as it appears in the real world right now, and not as interpreted by all that data turned into numbers.
But the real proof of this: The quality of EVFs are measured exactly by how close they come to looking like a true reflex viewfinder.
True, Mirrorless camera’s contrast detection is not as good in tracking as phase detection on DSLRs but the current level of accuracy accomplished by mirrorless in under 5 years is still less than half the time Canon or Nikon took to develop decent focus tracking.
In addition, mirrorless cameras autofocus speed is almost on par or the same speed as the full frame offerings by Canon and Nikon. None of Canon or Nikon’s low end, deliberately feature limited APS-C crop sensor garbage focus near as fast as Mirrorless cameras. Never have.
“hows the actual scene rather than an electronic tv screen”
The mirrorless shows what you will get in the file not what you can see without a camera anyway.
The E-M1 is in a completely different league than the Nikon 5300. Only an experienced prosumer or a professional can actually use the E-M1. The Nikon 5300 is not used by any professionals anywhere on planet earth, unlike the E-M1.
It’s a soccer mom camera that is hardly any better than a bridge camera. It uses an outdated, recycled sensor that has lower ISO, worse IQ, worse dynamic range, and average focus tracking than the E-M1. It’s amazing how poorly it performs, yet it’s supposed to be better simply by virtue of it being “bigger”.
“The Nikon 1 V3 has been out of stock with many retailers online and elsewhere, making the mirrorless camera hard to come by. The duration of the stock shortage has prompted an apology from Nikon Japan, which it recently posted on its website.” dpreview news item 8Jul2014
So “US is not mirrorless friendly” because we don’t keep stocks there as we prefer to sell them DSLRs
The US is a significant but shrinking part of the world sales though.
Too many people judge sales by the retail presence in American big stores.
As mirrorless sales are already small in an area that makes up less than 20% of total sales it makes more sense to concentrate limited resources in more ‘mirrorless friendly’ areas where smaller size is valued more (different culture).
Plotted as YOY growth of shipments (not sales as incorrectly labeled). A lot of variability in mirrorless with swings into positive territory (probably due to big product releases, e.g. GX7, OMD, GH4, etc.). DSLR consistently negative.
Don’t know why deleting a post just assigns it as a guest post. Old plot. Humph.
You are tracking not growth, but rate of growth.
Since mirrorless sells fewer total units, fewer numbers of units mean wider variations in the graph.
If mirrorless sold one unit last year, and two units this year, you can show a 50% increase. If DSLR sold one million units last year and 1.1 million units this year, your graph would show a 10% increase.
Your conclusion: Mirrorless is winning!!!!!
mirroless sales are a 1/5 of dslr sales and their sales are down 1/3 compared to DSLRs … get some clue about what your talking about.
people buy mirroless because they are unsatisfied with wht they have and oly, pana, fuji release new minimal updates every 6 month.
.
Plotted as YOY growth of shipments.
not grow you moron.. it´s absolut numbets of shipped cameras.
Do the math. Compare total for each month in previous year with each month of this year. That’s what YOY growth means.
very pretty.
But what does it prove? DSLRs still outsell mirrorless by at least 3:1 and have done for at least 2 and a half years
It shows that mirrorless camera shipments are on the rise and DSLR shipments are on the decline.
A 20% increase on not a lot is not a lot – I am sure that graph is NOT having Olympus execs leaping out of their chairs in excitement.
YOY numbers in anything can be misleading, especially the way you are presenting them – it is a good way to identify if your strategy may be bearing fruit (or failing) but what matters is the long term trend.
And the original graph shows mirrorless sales pretty stable at 200,000 for 2 years with peaks at Oct and Nov each year. Now THAT could be worrying for the execs – I say ‘could be’ because it depends on what expectations they had when defining their business plan (and I am pretty sure you do not know that!).
The DSLR show a slight decrease on high sales and that still leaves a lot of sales but is probably due to the growth of camera phones and not mirrorless.
You need to think about it a different way (as do the Japanese): interchangeable lens camera sales are in significant decline. That means that even if you can break the Canon/Nikon duopoly you can never get your sales to the levels those two companies once had. Which means that you had better be scaled down in all your costs, otherwise you won’t make any profit.
So far in mirrorless, every camera company would have been better off putting their money into a bank savings account rather than investing in mirrorless. That’s despite a ROI of 0% in Japan on bank savings accounts ;~).
People are cheering for teams in a league that’s failing. Maybe what we really need is a league that won’t fail ;~).
Where are the hot rumors that were about to come?
Could the continuing significant losses from the imaging divisions of the major mirrorless players, be indicative of selling off older stock at huge discounts. With the rapid release of mirrorless models this would not be a surprise, how many near identical image quality mFT cameras are there now ? .Image quality has been stuck { give or take a small fraction of a stop} for nearly 2 and half years. .
Since the release of the E-M5 in Feb 2012 {counting the black magic camera } and the latest the GH4 Feb 2014 ,there have been 16 mFT mount cameras released that is roughly a new camera every 6.5 weeks. 11 in the past year alone, with Canon rumoured to be bring some new sensor tech to the table and the rumored release of several DSLR models it will be interesting to see how the numbers hold up over the year. Though lets face it claims about the wonderful sales of mirrorless are nothing new, obviously something is going very wrong consider just how much the big players have lost.
“Image quality has been stuck { give or take a small fraction of a stop} for nearly 2 and half years.”
Funny how that’s never been a problem for DSLR shooters. You could say the same about Canon. Only, it’s been more than 3 years since their last sensor tech upgrade. Not so fun on the other brands, either — how many models now sport the same 16MP Sony sensor, and for how long? They are only just now moving to the newer 20MP one.
What a scandal! But you are so salacious, you point it all out to us! Keep up the good job!
Thanks. I will.
My GH4’s sensor, user interface, and camera tool set is quite better than my old GH3. I get better high ISO, better color rendering, better control of information, higher resolution EVF, higher resolution live view screen, highlight/shadows curves, Luminance values, Master Pedal values, Cinema D and Cinema V profiles, four types of video codecs at over 6 bit rates, broadcast quality 4K video…etc, etc…
Back when I owned the Canon T4i I sold it after Canon reissued the exact same camera under the T5i…but over $300.00 more. It was ridiculous, even the specs sheet were identical except for a marginal bump in FPS speed shooting. Canon publicly admitted it was the same sensor. Same with Nikon…same recycled crappy APS-C sensors, no improved video, no improved sensor or photographic tools…all of that is reserved for their high end full frame cameras. And that’s it. That’s all they got that’s of any serious value. The full frame cameras.
I’m not a professional, so I don’t spend (nor can I afford) $12K on a Canon 1D-C or even a $3K Canon 5DMk3 with a $4K Zeiss Otus Distagon T*. But between the numerous Mirrorless options ranging from m43, to APS-C, to Full Frame, it’s an obvious choice to go leave behind the medium to low end DSLR offerings.
There has been massive discounting on dSLRs here in the UK. Every week I get emails from retailers offering the latest deals and the dSLR deals are as big in % terms as the mirrorless deals.
The move to FF for a lot of dSLR users was pent up demand from people who previously couldn’t afford them,
Given the number of deals that are happening with FF dSLRs here now I would say that demand has been satisfied.
Simply put, the reason why you have older stock selling at discounts is that the Japanese companies ALL missed the change in the market. True for Compacts, Mirrorless, and DSLRs, though for different reasons.
The mirrorless companies all saw the initial uptick in sales in 2009-2011 and thought they had found the secret to competing with the DSLRs. They geared up production to levels that weren’t sustainable and left production at those levels for far too long. Companies like Olympus kept that production up right through the end of last year while Panasonic finally got wise and turned production down.
Canon/Nikon just stuffed the channels with DSLRs, a problem they’re still dealing with (Canon now has a Rebel priced at US$300 with lens), and especially problematic in the US, where both companies have three generations of some products still on dealer shelves.
I’m currently predicting a total of 42m cameras of all kinds sold in 2014. And that’s a bit optimistic, I think. That’s down from 63m in 2013. Put another way, the Japanese just keep thinking that sales can’t trend down so far, so fast, but have now been surprised for three years running. In five years, the market will have collapsed 66% from its peak in 2010. It’s rare that we see any tech market decline so rapidly. The only times they do tend to be when the market has been completely disrupted.
And that’s the problem: the camera companies have no answer for smartphone image workflow. The crazy thing is that the COULD have an answer, they just don’t. Which means they don’t understand the customer need, and all that’s left is the higher end customer who seeks image quality and other high performance factors and is willing to live with pathetically bad workflow.
Exactly. I often imagine mildly interested wanna-be enthusiast on a holiday. He can’t share his photos until he gets home. He can’t backup photos to cloud, hoping he won’t lose his memory card. Even if his expensive, high-end camera has WiFi, he still needs a smartphone. In the end, is it worth spending big bucks for all that equipment, just to be able to take a nice beach, mountain or party photo? Nope. We might just as well discuss why fishing equipment industry doesn’t grow.
The funny thing is that if said tourist has WiFi at his hotel, Apple will solve more than half his problems for him, but the camera makers still fail to solve the rest.
I should be able to go back to my hotel, my camera’s WiFi should see my computer’s, and the images should get transferred automatically from camera to computer. Given that computer to be a Mac running Yosemite and Photos, the images can automatically go to iCloud Photos if I want them to. At which point I can walk out the street to the restaurant and show the images I took to someone ON MY PHONE.
But no. The camera makes want you to run their app on your phone, MANUALLY transfer them all, and then have the images get elsewhere via CELLULAR communication. And heaven help you if those images are raw.
Failure to understand the user need means failure. There’s a reason why the camera companies are all failing, and that failure is fixable by them. Whether they will ever recognize that or not is another story.
EDIT: I should point out that someone who knows what they’re doing CAN do what I suggest once Yosemite and Photos are out using EyeFi cards and AppleScript/Automator. It gets a little complex and because it involves yet another software provider and their server to be reachable, can break more easily.
> Failure to understand the user need means failure.
The backbone of any highly-specialized industry is made of incorrigible conservatives and stalwarts. Imaging is no exception.
Photography for a long time was an exclusive hobby, requiring dedication and effort. And industry (both side of the fence – photogs and manufs) is stuffed with people like that. People, who think that if you don’t want to spend 5 minutes processing a photograph, you shouldn’t even own a camera.
Smartphones haven’t challenged ILCs on technical level. They have challenged (and utterly destroyed) the perception of the photography as an exclusive, high-effort/high-price hobby.
I run a small company specializing in 3D visualizations. Photography is not my primary professional concern (although I like it as a hobby). But we need cameras to be able to create realistic environments / textures and create a catalog of various materials and surfaces in the process. I want files _flying_ off the camera to our centralized storage so that the guys can start working. I can live with the existing workflow but it’s far from ideal and costs money.
> People, who think that if you don’t want to spend 5 minutes processing a photograph, you shouldn’t even own a camera.
Yet the manufacturers even today only sell one in ten of their products to this crowd, best case (I’ll bet it’s more like 1:20). So it’s not as if they don’t recognize that user.
2 Mice have a slice of bread 10 mice have some crumbs the 2 mice lose a piece of bread and the 10 mice lose some of their crumbs. 10 mice say we win!
Don’t worry, they have pills to cure it.
This is terrible.
In May of 2012, 1.6 million cameras shipped. In May of 2013, 1.4 million cameras shipped. In May of 2014, only 1 million cameras shipped.
Each year the peaks get lower and the troughs deeper. And all we can think about is that yay, mirrorless will defeat DSLR, as though that is some kind of battle that is important. As though that hasn’t been something we have been proclaiming for 6 years already without sign of victory. As though we aren’t arguing merely about who is winning the shuffleboard match whilst the Titanic is sinking.
If the US ever joins the mirrorless bandwagon, neither Olympus nor Panasonic will benefit. It will likely be Sony and later Nikon and Canon. The North American market is pretty brand centric, esp brands with a lot of store presence. Olympus and Panasonic might as well be cheap Chinese knock-offs of real brands. Most people here don’t even know Olympus still makes cameras or that Panasonic ever made still cameras. I believe the US market will eventually shift to mirrorless, but the brand that will enjoy 90% of the benefits will likely be Sony, unless Nikon and Canon gets serious. Even among mirrorless fans around the world, there seems to be a shift away from cropped sensors to FF. As I predicted a few years ago, m43 does seem to be receding back to a small niche. I believe Sony’s lead in mirrorless is only going to widen unless Canikon jumps into the game.
Right now, Sony is on top of Mirroless in the States, but Fuji is making a push for the top spot. And DSLR’S remain no1.
Just recently, i was trying to talk a Co – worker into buying into M43, but for what he wanted, he found it Too Expensive (mistake no1). He ended up buying a Pentax. I couldn’t believe it. It even took AA batteries!
But, he only paid like $350 for it, with a kit lens.
M43 can not and will not compete with that. As long as Canon makes cameras like the 70D with better IQ than any M43 camera, for around the similar price of the top M43 camera, M43 will stay in the shadows.
Most recent cash register receipts in the US do not show Fujifilm as being #2 in mirrorless. They don’t appear in the top 5 in the first five months of the year so far. Nikon is consistently #2. The others seem to vary from month to month, and Samsung is usually in the top five.
DSLR sales are way higher than mirrorless in the US, and Canon/Nikon take 95% of those sales. Yes, 95%.
We’re a large country physically. The problem is simple: Canon, Nikon, and Sony still have a widespread dealer network and presence in many Big Box and chain stores. Olympus, Panasonic, and Pentax have few dealers due to cutbacks they made. So how do you even see an m4/3 camera in some markets?
Fujifilm is a good example of what happens. At one point they had a strong physical dealer presence with the S1 through S5 Pro DSLRs and all their compact cameras. When they dropped out of DSLRs, they also reduced dealer support considerably, and their compact-only lineup caused many dealers to drop them entirely. Now they’re trying to rebuild their dealer network in the US because of the X models. But it’s a slow process. Dealers (that remain) have long memories, the demand isn’t fully there, and it takes a lot of incentive to get dealers to commit the cash necessary to carry a line. Meanwhile, we lose a few dealers to sales declines every month.
At some point, one of the camera companies is going to try going all direct sales in the US, I think. Olympus has been toying with doing more direct sales lately. But that still begs the question of how you get someone to even know about your product.
If they counted the smartphones to the mirrorless because they are mirrorless then the trend would be obvious.
It’s simple. Due to the majority of the world using phones with cameras, the camera industry will never be what it once was. Doesn’t matter if a small sensor gets as good as medium format. people have already found their polaroid of the day. These phones are already good enough in most peoples mind and will only get better. Camera companies survived over the years selling cheap small cameras to the masses and on a less important level, sold better cameras to pros and enthusiasts. Now that they can’t sell to the masses they find themselves up the creek without a paddle. It is beyond the breaking point for companies and they have no answers. I can’t seem to think of a solution other than joining forces with phone makers. Creating better optics and apps for phones etc.
Wow, mirrorless is doing a “bit better” than DSLR’s. Well, let’s have a party!
But then again, during the last year, we have seen the following mirrorless camera introduced:
Panasonic: GH4, GM1, GX7, G6
Olympus: EM1, EM10, EP5
Fuji: XT1
Sony: a7, a7r, a7s, a6000
Nikon: V3, and all sorts of other Nikon 1 stuff that I don’t keep track of….
Samsung: NX30
And what have the DSLR makers come out with? A Pentax K-3, and Canon 70D, and Nikon and Canon’s numerous tiny iterations of it’s entry level models. Oh yes, and now Nikon’s tiny iterations of the D610 and D810. Can’t forget those two…
And even with all these new, wonderful, exciting, awesome, earth-shattering, mirrorless camera announcements, and those completely boring and forgettable DSLR announcements, at best we get a little “nudge” in overall mirrorless shipments.
And now we have Canon dropping the price on their vintage 2009 7D pro camera to a mere $1,000 each for the body, at least here in the USA. And even though it’s vintage 2009 technology, in terms of performance and reliability, it destroys any of the “prosumer” mirrorless cameras out there. Yes, mirrorless cameras have better low-light performance than the 7D, but NONE have better C-AF focusing performance, and they all fail miserably when it comes to Canon’s incredible range of telephotos and telephoto zooms, let alone what third parties have to offer. And let’s not even talk about battery life…
So why do I want to spend $1,400 USD on an Olympus EM1 again?
The only mirrorless I would even thing about taking over a Canon 7D would be a Lumix GH3 or GH4, and that’s mainly because of their video quality.
I’m a fan of mirrorless cameras, even bought a new a couple of weeks ago, but they are no DSLR, that’s for sure, especially not a Canon (or Nikon)
And speaking of Nikon, one look at the incredible beauty of the Nikon APS 24mp file, RAW or JPEG, and you’d wonder why anyone would settle for less. Which is pretty much what everyone (other than possibly Sony) is offering: less.
Micro 4/3 isn’t even on the radar here in the USA. Canon probably sells more G16’s than all the micro 4/3 cameras combined.
Of course we have those who think that Asia is the key because mirrorless is selling so well (sort of) over there….but look at what’s REALLY selling, and you’ll see a majority of those cameras are NEX-3, Nikon S1, Olympus EPM2, and assorted discontinued entry level models. They are not buying up those GH4’s and EM1’s, that’s for sure.
And that’s the true state of mirrorless. It’s a bust.
If Olympus want’s to make money selling micro 4/3, they better hurry up and bring out a “Tough” version of the old Trip 35 with a micro 4/3 sensor inside, and sell it at a very attractive price (sub $500 USD)
– Olympius
To place your rant in perspective:
1. Canon and Nikon are the undisputed big box store of cameras and thus Mirrorless should never touch the hem of DSLR sales if Mirrorless are in fact inferior or “a bust”. You go to Target, Conn’s, Best Buy, Staples, even low end Walmart stores sell Canon and Nikon. You go to any dedicated Photography store, front and center, most recommended by sales staff, the largest inventory on hand are DSLRs. Go to any camera/lens rental retailer (brick and mortar or online) DSLR products dominate the selection. Mirrorless bodies and lenses are scant in selection or not even available in most retail chains.
2. Canon and Nikon technical/warranty support are light years ahead of mirrorless offerings.
So it’s really quite impressive to see mirrorless consistently doing better every quarter and introducing the best innovations in the world. Meanwhile DSLR giants like Canon’s and Nikon’s sales fall a minimum 15% of projected sales every single quarter, and have the worst hybrid and video offerings, not to mention the worst mirrorless offerings on the planet. To date the only response I get to this fact is “well full frame has better blah blah blah…”
Yet hardly anyone can actually understand how to use a FF DSLR much less afford one. Most people who own Canons or Nikons have the low end APS-C crop sensor cameras. Once people, like me, have tried using mirrorless it’s difficult to go back to a DSLR.
I spent a fortune using my old Canon Rebel T2i and T4i with 2 primes and the best Canon zoom lens their APS-C sensor could handle. Once I used the Olympus E-M5 and found:
1. the color produced in RAW and JPEG to be more accurate
2. autofocus system performed faster – rarely missed a shot
3. IQ was better than my Canon
4. lenses were smaller, cheaper, quieter and much higher quality than typical Canon glass
5. the system was portable, thus actual use of my camera doubled
6. 5 axis stabilization more than 6 times better than Canon in-lens stabilization with stepper motors
“So it’s really quite impressive to see mirrorless consistently doing better every quarter and introducing the best innovations in the world.”
That cracked me up.
Now, let’s remember what m43 is based on: tiny sensors, crappy lenses, software correction. Charge more, offer less. I wonder why they have no future… Maybe because their premises are so obviously dishonest?
Lol, your right those tiny sensors get together in a smoke filled room and dishonestly conspire meathods to beat the shitty decade old APSC sensors from Canon and Nikon, both of which I have used.
Now don’t get defensive here. Full frame D800 or the 5Dmk3 easily can top any m43 sensor in low light, depth of field and dynamic range. And for sports shooting, both cameras perform better than the GH4. However, rarely does anyone carry a massive FF body with lens around in the middle of the night. For that, one should go mirrorless. The Sony A7s is now the undisputed king of low light.
Which again goes to show how nothing in the market over the past 6 years has led the way in terms of leading innovation from Canon or Nikon. Let’s hope they come up with something soon. It only hurts photographers and hybrid shooters to have to change systems, as many professionals already have done.
LOL, I’m sure those sneaky crop sensors get together in a smoke filled room and conspire their devious, “obviously dishonest” plans. So what about the garbage APS-C crop sensors offerings from Canon and Nikon? They also have crappy sensors, crappy lenses, crappy video, average photos, crappy features…
Mirrorless leads the market in 4K (GH4, A7s). Mirrorless leads the market in the undisputed king of low light (A7s). Mirrorless cameras can be adapted to almost ANY lens on earth (Olympus, Panasonic, Fuji, Sony). Serious professional photographers like David Thorpe, Andrew Van Beek, Steven Huff, Paul Gero, Trey Ratcliff, Will Crockett, and MANY others have switched to mirrorless because Mirrorless is leading the market in technological innovation, while DSLRs are doing nothing. Canon and Nikon could also offer mirrorless, but nobody in their right might would ever choose the laughable EOS-M or a Nikon 1 over any Panasonic or Olympus camera.
Mirrorless cameras have been around since the 1920’s and some mirrorless cameras and lenses are still sought out for their exclusivity to this day. They are under the Leica brand. Leica was the first mirrorless camera on the market, still make the best mirrorless cameras and remain arguably the best camera/lenses on earth. No other company on earth has lenses and some camera bodies that increase in value over time. No other camera company has whole art galleries with the world’s most prolific photos than the mirrorless wonder of Leica. Mirrorless has been around LONG before DLSRs and will be around long after DSLRs are obsolete.
When people like you bash camera systems in the manner you do, you’re proving little to no experience with the system or in cameras in general. Just like when DSLR’s were considered a “joke” because DSLR’s were too big, too expensive, poor IQ and poor workflow compared to film cameras. Well guess what, DSLR’s did in fact catch up and surpass film. Mirrorless is simply the next iteration of technology and progress. You can either get defensive about this and ignorantly attack it, or enjoy your DSLR and actually start shooting.
very good
http://epanasonic.net/canteral-telephone.html
Wait, I’m confused, the graph shows the exact opposite to the headline of this post. DSLRs are selling 4-5x more than mirrorless. According to the graph.