In 1986, imaging expert Dr Ferris Bueller was definitely heard to say: “advances in digital photography happen pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss them”.
Okay, this quote is almost certainly incorrect. But while we check, it’s worth realising that the sentiment rings completely true.
Almost every new camera that hits the shelves has something new to shout about. Some have big shiny innovations pinned to their swelling chests; others have more subtle advances that only become appreciated over time in use. But there are so many, how are you supposed to keep track?
In other words, you’re about to read about some of the most important digital camera developments of the last few years. This is stuff that’s actually being used in cameras to great effect, mind, rather than drawing board flights of fantasy or half-baked ideas which don’t really do much (hello, Dual Pixel Raw).
Do you agree? Have we missed something? Let us know in the comments.
Hitting the heights
Around 2010, many people thought the megapixel race was over, but no. First, in 2012, the D800 series scaled new heights, and then, in 2015, Canon ran off with Nikon’s high-resolution DSLR crown, melted it down and made two spiffing cameras out of it: the 50. 6-megapixel EOS 5DS and EOS 5DS R. That kind of resolution offers supreme detail if you shoot in the right way, or the ability to crop massively into a file and still have the plenty of pixels to play with. The 5DS’s standard output of 8688x5792 also means you can make A0-sized prints at 200dpi. If you can find a printer to do it, that is. And anyone worrying about the massive images clogging up hard-drives or choking their processor can just switch to the S- or M-Raw mode for smaller files, and button their lip.
The 5DS and 5DS R sport the highest resolution sensors of any DSLR yet.
Handles with care
There’s no doubting that Fujifilm’s X Series has rejuvenated the company’s camera business. X Series cameras feature a unique sensor design that provides beautiful pictures, and a suite of very tempting Film Simulation modes for classic film photography looks. But it’s the style and handling that’s arguably the main attraction. And with good reason. If science fiction set designers were to be believed we’d all be using 3D touchscreens by now. Hey, maybe someday we will, but the X Series’ use of classic camera aesthetics and manual inputs means you get to enjoy the tactile pleasure of using a camera. Nikon tried it with the Df, so you can see it’s not always successful. Truly, sometimes you have to look backward to move forward. Unless you’re crossing a road, obviously.
Fujifilm's X Series has been a huge success, thanks in part to its brilliant manual feel.
Slow and steady
Remember when you sat in photography school and learnt that the lowest shutter speed you should use to avoid camera shake was the inverse of the focal length? Well, thanks to modern image stabilisation, you can tear that bit of your brain out and flush it down the toilet. The best of them is arguably Olympus’s 5-Axis Image Stabilizer found on the OM-D E-M1 Mark II. As if the in-camera system wasn’t enough at 5. 5 stops of compensation, with the right lens attached (one featuring its own IS system, like the ED 12-100mm f/4 IS PRO), this rises to 6. 5 stops; a factor Olympus claims is limited only by the rotation of the Earth. Obviously how slow you can shoot depends on your own handling skills, but with 6. 5 stops of compensation to play with it ought to be into full seconds. When you think about it, that’s astounding. So, think about it. A lot.
Olympus's Image Stabilizer, as found on the OM-D E-M1 Mark II, is arguably the best out there.
Reaching the peak
Along with all this fastest, biggest and highest action, here’s a bit of a curveball. Forgotten by many, thanks to… well, it not being very memorable, Sony’s NEX-C3 snuck one of modern cameras’ best features into the world of stills photography: focus peaking. Borrowed from generations of video cameras, focus stacking finally made some sense of putting live view modes on stills cameras, adding a wysiwyg preview overlay showing exactly where a picture was sharpest. Combined with modern EVFs, this feature makes manual focusing so easy that, once you’ve used if for a while, it’s almost a pain to switch back to AF. Thankfully it’s in most cameras now and those that don’t have it can go to hell.
Focus peaking has been around for a while now, but it's still one of the most important digital innovations.
Action stations
Canon may have stolen the high-resolution crown from Nikon (though that may change when the D850’s specification is confirmed), but the big-N is still king of action with the D5. Nikon’s flagship DSLR has the kind of high ISO and AF performance people would’ve been embarrassed to predict a decade earlier. Obviously, most of us have no business going anywhere near the maximum expanded 3,280,000 setting where you can pretty much see in the dark, but with a top-end proper ISO of 102,400 which is actually usable, and clean-a-whistle results at many settings close to it, you can keep shutter speed high at middling apertures, and increase detail and depth-of-field for high quality. It also has the world’s best AF system, the show off.
Nikon's flagship D5 is the king of high ISO shooting, a benefit that's already trickling down to more affordable cameras.
The need for speed
Olympus has worked very hard to make its micro four-thirds CSC cameras competitive, so it should be no surprise to find another bit of Olympus tech on this list. And again it comes via the OM-D E-M1 Mark II. At 60fps, the camera’s fastest continuous drive mode is as pacy as Usain Bolt crossed with Joshua Jackson, eating a chewy mint sweet from the 1980s. It’s so fast in fact that you could shoot over 200 Raw frames in the time it took to read this sentence. Well, if the buffer could keep up, that is. It’s currently limited to 48 raws at top lick, which is probably a good idea. More than that many pictures of the same thing is something none of our hard drives need. Unless they’re of Scarlett Johansson, obviously.
Olympus's OM-D E-M1 Mark II has a top shooting speed of 60 frames per second. Whoosh.
Stacking the odds
If you’re a macro photographer you’ll know all about focus stacking; the principle of shooting multiple images focused at different points and combining them to increase depth-of-field. Many landscapers use it too, though the former require a lot more frames than the latter. Normally focus stacking requires separate third-party software to combine the images, but some cameras have that mode built in. For instance a Focus Stacking mode was included on the Olympus Stylus TG-3 and TG-4, and made its made its way into a ‘proper’ camera with a firmware update of the original Olympus OM-D E-M1. We’d like it in more cameras soon, please. Yes we would.
In-camera focus stacking is something we'd like to see in a lot more cameras, please.
The DSLR killer
The phrase “DSLR killer” has been rolled out for almost every new CSC since the first one was hatched, but broadly DSLRs still stamp on CSCs and keep walking, unaware they’ve crushed a cute little camera and the upstart dreams of those who owned it. The Sony A9 looks very much like being different though. For why? Well, if you read down this list, it combines many of the best features already mentioned: it has a 20fps burst mode, with continuous feed from a smooth EVF display, superb image quality from its full-frame 24. 2Mp chip, amazingly fast AF with 693 phase-detect AF points covering about 93% of the image area and even shutter speeds up to 1/32,000sec. Not an individual development in itself then (though the camera has a few of those), but a bloody good looking camera that might just change the world.
Sony's A9 looks like being the biggest challenger to DSLR dominance yet.
. digitalrev.com2017-7-28 03:00
