Love it. I really wish classical mirrorless camera makers would get their head out of their collective asses, and make a camera that is not stuck in the 80-s mentality.
Give me a large sunlight-readable touchscreen, with multitouch. Also GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, and 5G/LTE for connectivity and geotagging. Add automatic uploads to Google Photos, iPhoto, WebDAV, etc. Put in a small editor for on-device photo touchups.
Also, ditch the old-timey film-camera look. I don't need 15 physical switches, most of which should be automatic anyway. A physical button for the shutter and an analog knob for fine tuning are fine, but I don't need a manual switch for AF/MF. Or a "shutter delay" selector that is too easy to accidentally bump.
> Also, ditch the old-timey film-camera look. I don't need 15 physical switches [...].
You really, really do. This may sound contradictory at first, but cameras are operated blind. Even when you’re looking at the camera, you’re not seeing the camera, you’re seeing the subject. Touchscreens suck at blind controls. (That’s not to say touchscreens aren’t useful: choosing the focus point doesn’t exhibit this conflict, even if some prefer a joystick; or if you’re already digging into menus to do something very particular and non-time-sensitive—astrophotography, focus stacking, live compositing—a touchscreen can be better than a D-pad.)
Cameras also weigh quite a bit and are supported with the fingers you’re using to operate them, so significantly shifting anything except maybe your right thumb usually means a real risk of dropping the camera. The weight also mounts a two-pronged attack on the size of your touchscreen (I’m assuming a walkaround camera, not weddings or sports): the camera needs to be smaller in order to be lighter, and a large part of its surface area needs to be available for you to grip. So, realistically, you don’t want a camera with a 6-inch touchscreen.
In conclusion, please please please don’t take away my physical controls. I know a touchscreen is cheaper, but please don’t. I’ll pay.
(Side note: it’s been almost fifteen years, and I still type slower on my Android phone than I used to on the QWERTY keyboard of my Nokia.)
There have been a few different attempts that look like this. Samsung Nx, Samsung Galaxy Camera, Sony has tried phone add on accessories. Basically they all sort of flop in the market.
People that don’t want to think about their photos use a smartphone. People that want to think about their photos still want a camera that they can control. I use a mirrorless Nikon camera and to take a single picture I normally want physical controls that can handle exposure, focus, zoom level and shutter release independently, but simultaneously without having to remove my attention from the image. The ability to do all that with physical, not menu controls, is a tremendous asset for most people that want to spend the money on a camera. If you slapped the latest technology inside a camera that didn’t have all the physical controls, photographers wouldn’t want anything to do with it.
I wouldn’t say that camera design is stuck in the 80s, either. The form factor is necessarily constrained by needing a tubular lens projecting in front of a flat imaging plane. The photographer is going to want to view the image from the opposite side as the lens. There’s only so much you can change the form factor with those constraints. Camera companies do have a few retro models, but even stodgy old Leica is making modern designs these days.
If you take tens of thousands of photos per year, you sort of realize that all cameras have more or less the same interface and form factor as they have for a while because it is what works best.
I've been using a professional camera (Sony A7C) for a bit over two years now, and my wishlist looks very different than yours.
- Modern computational photography: Imagine having access to a high-end sensor combined modern computational photography tooling. Smartphones do incredible things with computational photography, including HDR, low light stacking, noise reduction, upscaling, and picking out smiling faces from multiple photos. Most of these things can be done in post on a professional camera with tools like Photoshop, but often they are inferior, using a single image to worse affect, requiring a lot of manual work, or just having less mature tooling. I'd love to have access to the raw data and computational pipelines to selectively apply different processing and tweak computational settings in post.
- Better UI: Sony notoriously has a terrible UI in their camera menu systems. Working with it feels like something I would've used on a flip-phone from 20 years ago, with things buried multiple levels down in obscure menus and vague, sometimes poorly translated descriptions. The hardware is great, but the GUI feels like something built by engineers rather than for end-users.
I’ve been doing a lot of extreme low temp (-70C ambient) photography with a Sigma FP. It’s basically a full-frame box hybrid movie camera. The addon EVF works well long after the LCD freezes. I really don’t want multi touch. I do want at least two physical dials with chunky detents. I don’t want auto-everything. USB charging is nice but I use a cabled external battery most of the time. The battery will die in minutes outside and for whatever reason Sigma decided not to add USB power pass through in the EVF. A week outside in the cold on AC power? No problem because there are no moving parts.
The power solution I came up with is a modified battery charger with a removable base (Wasabi Power). I added teflon coated cables and a connector to go to the (also butchered) dummy battery. Real battery gets stuffed into a pocket or up a sleeve. The camera doesn’t care how cold it gets, from experimenting.
It’s also small and the display is most of the back. If you make the display bigger, the camera gets bigger. At some point you aren’t serving pro photgraphers or people who would just use an iPad. Really you want a good OLED display or a high-res viewfinder. The FP has a weird loupe accessory back.
An on device editor? I don’t understand the need, if you can sync to a phone or computer. The same goes for wifi - a lot of new cameras have 2.4Ghz in them (my OM-D EM5ii from almost a decade ago can sync to an app).
I'm not sure I want any of that in my camera. Maybe fast wifi for photo sync at home but still faster to plug in the cable/card.
You know what I want and have? A sub half second power on time. Probably sub one second from turning on to first photo. I don't want any "smart" crap slowing that down.
For the sake of every professional (and semi-professional such as myself) photographer out there, I wish, to use your terminology, that the manufacturer's heads remain firmly up their asses. The only thing touching the LCD on my camera is my nose while I look through the viewfinder and when I am looking at the screen it's because I'm holding the camera in a strange position that doesn't allow me to use a touchscreen either.
Give me an open API so I can offload all the smarts to my infinitely more capable phone that already has a SIM card with a huge data plan and keep the camera a camera.
The only thing that I wish that camera-makers would finally agree on is a common mount. I'd love to try out camera bodies from different manufacturers, but that almost always means switching your entire lens collection as well. No, thanks.
I agree on built-in GPS (currently need to pair with a smartphone - which I'd rather love to leave at home), but everything else seems like a non-feature to me. I have zero interest for that on my Camera, because the experience would just be insanely annoying. Touchscreens are awful for camera operation - the feature is turned off permanently on my camera. Camera needs to be operatable blind, touchscreens are awful for this. Please give me more buttons and dials.
A few have tried, and they all fail. Most people are just going to use their phone, and the ones that won't _want_ the old-timey looks and hardware dials.
Samsung did make a camera with most of those features (it was before 5G, so 3G I think). I had it, it sucked a lot.
Turns out physical buttons for most things is very important if you want to be able to rapidly change settings as required for capturing a moment. Whenever I tried using that camera I lost so many shots due to the delay of fiddling with menus or the startup time.
Half of the point of having a dedicated camera is better ergonomics. I'm finding current smartphones good enough for most uses, but they are simply awkward to use and very slow to control without an external grip.
You just described a camera from hell (minus the connectivity part). Muscle memory is very important in photography, half presses, AEL/AFL lock buttons, exposure compensation. There's so many things that have to have physical buttons, you will not be looking at the screen to do these things.
This is exactly the same problem Tesla created with the touch buttons for turn signals, not everyone is a BMW driver, we use turn signals.
I am a photographer with decades of experience, the vast majority of which is studio works.
My wishlist is the exact opposite of your's. I don't need multitouch, couldn't care less for anything wireless, much less automatic uploads and on-device editing. I need physical buttons for everything. The more the better. And I need a manual AF/MF switch badly.
You need physical buttons. It is about communicating with the machine what you really want and control it. If you want auto just have an option for auto.
A good example is auto focus. Many has a button on the back to activate on an area with focus size and point control by a joystick. And if it is good, fix it so the machine does not decide to autofocus another area, subject, …
> Also, ditch the old-timey film-camera look. I don't need 15 physical switches, most of which should be automatic anyway.
No thank you. The whole point of a good camera is to have manual controls IF you want them. Nope that you can already use DSLRs and mirrorless cameras as fully automatic point and shoot cameras of you want to use them this way.
> Also, ditch the old-timey film-camera look. I don't need 15 physical switches, most of which should be automatic anyway.
Yeah, you do. For the reasons others have given (adjusting the exposure compensation on my iPhone is a PITA. On my Olympus I just spin a dial).
But also: if you're "out shooting", this may happen when it's freezing outside. If you've found a pair of warm gloves that allows you to comfortably use an iPhone, I'd love to hear about them. My Olympus' dials are usable with my winter motorcycle gloves. My iPhone's screen is also a pain to use if it's wet. Sure, it won't brick the phone, but dragging things around the screen? Good luck.
I think this is an incredibly cool project. I think it'd be neat if they did something like MNT do and ran a crowdfunding campaign to try get these some what more mass produced, though I dont get the impression the author is looking to run a business like that and mostly developed it for their own enjoyment.
Regardless though, it does feel like open hardware is getting a lot more attainable than it used to be and that is surely a good thing
Hey OP, if you ever plan to turn this into a kit for sale for <$2000-ish I'd be highly interested.
I'm sick and tired of microscopic cameras like the RPi "HQ" camera being called HQ. I come from photography land and a full 35mm-ish sensor is the minimum of what I'd call HQ.
The design is pretty modern. But what is with the choice of the Kodak CCD sensor? CCD cameras got a resurgence in Chinese communities with second-hand camera prices increased like tenfold.
Also see Apertus Axiom where they also used the Zynq but used one hell of a CMOS sensor that can do 4K 300FPS.
> Well let's say I started this project before the recent CCD camera hype so that's not the reason. Part of me just wanted to be special and fullframe CCD is kind of special.
Being a small manufacture means you go to the bottom of the list for the vendors of the sensors. I'm sure the best sensors are pretty much already spoken for, and the lower quality ones are what's available to any one not the likes of Sony, Canon, Nikon, etc. Any other reason is pretty much an excuse.
We could just go back to full sized cameras with 3 CCDs. j/k
CCD sensors render differently than CMOS sensors and, if their strengths are what you are looking for they could still make sense. Compared to CMOS they require more light, but when you are capturing an image properly they do a really good job of rendering colors and details. CCD sensors also introduce less noise as part of their pipeline (though again, the ceiling on how sensitive they can be is much lower than CMOS).
Basically there has always been a community of photographers who like the "CCD look" and it's not surprising to me that someone who's geeky enough to make his own camera went with one.
IIRC the author scored a few trays on local equivalent of eBay. Obsoleted Kodak/OnSemi KAF line of sensors are rare kind of large film-sized sensors with public full datasheets; most manufacturers don't even confirm or deny existences of sensors in public.
I have interest in assembling this, but I'd love to buy it.
I wasted about 1k on trying to design a small backup phone before realizing I couldn't get it down to the dimensions I wanted. I'd need like half a million to actually build this thing.
However, I really want to see more hardware with open software. On the other hand you have open firmware for some cannon cameras if you want to do that route.
A lot of modern (DSLR or mirrorless era) lens intentionally accept a lot of optical flaws that are easy to correct with software (e.g. vignetting; sometimes even mechanical/hard vignetting where the lens does not fully cover the sensor); to prioritise addressing flaws that are difficult to correct with software (i.e. resolution, sharpness).
The software in the camera automatically correct these things before you see it; and when it's particularly bad, usually this correction cannot be disabled. On most brands, RAW will tell you something closer to what the sensor is really seeing.
Probably the author is not using digital optimized "telecentric" lenses. It's known that digital sensors are less tolerant with respect to incident angles compared to films.
Because the lens mount alone is as thick as the phone, lenses are heavy so the phone's.frame must become stronger and this heavier, and the result becomes a pretty silly phone, heavy and weird-shaped without a lens, and even more weird-shaped with an attached lens.
I want a camera that works digitally, but all is through physical controls and only the photometer is digital as well. Not a single "auto" feature. All manual, but saves to an SD.
Not cheap, but you can get a Leica that doesn't even have a screen, it's all manual and just treats the sensor as though it were film stock. One of the things I like about the Leica digitals is that they are still rangefinder cameras so your experience of using them is still through the viewfinder and much more akin to an analog experience because of the manual focus / exposure / speed control. Now I just need to save up :-)
As others have said, the Nikon Zf is a nice manual feeling digital option too.
[+] [-] cyberax|1 year ago|reply
Give me a large sunlight-readable touchscreen, with multitouch. Also GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, and 5G/LTE for connectivity and geotagging. Add automatic uploads to Google Photos, iPhoto, WebDAV, etc. Put in a small editor for on-device photo touchups.
Also, ditch the old-timey film-camera look. I don't need 15 physical switches, most of which should be automatic anyway. A physical button for the shutter and an analog knob for fine tuning are fine, but I don't need a manual switch for AF/MF. Or a "shutter delay" selector that is too easy to accidentally bump.
[+] [-] mananaysiempre|1 year ago|reply
You really, really do. This may sound contradictory at first, but cameras are operated blind. Even when you’re looking at the camera, you’re not seeing the camera, you’re seeing the subject. Touchscreens suck at blind controls. (That’s not to say touchscreens aren’t useful: choosing the focus point doesn’t exhibit this conflict, even if some prefer a joystick; or if you’re already digging into menus to do something very particular and non-time-sensitive—astrophotography, focus stacking, live compositing—a touchscreen can be better than a D-pad.)
Cameras also weigh quite a bit and are supported with the fingers you’re using to operate them, so significantly shifting anything except maybe your right thumb usually means a real risk of dropping the camera. The weight also mounts a two-pronged attack on the size of your touchscreen (I’m assuming a walkaround camera, not weddings or sports): the camera needs to be smaller in order to be lighter, and a large part of its surface area needs to be available for you to grip. So, realistically, you don’t want a camera with a 6-inch touchscreen.
In conclusion, please please please don’t take away my physical controls. I know a touchscreen is cheaper, but please don’t. I’ll pay.
(Side note: it’s been almost fifteen years, and I still type slower on my Android phone than I used to on the QWERTY keyboard of my Nokia.)
[+] [-] dghlsakjg|1 year ago|reply
People that don’t want to think about their photos use a smartphone. People that want to think about their photos still want a camera that they can control. I use a mirrorless Nikon camera and to take a single picture I normally want physical controls that can handle exposure, focus, zoom level and shutter release independently, but simultaneously without having to remove my attention from the image. The ability to do all that with physical, not menu controls, is a tremendous asset for most people that want to spend the money on a camera. If you slapped the latest technology inside a camera that didn’t have all the physical controls, photographers wouldn’t want anything to do with it.
I wouldn’t say that camera design is stuck in the 80s, either. The form factor is necessarily constrained by needing a tubular lens projecting in front of a flat imaging plane. The photographer is going to want to view the image from the opposite side as the lens. There’s only so much you can change the form factor with those constraints. Camera companies do have a few retro models, but even stodgy old Leica is making modern designs these days.
If you take tens of thousands of photos per year, you sort of realize that all cameras have more or less the same interface and form factor as they have for a while because it is what works best.
[+] [-] MarioMan|1 year ago|reply
- Modern computational photography: Imagine having access to a high-end sensor combined modern computational photography tooling. Smartphones do incredible things with computational photography, including HDR, low light stacking, noise reduction, upscaling, and picking out smiling faces from multiple photos. Most of these things can be done in post on a professional camera with tools like Photoshop, but often they are inferior, using a single image to worse affect, requiring a lot of manual work, or just having less mature tooling. I'd love to have access to the raw data and computational pipelines to selectively apply different processing and tweak computational settings in post.
- Better UI: Sony notoriously has a terrible UI in their camera menu systems. Working with it feels like something I would've used on a flip-phone from 20 years ago, with things buried multiple levels down in obscure menus and vague, sometimes poorly translated descriptions. The hardware is great, but the GUI feels like something built by engineers rather than for end-users.
[+] [-] joshvm|1 year ago|reply
The power solution I came up with is a modified battery charger with a removable base (Wasabi Power). I added teflon coated cables and a connector to go to the (also butchered) dummy battery. Real battery gets stuffed into a pocket or up a sleeve. The camera doesn’t care how cold it gets, from experimenting.
It’s also small and the display is most of the back. If you make the display bigger, the camera gets bigger. At some point you aren’t serving pro photgraphers or people who would just use an iPad. Really you want a good OLED display or a high-res viewfinder. The FP has a weird loupe accessory back.
An on device editor? I don’t understand the need, if you can sync to a phone or computer. The same goes for wifi - a lot of new cameras have 2.4Ghz in them (my OM-D EM5ii from almost a decade ago can sync to an app).
This project looks super cool though.
[+] [-] progbits|1 year ago|reply
You know what I want and have? A sub half second power on time. Probably sub one second from turning on to first photo. I don't want any "smart" crap slowing that down.
[+] [-] franga2000|1 year ago|reply
Give me an open API so I can offload all the smarts to my infinitely more capable phone that already has a SIM card with a huge data plan and keep the camera a camera.
[+] [-] thunfisch|1 year ago|reply
I agree on built-in GPS (currently need to pair with a smartphone - which I'd rather love to leave at home), but everything else seems like a non-feature to me. I have zero interest for that on my Camera, because the experience would just be insanely annoying. Touchscreens are awful for camera operation - the feature is turned off permanently on my camera. Camera needs to be operatable blind, touchscreens are awful for this. Please give me more buttons and dials.
[+] [-] girvo|1 year ago|reply
A few have tried, and they all fail. Most people are just going to use their phone, and the ones that won't _want_ the old-timey looks and hardware dials.
https://newatlas.com/photography/switchlens-m43-smartphone-c...
This one I think has promise though
[+] [-] chillfox|1 year ago|reply
Turns out physical buttons for most things is very important if you want to be able to rapidly change settings as required for capturing a moment. Whenever I tried using that camera I lost so many shots due to the delay of fiddling with menus or the startup time.
[+] [-] orbital-decay|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nucleardog|1 year ago|reply
- Power draining giant screen - Touchscreen and minimal physical controls - Multiple radios, including cellular - Cloud integration - Apps for photo editing - Slim form factor
You want a smartphone with a better lens.
[+] [-] quuxly|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nunoonun|1 year ago|reply
This is exactly the same problem Tesla created with the touch buttons for turn signals, not everyone is a BMW driver, we use turn signals.
[+] [-] egorfine|1 year ago|reply
My wishlist is the exact opposite of your's. I don't need multitouch, couldn't care less for anything wireless, much less automatic uploads and on-device editing. I need physical buttons for everything. The more the better. And I need a manual AF/MF switch badly.
[+] [-] ngcc_hk|1 year ago|reply
A good example is auto focus. Many has a button on the back to activate on an area with focus size and point control by a joystick. And if it is good, fix it so the machine does not decide to autofocus another area, subject, …
[+] [-] akho|1 year ago|reply
Why do you want camera makers — who are obviously serving a market you are not interested in — to stop serving their market?
[+] [-] porphyra|1 year ago|reply
* nice big multitouch screen
* on-device Lightroom for retouching
* it's an android device
But it didn't do very well despite its really outstanding image quality. (Maybe it was the $6000 price tag, maybe it was just the lag)
[+] [-] entropie|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ekianjo|1 year ago|reply
No thank you. The whole point of a good camera is to have manual controls IF you want them. Nope that you can already use DSLRs and mirrorless cameras as fully automatic point and shoot cameras of you want to use them this way.
[+] [-] vladvasiliu|1 year ago|reply
Yeah, you do. For the reasons others have given (adjusting the exposure compensation on my iPhone is a PITA. On my Olympus I just spin a dial).
But also: if you're "out shooting", this may happen when it's freezing outside. If you've found a pair of warm gloves that allows you to comfortably use an iPhone, I'd love to hear about them. My Olympus' dials are usable with my winter motorcycle gloves. My iPhone's screen is also a pain to use if it's wet. Sure, it won't brick the phone, but dragging things around the screen? Good luck.
[+] [-] whoiscroberts|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nakedrobot2|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Coolbeanstoo|1 year ago|reply
Regardless though, it does feel like open hardware is getting a lot more attainable than it used to be and that is surely a good thing
[+] [-] MaximilianEmel|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dheera|1 year ago|reply
I'm sick and tired of microscopic cameras like the RPi "HQ" camera being called HQ. I come from photography land and a full 35mm-ish sensor is the minimum of what I'd call HQ.
[+] [-] gaudat|1 year ago|reply
Also see Apertus Axiom where they also used the Zynq but used one hell of a CMOS sensor that can do 4K 300FPS.
[+] [-] SushiHippie|1 year ago|reply
> Why use CCD instead of CMOS?
> Well let's say I started this project before the recent CCD camera hype so that's not the reason. Part of me just wanted to be special and fullframe CCD is kind of special.
[+] [-] dylan604|1 year ago|reply
We could just go back to full sized cameras with 3 CCDs. j/k
[+] [-] aeturnum|1 year ago|reply
Basically there has always been a community of photographers who like the "CCD look" and it's not surprising to me that someone who's geeky enough to make his own camera went with one.
[+] [-] numpad0|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] LeafItAlone|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 999900000999|1 year ago|reply
I wasted about 1k on trying to design a small backup phone before realizing I couldn't get it down to the dimensions I wanted. I'd need like half a million to actually build this thing.
However, I really want to see more hardware with open software. On the other hand you have open firmware for some cannon cameras if you want to do that route.
[+] [-] dvh|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dannyw|1 year ago|reply
The software in the camera automatically correct these things before you see it; and when it's particularly bad, usually this correction cannot be disabled. On most brands, RAW will tell you something closer to what the sensor is really seeing.
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[+] [-] bjpirt|1 year ago|reply
As others have said, the Nikon Zf is a nice manual feeling digital option too.
[+] [-] cultofmetatron|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] numpad0|1 year ago|reply