Eleven years ago in another place, I wrote an article ‘Digital Wishes‘ when I looked forward to what the camera of the future might be. I wanted something that was small, light, responsive and flexible (and with a decently extreme wide-angle) and had a few suggestions, including:
“For a digital camera system, the obvious first step is to remove the mirror and pentaprism, replacing them by a digital viewfinder system,”
It was certainly the most contentious article I’ve ever written, and e-mail after e-mail came in and there were long and at times rather bitter arguments on an online forum I belonged to, with many posters telling me exactly why the laws of physics said that some of the things that I suggested just were not possible.
Most of them have I think been implemented now, though sometimes a little differently from how I envisaged them, and there are many more features I hadn’t thought of (or didn’t and still don’t want) in some of the newer cameras, but I’m still waiting for my perfect camera, or even one good enough to tempt me away from the heavy DSLR outfit that has been weighing down my left shoulder for years. (I had to give up on my right side thirty years back.)
Looking at the ‘first impressions’ on the web of the Sony NEX-7 announced in August it looks as if we may have the first truly usable digital viewfinder (it’s also in another Sony) for still cameras (although some others such as the Fuji X100 are close.) And although the NEX-7 seems slightly ugly it does appear to manage to get an awful lot in a rather diminutive body.
I’m not a great fan of Sony, but they do seem to have tried in the NEX-7 to produce a camera that has taken a new look at what photographers want and tried to provide it rather than produce cameras that look very much like classics but don’t really provide the features we want (and I include the Fuji FX100 in this, much as I like it.)
It’s a shame that Nikon seem to have put so much effort into a new format camera that can’t quite give the quality we need and that Fuji’s second attempt suffers from an even worse small format problem. If it really performs as well as the early views suggest, the NEX-7 might just mean we can take some strain off our shoulders, though there are one or two disappointing aspects.
One for me is the over-large file size at 24Mp, and another is the lack so far of any real wide-angle. The widest lens is a 16mm (24 mm equiv) and there are 0.75 and fisheye converters but although I’ve seen sample pictures on a Japanese site I’ve so far found no really detailed reviews, though this user review by ‘TRA’ on Amazon is encouraging. But what I’d really like is a good zoom that gets down to perhaps 11 or 12mm at the wide end, rather than having to fiddle adding a converter for the wide pictures. I could live with having to do this for a fisheye, as that’s a little more specialised.
There are really very few occasions when I’ve felt any need for more than the 12 megapixels that my current cameras provide, though I have used some very much large files. Doubling the number of sites on a chip is unlikely to provide any real advantage and is likely to result in higher noise levels as well as larger files. I’ve a 40×30″ print from a 12Mp file (corrected somewhat from a fisheye view and actually probably only using rather less than 9 of those 12 Mp) in my ‘Secret Gardens’ show at the moment, and elsewhere there is a 2.3 metre wide image in a public exhibition which was made from a 6Mp image taken on a Nikon D100.
We are bound to read some glowing articles on the new Nikon 1 system shortly, with journalists from the major magazines being treated to trips out to Japan and lavish hospitality. Of course it won’t affect their objectivity:-) Nor of course will Nikon’s huge advertising spend that they depend on to keep in business. But the Nikon 1 has a sensor less than 1/3 of the area of the Sony, and that is just too big a hill to climb. So get ready with the salt for when the guys report from their expenses-paid trips. It used to sometimes annoy me when I wasn’t allowed to accept such offers when I wrote professionally, but I can see why we had a strict code of professional ethics. It is perhaps surprising that such codes apparently don’t apply elsewhere.
The Nikon 1 will almost certainly be a good camera as compact cameras go – and probably more than a match for the recently announced Fuji X10, which has an even smaller sensor, about half the size of the Nikon 1. But it isn’t going to be batting in the same league as cameras like the NEX-7.