Most new cameras that are announced are pretty much the same as our old ones, though the marketing guys would like us all to get all excited about a few more mega-pixels or slightly faster autofocus and other minor improvements, many of which we will never use. And often we fall for it and spend our cash on the latest model, hoping it will in some way revolutionize our picture-making.
Of course all these improvements do add up over time. The Nikon D810 I now use is significantly better in so many ways than my first digital SLR, the D100 in 2002, with its small, dim, viewfinder and its 6Mp sensor. But by the time they brought out the D200 or D300, Nikon had more or less sorted out the major issues, though they tempted me with full frame in 2008 and I upgraded to the D700 the following year. Nikon had actually said for some years that we didn’t need to have full-frame for digital cameras, and essentially they were correct for pretty much all I do – the main advantage is a little more light into the viewfinder, though often I work in DX format as I like being able to view outside the frame – an advantage the Nikon marketing department keep quiet about.
Incidentally, this is a feature that works better on the D810 (and 800) than on the D750. With the D750 you see the viewfinder frame, but it is easier to ignore, especially in the heat of the moment when what you see gets exciting, and I’ve several times framed and taken what I think would have been a great image, only to find later that I’d actually lost half of it and only taken the central part. With the D810 there is some esoteric combination of custom settings (don’t ask me – search in your manual) which allows you to grey out the non-image area of the viewfinder. You can still see the area outside the picture, but it’s very obvious it isn’t a part of the picture.
But there haven’t really been any great advances. I’d still be using the D700 if it hadn’t gone legs up after a little over 520,000 exposures (not bad as it was only rated for 150,000.) It does have a few other minor faults, but it’s still sitting on my desk waiting for me to bother to get an estimate for repair, though I’m convinced it will be beyond economic – along with my 16-35mm f4 lens.
Over the years I’ve read about several new cameras that claimed to be truly revolutionary, and the latest is the Light L16. When I first read about it around a year ago I was frankly a disbeliever, and certainly not convinced enough to risk the thousand dollars or so to back the campaign and get an early camera. The video on its web site explains the concept, with 16 lenses with focal length equivalents of 28 to 150mm, using 10 of them each time you take a picture and digitally combining their images. They promise this will give ‘DLSR quality’ equivalent to using 28 to 150mm lenses from a package the size of a rather fat smartphone.
The camera will produce 52Mp images and will enable you to choose focus and depth of field after taking the picture. I remain more than a little sceptical, but cameras should soon be going out to those who pre-ordered and are expected be on sale to the rest of us towards the end of the year. If it lives up to their expectations, they may be correct in their claim it will be the most significant advance in camera technology since the first Leica. Just a shame they don’t have a wide-angle version!