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Matsu
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
 
2011-04-05, 16:02

5100 may not be a good working pro choice, but the body shape is compact and generally regarded as comfortable to hold. This is not a bad concept for a camera actually. What's missing are the lenses, and maybe a bigger viewfinder bump for better magnification in the viewfinder, or a hybrid viewfinder.

The 35mm f/1.8 is a start, but it needs a whole range of DX primes, preferably f/1.4, These could all cost under 700 (in DX guise) and make for relatively small street cameras. Start with DX equivalents for 35mm FX and work down. 24mm DX, 18mm DX, 16mm DX and 13 or 14mm DX. Nothing longer that 50 is needed, since FX lenses stand in acceptable well here.

A fast live view mode and a relatively light camera/lens combination would make for a great camera for furtive street shooting. Especially something with a detachable eye-piece...

Nikon and Canon both recently poo-pooed mirrorless cameras: Nikon specifically suggesting that DSLR buyers don't want smaller cameras, so there's little to no advantage for non-DSLR designs. I think this really just represents both companies protecting established and profitable systems until the relevant technologies improve to the point that they can replace the mirror and/or pentaprism. They then have to determine whether to continue with existing mounts, modify them into a hybrid form, or redesign completely. Tricky stuff to judge. Sony is, again, putting toes in every pond. They have DSLR, SLT (EVF), and mirrorless (EVF) models, and seem committed to dropping the OVF completely.

Like many, I'm not so sure you need radical departures to make acceptably discrete cameras. If you compare a D3 to a D40, clearly there's a huge difference in size possible between the largest and smallest DSLRs. The largest being somewhere between too big and just right for their intended use, and the smallest clearly being small enough to use discretely. Except, that we lack the lenses (small fast primes) for that type of use... It's here that some of those hybrid technologies, like fast live view, and detachable finders could be very useful paired to a small fast prime and a light body.

But there's also a line where it might just be better to redesign the thing completely, rather than modify and evolve (obviously a tricky task for any camera vendor)

If the mount throat is wide enough, perhaps only Canon fits this description, I could see a future mirror-less hybrid that mounts DSLR/SLT lenses as well as lenses that recede into the camera body (like optically less complex pancakes?) for a compact profile: a sort of virtual flange. Leica's M has a 27.8mm flange, so modifying either of Canon or Nikon's DSLR mounts into mirrorless full frame designs with the same lens size advantages would mean creating a group of lenses that recede about 16-18mm into the mount. Doable, I think...

If we look at Nikon and Canon's existing mounts, we see:

Nikon - 46.5mm flange; 44mm throat.
Canon - 44mm flange; 54mm throat.

Plenty of room for fast lenses to recede into a "mirror-less" box, certainly for APSC and APSH, perhaps not for 35mm/FX. But there's perhaps little reason to design a camera this way - some customers potentially damaging their equipment by mounting the wrong camera-lens combinations... Sony/Minolta splits the difference, 49.7mm throat, but they nonetheless decided it was better to make a completely new mount for a purely EVF camera, while evolving the SLR into an EVF backed pellicle mirror design their SLT-EVF. They also reduced the flange even further on NEX, more or less creating an APSC mount with Leica M mount geometry, and similar corner issues...

I worry just a tad that the f-mount may have the greatest (potential) risk of obsolesense over the next decade, we'll see in time I guess.

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