When Did It All Go Wrong?

[jlw]

In a previous discussion I've mentioned my surprise at learning that many RFFers use rangefinder cameras not because they like the advantages of the range/viewfinder optical system... but because they DISlike the way mainstream cameras have been developing, and choose RFs as a way of jumping off the evolutionary bandwagon.

For those people, I'd like to ask you to pinpoint WHERE in the development of modern cameras you feel everything started to go wrong. I've proposed several "breakthrough" camera models and their associated years for your selection.

[I've left out some admittedly important historical milestones, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union drying up the supply of cheap FEDs and Zorkis, and of course you may have a different nominee for the Devil's Own Camera that lured photographers down the path of technological perdition. But just check the one that's closest to your personal béte noir...]

 

[SolaresLarrave]

In my case, the dim viewfinder of my Minolta and Nikon SLRs drove me to rangefinders. But then, this isn't an evolutionary assessment but rather my own discovery.

Besides, SLRs managed to bore me about three years ago. 🙄 What can I do? It's the truth...

 

[wlewisiii]

Hmm. I had a decent camera - a Canon Rebel XS with kit zoom and took a fair number of decent shots with it. What I kept running into was the limitations of it's programmed modes and the difficulty of using it in manual mode. So I bought a Yashicamat 124G on the bay. Lots of fun. Then I saw a GSN at a flea market. I had no clue what it was but the Yashica name was already a proven quantity to me so I dropped the $10. A couple of days later, in total desperation, I found this place and it's slippery slope. I hope the 2x3 RF equiped Speed Graphic is where I bottom out... but I doubt it 😀

No thought about technical superiority, just what lets me get the pictures I want. "So far, so good" he thought as he went down past the 50th floor... :bang:

William

 

[back alley]

nothing that i'm aware of drove me into the arms of the rf camera. a rf was my first camera and i liked it, even though i have used many of the mainstream slr cameras from the past.
rf is still my first love, they seem more natural than slr's, more comfortable and easier to use also.

 

[ballfresno]

I love my SLRs (both digital and film, auto everything and fully manual, ...) but my love of RFs is all down to the viewfinder.

SLRs were okay in the viewfinder stakes until AF started taking over and we now have cameras that are impossible to focus manually, a nightmare for available light photography. Sigh.

 

[Bryce]

I'm not down on SLR's where they work. That being longer lenses, etc.
What I can't stand is huge cameras (canon), cameras that are automated to the point that you have to do workarounds to use them manually (virtually anything made in the last 20 years).
So I've got (and like) early K- Pentax stuff, a Bessa L, a Fuji GS645s, a Brooks Veriwide, a Mamiya TLR. I also have a Pentax *istDs, since it's the closest thing I could pay for to a likeable digital camera. I don't like it all that well...

 

[Slipkid]

It's all in the formative years...😛

It's all in the formative years...😛

The first camera that I ever touched was one of my father's Leica M's...Probably about fifteen years later I actually took some pictures with it...figure I was about 15 or 16...when I got to use his M3.

I have SLRs (Nikon) and digital (Sigma and Nikon)...Nothing wrong with them (besides that they won't take my Leitz glass)...and that they are large, heavier, bulkier, noisier... And I find that I am hardly using them...But my used M's...now those are a pleasure to hold and shoot...often.😀

Cheers,
AJ

 

[dmr]

So I've got (and like) early K- Pentax stuff ...

Sorry, RF fans, but my main camera for serious work is still the Pentax K1000, even though I use RFs for most low-light stuff.

What annoys me, and makes me want to regurgitate, is the guys (and yes, they are mostly guys, sorry) who are sooooo stuck on the latest and greatest DSLRs but do not have the slightest clue as to the very basics of photography. I'm sure all of you know the type I refer to.

Oh well ...

 

[David Murphy]

In my case, the dim viewfinder of my Minolta and Nikon SLRs drove me to rangefinders. But then, this isn't an evolutionary assessment but rather my own discovery.

Besides, SLRs managed to bore me about three years ago. 🙄 What can I do? It's the truth...

SLR's bored me for a while too, now I am getting interested in them again. The reason: The lenses. There are simply some great ones at low prices now. I am particularly fond of the Canon FD/FL lenses in their multitude of variety. They are built well (some like works of art) and offer astonishing image quality for the money. Most Pentax and Nilkon SLR lenses still command prices so high as to discourage collecting and experimenting.

 

[David Murphy]

Sorry, RF fans, but my main camera for serious work is still the Pentax K1000, even though I use RFs for most low-light stuff.

What annoys me, and makes me want to regurgitate, is the guys (and yes, they are mostly guys, sorry) who are sooooo stuck on the latest and greatest DSLRs but do not have the slightest clue as to the very basics of photography. I'm sure all of you know the type I refer to.

Oh well ...

If you like the K1000 (I used one for about 20 years), check out the Pentax MX. It's K mount perfection. It's a small, light, precise, all mechanical machine that will impress.

 

[Nachkebia]

You know my choice, don`t ya? 😀

 

[Abbazz]

It all started in the 70s when marketing departments of some manufacturers realized than many consumers were more interested in reading camera specs than in taking pictures. Photo companies soon began to cater to these customers and to release ugly plastic cameras with crappy zooms and two inches thick instruction manuals. And, yes, the Canon AE1 was one of those who started the trend.

Then consumers began to switch to point and shoot 35mm cameras, seeking smaller, full automatic cameras equipped with long zooms. Ever tried to shoot with a plastic 150mm zoom lens with a max aperture of f/11.5 on a tiny point and shoot? Then the manufacturers started to complain, because SLR sales were dropping. What a surprise... Fortunately, digital came to the rescue and everybody now sells cameras by the truckload.

But, wait a minute, what happened then to Konica and Minolta? Why Pentax has just been bought by a filter manufacturer? Why Kodak is going the way of the Dodo?

Photo equipment manufacturers should focus on their core consumer base: photographers, and not forget that photographers like real cameras that help them to takes good pictures. Photographers don't care about crappy zooms and cameras that look like electronic toys. Photographers don't give a damn about Instamatic, 110, Kodak Disc or APS postage stamps sized negatives.

If a digital SLR delivers the same picture quality as a p&s weighting and costing half as much, and if the SLR doesn't even allow you to frame your picture on the LCD screen or to shoot a video, then what's the point of buying the SLR for the average consumer that will never buy an additional lens? Manufacturers like Canon are putting great efforts into downgrading their p&s cameras in order not to compete with their SLRs (no raw shooting, limited video quality, bad high ISO handling...). But the amateur digital SLR market is already dying.

It seems that Mr. Hirofumi Kobayashi is not wrong afterall: there is a market for manufacturers of tools destined to people who actually enjoy taking pictures (digital or film is not the point, one can always mount a digital back on a 40 years old Hasselblad). For all the others, they will be happy with their 12x zoom 10 Mpix digital gizmo assembled by an underpaid third world worker and sold under Nokia brand. I said Nokia, not Nikon...

Cheers,

Abbazz

 

[oscroft]

There are two things that I dislike. No, three things. No, .... Amongst my dislikes are such diverse things as...

* Autofocus. This came hand in hand with small aperture lenses and nasty dark viewfinders, which made proper focusing harder rather than easier (the "one size fits all, focus where the camera wants" design is just horrible).

* Extra-zoom lenses. The zoom lenses that were enabled by auto-focus (where you don't actually need to be able to see anything), with such small apertures that a white rabbit on a snowfield looks like a black cat in a coal mine.

* Batteries with everything. A camera where nothing works unless it's stuffed with twice its own weight in batteries (and with the same weight of batteries again in a bag round your shoulder, because the first set are only going to last ten minutes) was sheer insanity.

* Push buttons. Shutter speed, aperture, metering mode, film speed - they're all supposed to be changed by turning knobs, dials and rings, NOT by pushing buttons! And as for multi-function controls - if there isn't room on the body for a dedicated control with engraved settings, then it's a control you don't need.

* Black plastic overload. Does anyone really think that the process that led from nice compact metal cameras like Leica, Olympus OM, Pentax MX etc to huge black plastic monstrosities like those appalling Nikon and Canon things is progress?

That'll have to do for now - I haven't taken my blood pressure pills yet today. (Oh, and is it just coincidence that all the things I hate are SLR developments? I think not).

 

[markinlondon]

Definitely the T90-style innovation. This changed cameras from things you used to things that gave a bewildering range of options, thus giving the illusion of choice but really taking control away from the operator. This is in the nature of Arthur C. Clarke's assertion that "a sufficiently advanced technology should be indistinguishable from magic". We're getting there 😱

 

[Avotius]

I hate plastics on my cameras, that said I have a canon ae1 that I love, its a great camera that has served me well for a long time.

 

[rxmd]

Definitely the T90-style innovation. This changed cameras from things you used to things that gave a bewildering range of options

What's interesting is that many pre-T-90 1980's cameras presented you with the same options, but in a way that was a lot more confusing and less streamlined because it was all bolted upon what was basically a Nikon F. The T-90 took all that and gave it a user interface where it was all integrated somehow, and actually a lot less bewildering and easier to use than many 1980's cameras before it. And incidentally it's sometimes nicknamed "Tank", so the plastic apparently doesn't hurt as much as we think. And the T-90 can take pictures that are impossible to take with other FD-series cameras and/or with any rangefinder, but we apparently aren't interested. I like the T-90 and consider it a landmark camera in the best possible sense of the word.

I would ask the poll question differently - not when dit it all go wrong, but when did we go wrong? When did we go luddite? A photographer who embraced the Leica M3 was expecting and using cutting edge technology. Same with the Nikon F, the Spotmatic, the A-1, the M5, the T-90. There's a train of evolution here that we missed at some point. We are afraid that because photography has become too easy for "the masses", we might lose our elite status, and thus we get poll options complaining about the ease of use of the Autoreflex and the AE-1 (as if cars only were proper cars before the Model T, because then driving became too easy for the masses). Not to mention how "autofocus makes it too easy", as if photography was only proper if it was born through artificial hardship. We are more concerned with looks than with content; a Canon EOS-1 looks like plastic, so it has to be plastic and hence Bad - we happily ignore the fact that in spite of its looks it's a metal body that is more sturdy and lighter than anything ever offered by Leica's brass bodies, and thus we get poll options complaining about the looks of the T-90.

As long as we can be happy to bend our heads around the quaintness of doing things like they were done fifty years ago, we apparently content ourselves with ignoring and, partly, deriding what has happened elsewhere in the photography world. We are like people who prefer steam-driven trains. It's all nice and quaint, the way of the 1940s, but at least to me it seems like it's our idiosyncrasy when we talk about how things went wrong when diesel and electrical engines came about.

Philipp

 

[gareth]

Definitely the T90-style innovation. This changed cameras from things you used to things that gave a bewildering range of options, thus giving the illusion of choice but really taking control away from the operator. This is in the nature of Arthur C. Clarke's assertion that "a sufficiently advanced technology should be indistinguishable from magic". We're getting there 😱

I've got a T90. What a fantastic camera. What it did was integrate all it's clever features via the control wheel. Everything you do with the camera is done through the control wheel. Once you realise that, there's no need for the manual, you just press any button and turn the wheel, within a few minutes you know your way round the camera. It's also a fantastically fast way to work.

And of course just about every modern camera since the T90 has copied it.

When did it all go wrong, if indeed it did? Probably with the invention of film and the camera. It's all technology, once you start something you can't stop it.

Anyway I always find it amusing to see people using the information super highway to moan about technology!

 

[sejanus]

I think Philipp makes a good point, as does Gareth. Nothing 'went wrong', things just changed. I wonder if we look at the welter of new cameras, most of which are competent tools, few of which are exciting, and forget that it was ever thus. The Leica M3s and the Rollei 2.8Fs were the creme de la creme but the everyday reality for the mass of photographers were the Baldas, Regulas and Halinas. And the cost of entry for the manufacturer has become much, much higher; every new camera has to earn it's cost back and quickly.


I say, let's enjoy our good fortune and all those marvellously cheap cameras out there! 🙂

 

[Socke]

Exactly Aug. 25th, 1959 5:42pm, at least in my case 🙂

Ok, honestly, I like a small camera with exchangeable lenses, mirrorslap/blackout vs. paralax/inacurate framlines is not my main concern as is shutterlag under 0.1 seconds.

Weight and bulk favours the RF for me.

 

[Richard Black]

Weight...when slrs dominated they weighed a ton compared to r/fs. Extra baggage is the bane of my existence. Rangefinders are superior in that regard and much easier to use their viewfinders.