Canon to stop producing new EF designs.

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Why are DSLRs still made at all? Why has the complete move to mirrorless cameras not happened faster?

EVFs are getting much better, but for people spending all day with their eye to a camera - it's still hard to top a reflex system that lets you look through the actual lens. For anyone shooting studio work with strobes, an optical system is VASTLY more pleasant than the horrific gained up nonsense you see through an EVF.

Also, for anyone who doesn't want to deal with batteries changing/charging pains, there's no comparison.

Mirrorless is amazing and offers a host of fantastic features, but SLRs have their own advantages. It just depends on what your needs are.
 
Sorry but looking at electronic devices all day long is very fatiguing for the eyes.
Visible or not, refresh rates do take their toll on the eyes.
I could easily spend the day looking through an OVF, not the case for an EVF.

In a perfect world, i’d only ever use OVF.
 
In a perfect world, I'd only ever use EVF.

Seeing the image as the camera will record it, and with additional info in form of histogram, waveform, etc, beats all possible EVF downsides for most users (this of course doesn't include sports and wildlife photographers, and maybe also people using strobes).

Also, seeing a hardware teardown from a DSLR and an equivalent mirrorless camera is a strong argument for a mirrorless-dominated future: a much simpler design with much less mechanical complexity will be cheaper in the long run, to the point of tilting the balance even if EVF vs OVF is a personal preference thing that can't push a lot of people either way.
 
In a perfect world, I would only use the flip-out screen.

The only problem is direct sunlight. Screen hood? Maybe one day the screen could have its own fold-out shade: panels on top and sides, which fold around from the back of the screen.
 
In a perfect world, I would only use the flip-out screen.

The only problem is direct sunlight. Screen hood? Maybe one day the screen could have its own fold-out shade: panels on top and sides, which fold around from the back of the screen.

Direct sunlight and old age. Flip-outs are for high shots, low shots and the 20 something young bucks... ; ) It's bad enough I'm going bald, I can't start wearing readers, too!
 
Direct sunlight and old age. Flip-outs are for high shots, low shots and the 20 something young bucks... ; ) It's bad enough I'm going bald, I can't start wearing readers, too!

Lucky you, I haven't been able to judge focus without readers for about 10 years! Really as soon as HD became popular.
 
For focus, don't you need to rely on peaking anyway? The resolution of the recording format far exceeds the resolution of the camera's screen or viewfinder. Or are you saying that you would need glasses even to see the peaking marks?

I admit I'm armchairing at this point. I haven't shot anything for several years.
 
While peaking is a great and necessary tool, it can fool you, especially colored peaking. I've been burned by "red-line peaking" more than once and use "normal" peaking almost exclusively. But you have to find a good balance with it. You have to figure out what is going to give the truest representation of what's truly in focus and not give you a "false positive".
 
THe first time I saw peaking about 10 years ago it was on 50 at 2 or so and I know only one eye is in focus. It was showing on the eye, the ear , hair , whatever. Ive never turned it on since as clearly it is rubbish.
 
If that’s what you experienced, your feelings towards it are understandable, but it’s kind of like someone saying they don’t like electric drills because they tried driving a small screw with it and the head striped out, but they had a 24V drill with the gearbox on 2, the torque turned up to ‘drill’ and the trigger fully pushed in from the start. They weren’t using the tool correctly.

On the flip side, I’ve seen VF’s and monitors that if you didn’t use any peaking, nothing ever appeared in-focus, even when you knew it was. This can especially be true when shooting log.
 
Show me peaking that peaks when im on an eyelash only and that would be great :)

Yep - Ive been in situations where I could not see focus. 16mm F11 64nd (zambian sun). Could look sharp on the FS7 inbullt from macro to infinity. Shot some stuff at .3m when the subject was 5m away.. what a numpty.. I guess peaking might have helped.
 
Now that we have 1080p EVF’s that can dial to the viewers eye, i find less a need for peaking.

I’d rather soft focus than not see a clean image.


Once you get used to a lens, just srart obviously out of focus and then rotate into it.

Some lenses shift focus distance depending on the aperture setting. So, i can’t recommend opening up for all lenses, but sometimes i’ll open up a little, just to make sure i am in the zone, and then stop back down. It’s usually more accurate than peaking.

720p and lower res monitors and evf’s can be frustrating regardless. I hate cluttered screens, so the blue or red peaking ruins composition for me. Especially when a lens has hard bokeh edges, then all the bokeh balls are lit up with red lines.

I once had to shoot an interview on a 5dmkiii with a canon zoom. I didn’t know how to get an HD feed from the hdmi out. I had zero confidence monitoring. Footage came out sharp.

Peaking would possibly work, if it happening at the sensor resoution level. But an external monitor getting the HD signal is only going to do so much.

Peaking as an option is great. Would like to see it improved. Maybe have a designated temporary on button, rather than wasting a user key on it.
 
Now that we have 1080p EVF’s that can dial to the viewers eye, i find less a need for peaking.

I’d rather soft focus than not see a clean image.


Once you get used to a lens, just srart obviously out of focus and then rotate into it.

Some lenses shift focus distance depending on the aperture setting. So, i can’t recommend opening up for all lenses, but sometimes i’ll open up a little, just to make sure i am in the zone, and then stop back down. It’s usually more accurate than peaking.

720p and lower res monitors and evf’s can be frustrating regardless. I hate cluttered screens, so the blue or red peaking ruins composition for me. Especially when a lens has hard bokeh edges, then all the bokeh balls are lit up with red lines.

I once had to shoot an interview on a 5dmkiii with a canon zoom. I didn’t know how to get an HD feed from the hdmi out. I had zero confidence monitoring. Footage came out sharp.

Peaking would possibly work, if it happening at the sensor resoution level. But an external monitor getting the HD signal is only going to do so much.

Peaking as an option is great. Would like to see it improved. Maybe have a designated temporary on button, rather than wasting a user key on it.

Some Sony Broadcast and Production cameras used to have this type of feature(easy with an ENG lens with built-in servos). It would open the iris all the way and then adjust exposure with gain/shutter. And if I recall correctly, it had a safety that it wouldn't do it while recording and/or it would revert back to normal when recording was triggered.
 
I actually found the Magic Lantern peaking to be extremely useful on the old Canon DSLR's. The designer had made it so that it went from yellow to red depending on the magnitude of the micro contrast. I'm not sure if that last phrase actually makes sense. But, anyway, you could get a general sense of relative peaking rather than just having everything outlined in one color. I don't think I've ever seen it on any other monitor. The only time I now find peaking useful is when I have a fabric or lawn that I am racking focus across. Otherwise, the little green focus triangles from Canon's DPAF have completely replaced peaking for me. The problem on their current DSLR software is that the triangle focus aides can only be seen when a lens is set to manual focus.
 
Once you get used to a lens, just srart obviously out of focus and then rotate into it.

Some lenses shift focus distance depending on the aperture setting. So, i can’t recommend opening up for all lenses, but sometimes i’ll open up a little, just to make sure i am in the zone, and then stop back down. It’s usually more accurate than peaking.

Actually this makes a ton of sense. Thank you.


the little green focus triangles from Canon's DPAF have completely replaced peaking

Things are starting to click for me why so many here laud Autofocus, although it makes me feel sad :(. If sensor resolution is greater than any viewfinder or screen resolution, then what choice do you have but to let the camera take over? To paraphrase Yakov Smirnoff, "In Mother Russia, camera focuses you!"
 
Reliable auto-focus is one of the greatest, wonderful achievements that has ever happened to cameras. (Panasonic/Olympus IBIS is #2, IMO.)

It is so beautifully liberating to be able to trust your system (a7R IV has my personal top spot as of now) and just concentrate on creativity and anything else.

I love being able to simply see a box around someone's eye - and with one press of a programmed button choose the left one or the right one - and know it's about 99% perfect. No colored lines, no glowing edges; nothing on the screen besides a tiny little box tracking the eye in real-time with barely any delay.

Now with that said, I do very much appreciate good manual focusing from everyone else but me, but I've been saying for half a decade now - and I see others whom I considered long time manual focus guys saying it too - that humans will never be better than machines at certain tasks, and this is one of them.

It's really such a beautiful thing and I get sad to see people still not believing in it in 2020 because the technology is so bulletproof in a few cameras.
 
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