Kharan wrote:
Or maybe, just maybe, some people are using history as a gauge for future actions. I think it’s pretty disrespectful to treat more fearful users in this way. If you think they’re wrong, lay out your arguments, but don’t start putting people down because they’re being “illogical”, “uncritical”, or “out of their depth”.
I did lay my my arguments as to why this is wrong. The issue is, of course, that history provides no reason to believe this will occur, nor do any conceivable market conditions.
If suitable replacements don’t exist, people will make do. This has happened time and time again in the photography world. When all brands switched to digital, suitable UWAs were almost nonexistent… and yet, many photographers worked around these limitations, by stitching or using converters.
That was a technological limitation relating to the sensor size that could be mass-produced. You'll note that full-frame digital cameras came along, at which point all those ultra-wide lenses became ultra-wide again.
If you put users between a rock and a hard place, a sizable chunk of them will find a way to squirm through.
Such as ... by using other brands' cameras, with which their EF lenses will work, or using an R5, with which they'll work?
Is that Canon’s optimal path right now? Not at all. Will it be three years from now? 🤷♂️ No one can say for certain, not even Canon’s board.
I can tell you pretty much for certain that it'll be a dumb as bricks idea 3 years from now to drop EF compatibility.
They haven’t come out and said “don’t worry, we have your backs, EF compatibility is guaranteed into the future”. No one ever has…
Considering that they say on their own websites, e.g., "EF, TS-E, MP-E: Compatible with every EOS camera ever produced, including the new EOS R System and EOS M series when used with the appropriate lens adapter" [source] and "At the heart of the EOS R system lies the amazing RF mount. It’s newly designed to deliver the ideal combination of speed, durability and flexibility in optical design for excellent performance and future system expansion, plus compatibility with EF and EF-S lenses" (with a further section "Beyond Full Compatibility with EF/EF-S lenses") [source], that's basically as close to such a promise as you can get. Oh, and if you read the patents for the RF cameras, they go into how the switching works, and you can see that EF/RF switching is fairly well-integrated into the reasons the RF mount itself was designed the way it was. Getting rid of that can only be done via a software change, an intentional choice to make the products worse, that will not save any money.
Olympus limited full Four Thirds lens compatibility to their E-M1 range.
Apparently this has to do with the lower-end cameras not including PDAF focusing on the sensor, which interacted poorly with certain lenses. Kind of dumb, but still not something made up.
Nikon dropped in-camera AF motors in their consumer lineup, and then completely forgot about them for Z-mount.
Yeah, because including in-camera AF motors costs more money, and it's another physical part to make and add into the design, and avoiding that was a large part of why the Canon EF system was designed the way it was to begin with. This is nothing like a software change.
Sony gimped adapted A-mount lenses from the get go.
That again has to do with A-mount lenses requiring on-camera motors in many cases.
Canon have now orphaned yet another mount without recourse,
"Orphaned," you say, when the EF/EF-S lenses all work on the RF system. Unless you mean EF-M, which was (to be honest) a flawed design, reportedly led by the PowerShot team, before the EOS team took mirrorless seriously.
have hamstrung speedlight compatibility in their cheaper bodies,
Which is a matter of including hardware components on the cheapest body; even then, there is an adapter that will handle any old speedlight.
Problem is, there’s a cutoff point at which this becomes a tempting proposition. This might be reached a few years from now, or in decades. Just ask Nikon - people with AF-D lenses were left by the wayside in the transition to mirrorless,
Yeah, because of the motor thing.
and the rest of the F-mount catalog could well be discarded a few years from now.
Considering that the FTZ adapter is an active adapter (translating from F to Z in the adapter), I don't see how, unless you suggest Nikon will lock out their own adapter manually.
And of course, this won’t happen all across the range at once - if you invest in an R3/Z9 successor, it’s very likely that you’ll see continued support for many, many years to come. But if you only get an R8/Z5 successor, who knows when they’ll hang you to dry?
The top-line Nikon DSLRs had better support because the non-motorized lenses required further hardware components in the camera. You're talking about adding software to artificially block EF lenses.
Thing is, people with broad lens catalogs tend to own and value more expensive bodies, whereas newcomers usually settle for the economy models, and they’ll be especially tempted to adapt cheaper lenses. This should be seen as a net positive, but modern capitalism doesn’t reward long-term loyalty and attachment, it just pushes for more short-term profits relentlessly. I.e. “force new users to purchase new lenses”.
Lol, I'm sure that they'll increase short-term profits by selling cameras that are less useful than their predecessors.
Yeah, which is why Canon rewarded them with an official FD adapter for RF /sarcasm.
Well, I mean, FD lenses work perfectly on RF, so... you're point. Of course, they're full-manual lenses, but still, they work just fine. FD to EF was a bad comparison as discussed before (because film cameras were different, as the film itself determined the characteristics of the image, not the camera, and switching from full-manual to electronic would not have resulted in direct advantages on a new body; EF's new design was meant to focus on greater forward-compatibility, unlike Nikon — and look at that, it did)
They don’t give a damn. They’re going to drop EF as well, and if they can earn 0.1% more profit by excluding most future bodies from access to it, they’ll do it in an instant.
You assume facts not in evidence.
