mike051051

Mr. Burgett, love the snarkiness of your last sentence!

My first camera was a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye Flash model circa 1956. I used that until Junior High when I obtained a Kodak Retina S1, not much to look at but it took pretty decent pics. Then I graduated to a Canon TL-QL SLR with a 50/1.8 lens.

After those there was a long procession of various SLRs of various brands including Olympus, Nikon, and Pentax, but mostly Canon.

Ah, and the Emperor just got another set of new clothes! I can just imagine what the team on Shark Tank would do to these dweebs..."...so you have a camera that's ugly as sin, with a non-zoom lens that no one wants, for a target market you have yet to adequately define, with need for a 4G communications network that never drops any data, with need for server space rivaling that of the NSA, priced at a level that suddenly makes buying a used Leica an attractive proposition...and you want us to provide how many hundreds of millions of $$ in start-up capital?...you're just a special kind of stupid aren't you? NEXT!..."

It perhaps serves better as a metaphor rather than an analogy.

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I once heard a quote ( some 30+ years ago ) that came to mind as I was reading this opinion piece. Words to the effect - A battleship can take quite a while to alter course and bring its guns to bear and while it's doing that other smaller ships are taking their shots. But once those big guns are properly aligned, you're dead.

I'm only speaking about the camera business here and wise decisions still have to be made by those running the "ship" (witness Graf Spee and Bismark for nautical examples of poor decision making). I'll be buying an M5 one of these days because I'm basically a Canon user and I like familiarity of control layout and scheme and because I've been at this game long enough and I've used enough cameras, both film and digital, to be able to use whatever camera I want in whatever way I want without it needing to be the absolute best, class leading-est collection of impressive technology on the photographic planet.
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DPR Guys;

I was wondering about your choice of lenses for the EOS M3 test shots, I realize the EF-M 22 f/2.0 is a really nice lens but it's not the best available in the Canon line that would fit on that mount. Utilizing the EF-M : EF lens adapter would have allowed use of something like the EF-S 60 f/2.8 or the EF 50 f/2.5 Compact Macro. But maybe the adapter was not available when you made those shots?

You made some comparisons to the excellent Sony A6300 so I looked at those studio shots and their exif says that you used the Zeiss Sonnar FE 55 f/1.8 ZA lens. Looking at M3 results at Imaging-Resource I see that they used the same lens on the Sony but the Canon EF 50 f/2.5 Macro on the M3. Seems that might be a better comparison in this case? Just asking.

@ Reilly Diefenbach,
It doesn't require denial from anyone to refute your 59% figure as being only applicable to the "discretionary spending" part of the annual U.S. budget. The following website goes into detail regarding how the budget is actually constructed, what Congress votes on every year, etc., etc.,

https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-budget-101/spending/

Sorry @HeyItsJoel, I can't agree with your opinion.

I have a degree in photography from RIT and that helped me have a 43 year career in the photography business (now retired).

If you meant that having a degree in photography is no guarantee of one being a good/great/successful photographer then I will agree with that, just as a degree in any field does not guarantee one's future success in that field.

Wow, that's a ton of equipment! And here I was thinking that Getty would just scarf images from other photogs, put their own (c) on them and then sue the other photogs for infringement...must be that since they'll be $1 Billion down in the next few months they thought it better to at least LOOK like they were actually capturing images.........DOH!!!

Yep, I saw that. Interesting but I could only find the one image made with the Sony out of the 324 in that album (but I may have missed some). I wonder if he was testing it out?

+BigOne: misjudging a market can mean being ahead of time but it can also mean guessing it wrong and failing to realize it soon enough.

Steve ohlhaber & nicolaiecostel: I'm not as technically challenged as you might think but I'm certainly not a genius either. I spent 17 years in digital camera engineering, much of it in the frustration of dealing with marketing and project managers lack of understanding of what makes a good digital camera.

Halc: My remarks about Photoshop were not based on compatibility with it, but rather to say that when Lytro's imaging post-process workflow can be shown to be operable free from any linkage with their servers, IOW as a totally stand-alone application, and when the final results can be output completely separate from any Lytro application,in a similar manner that the output of any current commercial film/video editing system can be stand alone, then my opinions about Lytro might change.

..so these guys are at it again? I thought they would have gotten tired of running the same scam over and over and over again, but I guess I underestimated their capacity for misjudging the market, promising the moon and stars and delivering green cheese late and 4X over budget. The Emperor still has no clothes!

Produce this stand alone and operable totally independent of any Lytro cloud or servers, as you can do with Photoshop etc, and allow it to be output in whatever the prevalent file format is for commercial film distribution is these days and I might change my mind.

Says the man with the T2i.............

I voted that the sensor size doesn't matter because I think the primary consideration is resulting image quality, not sensor size.

Also, I think the polls would be better stated if the "reasons" were left out, e.g. I don't "worry" that a fixed lens might limit me in the future because I don't "worry" over anything to do with cameras. I realize that would shorten the number of poll questions and perhaps make it less entertaining, but I think it would be more to the point.

You're right, it's the field size at closest focus distance. Here's a translation from babylon.com:

A photography range at the time of the most proximity 125×93mm

It might be that I just can't stop laughing after reading your post and that's affecting my judgement, but...you're being sarcastic, right?

Oh, and as if the NY Times was such a bastion of truth in journalism...

>...PEN sales had fallen 12% in the first quarter, but that it expected the
> year's income from mirrorless models to be consistent with last year's
> figure <snip> ...said the camera business is on track to break even this
> financial year. <snip>...but Olympus says its restructuring plan will allow it > to 'move to a cost structure suitable for the scale of the business.'

Ouch, this kind of talk makes me nervous for Oly's camera business. This is the exact same line of rhetoric used by Kodak Senior Management about two years before the Chapter 11 filing and the dissolution of their camera business.

I sincerely hope that Olympus's senior staff and directors are more focused than were Kodak's (pun intended).....

I'm a bit surprised that the level found was only 5%, but that may be due to the product being a clothing line and not electronics. In my previous job (retired now) I found that camera reviews on seller's sites ran closer to 8-10% disingenuous regardless of brand, and that includes both overly positive and overly negative reviews. I can still usually spot it when a review is from a falsely proclaimed "owner" or when the problems in question are essentially self-inflicted. Always gives me a chuckle.

Can't agree with you Mostly,
The color is from the reflected clear blue sky; the exposure looks to be spot on with highlights pushed for effect; the sharpening and saturation are also for effect and the composition is excellent. Deliberately cropping off the right rear corner of the car is a technique, not a mistake. I don't see this as a plain record for posterity but rather a shot taken to emphasize the visual strong points and aesthetic of the car.