DPReview TV: We share our 2021 predictions while freezing our asses off

Truly the end of an era. They helped capture life's moments. They were there when my children were born. They were there for their weddings. They will be gone but will not be forgotten.

Farewell, Trolls.

I would also prefer APS-C bodies with smaller and lighter form factors, such as the A6X00 series and Canon's M-series. Just as full-frame cameras have shrunken in size, APS-C bodies, if designed well, can be made even more compact without having poor ergonomics, as Fuji' has demonstrated with their X100V and Ricoh with their tiny GRIII.

Personally i think too small and poor ergonomics go together.
Fujifilms best cameras from an ergonomically standpoint have been the X-Pro and X-H1. Both not being the smallest in its class.

A Pro Grade camera is bought by a relatively small number of pros. Far more more is made selling consumer products.

Pretty sure the Z6ii and Z7ii and lens map shows they are still "in the game".

Cool, now let's do that in a whole range of cameras for mere mortals.

A well built, full featured GX10 is all I want, or alternatively a PEN-F II. If Panasonic and JIP can't be arsed, I might have to look to the X-E4, or sell a kidney and get a CL2.

Where did you get the aperture info for the upcoming Pentax 21mm Ltd.? AFAIK that info has not been released.

So if m43 was widely panned for tiny pixel pitch (relative to full frame) then wouldn't a 90mp full frame sensor have pixels far, far smaller than basically any crop sensor camera? Lens resolution aside, smaller pixels can read less light before maxing out, limiting dynamic range. Maybe things even out because there would be so many tiny pixels?

I don't know. I think ~45mp is the sweet spot for high resolution full frame.

The current m43 cameras have a pixel pitch of an 80mp FF camera.

So to answer your question. NO. a 90mp full frame sensor would NOT have pixels far, far smaller than basically any crop sensor camera. It would be very similar to many M43 cameras from the last 4 years.

I often disagree with Mr Bolton - But here I have to agree with him.

GFX100 has the same pixel density as the Sony 61MP A7r4 and the Fujifilm X-T4. This camera is diffraction limited and it is not due to the fact Fujifilm can't make lenses. They are at the top of doing so.

Of course Canon can introduce a 90MP FF camera - But do you need it?

The GFX100 outputs 200MP RAW files making for just 600 images on a 64GB SD card. Sure you can use it for BIG prints. But, when was the last time you made a print larger than 50x70cm (20"x28")? Most images end up on a website or on social media or in a small album if they get printed at all.

For cropping? Yes - but even so a 50 - 60MP FF sensor already makes for a 20 -24MP APS-C sized shot. Even at 100MP you don't go over 30MP much.

In all honesty - 100 megapixels has no real use. (At least not for me and not anytime soon either).

I believe the sweetspot these days is 50 to 60MP and everything more is overkill for 98% of the photographers.

Last time I checked, the 50/2 APO SL was quite the hippie artist regarding CA for a lens with that designation.

Not to mention the price of course. Ridiculous.

Rumor has it that early next year Fuji will release a camera using the 100MP medium format sensor of the GFX 100 but in a body like the GFX 50s.

To me that would be great, since I like the GFX 50s body best of all of the Fuji MF cameras.

Unfortunately, you don't provide anything substantial to back up your argument. As usual of course.

Maybe you should look at Tokina newest products - rebranded Viltroxes - to see who actually has engineering services and who does not.

And maybe you should look where Tokina Opera 50 is made. And maybe give some thought to why it's the only Tokina lens made in Vietnam, where Tokina has no manufacturing.

As for what failed and what not, it's not for me to judge. Ricoh/Pentax considered it successful enough to continue the D-FA* series with the 85mm, and that's what counts.

Argh, I fed the troll again...

@dpthoughts
!. D FA* 50/1.4 is a Ricoh/Pentax design (as is the 85). End of discussion. Stop muding the water and spreading your troll hate.
2. How you measure failure I don't know. I love the lens and it takes incredible pictures. I don't call that failure because that's what lenses are supposed to do, right?
You should start showing your photographs instead of trolling

For a lens with no sales volume, it makes sense that mount variants share the same production site. There's nothing wrong with Vietnam, it is very cheap labour, which in turn guarantees the (in)famous decentering plague 😉

Maybe that is the reason why the Tokina Opera failed in Canon/Nikon markets, because Canon/Nikon users are just not used to low quality / high decentering, beyond tolerance levels.

Or another reason might be, that such lenses (huge, hefty, heavy monsters) are against the current downsizing trends. Pentax just doesn't understand the market.

@David, the market failure can be measured by looking up a lens' Amazon.com sales ranking.
The silver edition ranks at #5,059 in "SLR Camera Lenses";
The black edition even doesn't have any rank.

DFA 85mm 1.4 (black): #1,936 in "SLR Camera Lenses".

I think such ranks effectively translate to: no sales for an extended period, so their rank mixes up randomly with all the other stuff which is not sold any more nowadays.

@dpthoughts - What low quality / high decentering are you talking about? I see none of it on my lens.
NOTE: why should Ricoh/Pentax rely on Amazon? I have never bought a single camera/lens via them. I have bought dozens via my UK sellers.
But I am so happy Pentax has you! Because you know everything about the market, you know all the reasons why things don't work or why they do. But most of all you know that everything Pentax/Ricoh does is wrong because - even if it wasn't - one troll writes it 200x in a message board so it must be true.
I still haven't seen a single picture by you, btw. Do you even take photographs or are you just a number fantasist?

Not everyone buys at Amazon, but their retail market share is big enough to be a representative cross section on what's going on in the market. What sells, and what doesn't.

You can even see indicators for entire brands as a whole. Just look up the rank of the respective 1.8 50mm nifty fifties. That tells you everything about a brand's market position at one glance.

For Pentax, the DA 1.8 50mm (for $100) was their best sold lens ever. The $100 price tag shows, where Pentax real customer segment was, when they were a bit stronger some years go.

By now, "Pentax being doomed" leaves traces. Today, that lens ranks very low at #394, being a placeholder for the entire brand's popularity. For comparison, the exact Canon counterpart 1.8 50mm ranks at #1 still today. That's #1 versus #394, and that is within an overall shrinking market segment.

Did I already say, that Pentax is doomed? 😉

That is being doomed within a doomed market segment (APS-C DSLRs). Kind of double doomed.

david_sladek - please don't make the same mistake as I did and feed the obvious troll.

dptrolls - thanks for insulting my mother and her family by implying that Vietnamese can't make good quality goods. I assure you they can and they do, and your remarks are not only ignorant, but also prejudiced and in turn, kinda racist. You have been reported.

The Vietnam plant in Hanoi belongs to Ricoh. Ricoh makes lenses there; also recently moved in with production of GR cameras, from their old plant in China.

Ricoh makes the Opera. Viltrox lenses (as well as its Tokina rebranded counterparts) are made in China by Viltrox.

The problem in general is that some people keep insisting on D-FA* 50mm lens being a rebrand of Tokina Opera, while patent on the lens belongs to Ricoh Company and the lens (actually, both lenses) are manufactured by Ricoh. Which basically means, the Opera is a rebrand of Pentax, not the other way around. It's just a matter of clarification and denying rumors about Pentax only rebranding stuff from Tamron (3 Pentax lenses are in fact Tamron rebrands manufactured by Tamron in their plants). Funnily enough, Leica rebrands tons of stuff and this logic never applies to them...

As for the internet fight, dptrolls is a known Pentax hater that is, for example, famous for putting K-1 II into his gear list just so he could leave a one star review on it. Hopefully at least one good thing in 2020 will happen and the guy will get moderated.

@Heliar, your racism allegations are BS. I think it is more "pride-ism" versus "frustration-ism". I (and the entire used-lenses market) assume, that Japanese workers feel an much-above-average pride for their Japanese companies and their products, so they tend to develop this extra diligence. They work with their heart. Whereas if cheap labour is exploited, e.g. no labour unions, unfair contracts, "hire and fire", bad payment, etc... then frustration emerges, which tends to cause somewhat lesser diligence.

The used lens market prices reflect this common wisdom. If a lens has two variants (one made in the country of origin, another one made somewhere else where labour is cheap), guess which variant commands the (much) higher used market price. Same applies for e.g. Leica lenses, made in Germany versus made in a cheaper country.

Well, if you say it doesn't matter too much on who designed the lens, you're probably right. It is however still misinformation to perpetuate errors.

The accusations of racism has nothing to do with the lens in question, but the attitude of the user who says Vietnam workers guarantees shoddy workmanship, which is a personal issue to me as part of my family lives there and they deserve better than ignorant stereotypes.

I agree that I maybe shouldn't get so agitated, especially at the end of the year. Happy 2021 everyone, I wish you lots of good light and photo trips.

I think that D500 may actually be provided as an MILC in 2021 to stand against Fujifilm and to get you into the Z eco system.

That said I foremost think that APS-C at the 2K dollar pricerange won't really sell much any longer considering the fact that you can buy Full Frame camera's that are nearly as capable for less.

Any X-H2 is going to be a really troublesome camera to sell.
Also because we all know how Fujifilm treated the X-H1 without giving it any love they basically ruined the model line.

They've got to compete with Pentax somehow :-D

@bdbender4, I suspect that APS-C is going downhill. Because fullframe (and their lenses) trend towards becoming more compact, and more affordable again. Fullframe is currently becoming the new APS-C.

APS-C is starting to become redundant, for the same reasons why Olympus already became redundant as well.

Nothing to do with technical reasons, only with market developments. Fullframe is in the process of cannibalizing APS-C, MFT, and the small cropped "digital" 33x44mm medium format.

Fuji's most expensive X mount camera is still $300 cheaper than a Z6 II, an S5; $800 cheaper than an R6.

For $999 you can get a cripple hammered FF plastic Canon, the A7III's Grandpa from six years ago, a ho-hum Z50 with three lenses available.. or a Fuji X-S10 that does most of what its bigger brother does including IBIS and magnesium body build. And those lovely film sims to boot.

So APS-C still has a story to tell. Heck, look at Canon's M6 II-also a very wholesome choice. And to its credit, the Z50 is at least built to Nikon's high quality standard.

Mr Bolton and on top of that uber-capable X-S10 for a grand you can pick up a used backup body for the same system for as little as $100 (X-E1 16MP) to $300 (X-A5, X-T100 24MP), pack a small bag with six native lenses and go on a trip well-prepared. If you want that kind of flexibility in FF mirrorless, you have to take a bigger bag and spend twice the money.

that FF bag is getting smaller
https://camerasize.com/compact/#841.621,852.944,ha,t

I shot my X-E1 a whole lot over almost 5 years, til I upgraded to the X-H1. The E1's images still hold up remarkably well. I still have it, and occasionally use it with the 35mm f2 or the Meike 25mm f1.8, when I want a smaller combo than the chunky X-H1 and 18-55 or one of the long, heavy vintage zooms I attach to it.

davev8 one collapsible zoom lens does not a compact system make. That's the same as saying "but my nifty fifty" while ignoring all the other focal lengths.
https://j.mp/3rFh00D

Mr Bolton - 300 dollar difference on a 2000 dollar vs 1700 dollar camera is just 15% price difference. People are willing to bare that difference.

We are talking a price range in which if people can spend 1700 dollars on a camera they are mostly also able to spend 2000 or 2500 dollars on a camera.

In this price range the price differences becomes pretty negligible.

Knock Knock "if people can spend 1700 dollars on a camera they are mostly also able to spend 2000 or 2500 dollars on a camera."

Spoken like someone who never had to bust a$$ all year and live on ramen to get the $1700 in the first place. There comes a point of diminishing returns in just saving up forever versus actually being able to do and enjoy the hobby.

Capture at 2.8 with a stop less Toneh is.. actually more than good enough for most people. Equivalence is a thing, but it's really an overstated thing in comparing APS-C to full frame.

This is my last equivalence troll feed in this thread. Enjoy.

fuji don't think equivalence is overrated ..if they did they would not make an F1.0 lens.. sigma would not make APS-c F1.8 zooms

They make one. But it's not the only lens they make-and a lot of the reason why they made it is to shut the FF troll extra-stop-of-Toneh crowd down a little bit. Plus it's nice to have such a specialized tool. Kind of like having the real Park Tools headset press versus the cheap-o one from eBay.

My point is that Toneh is valuable to have-but it is by far not the most important aspect of photography-and when I say it's overrated, I mean by the FF troll crowd who don't know how to get a longer lens and step back to get the image compression and blurred background, in the rare instance when a stop less isn't enough. Or how to use other compositional and lighting capabilities to get good photos.

If you're on this forum bashing crop sensor, then chances are you don't really need the resolution increase. As an aside, @DaveV8, I looked at your gallery and there is nothing there that I couldn't do with my Olympus E-M5. Jussayin'..

Mr Bolton my gallery is full manly of test photos and stuff that are there as i use DPR to host them for elsewhere.....maybe i should put some real photos in it as it often mentioned,,in fact only the other day in one thread some one say he was justified in being rude about my education because of my gallery ...i cannot see the connection either i have FF and APS although my EOS M stuff will be going as no update for the M5....for me i find FF cheaper as most of my FF lenses can be 1 stop shower.. i tend to use on average F1.8 to 4 but stop down on UWA

Equivalence is equivalence. Nothing to do with "overrated", or other bad emotional associations (usually coming from the inferior side of equivalence) 😉

Compensating that via getting a long lens is not a solution. This paparazzi style tele photo look is boring and outdated. Today, from fashion to editorial to advanced hobbyist photography, standard to wider angle looks become gold standard.

Today, most photographers (hobbyists to pros) don't photograph the same way as their grandpas did.

For having standard angles to wider angles, with still maintaining some decent amount of background separation, fullframe seems the best option, in equivalence terms (fullframe is also superior to the small cropped "digital" medium format, in that respect) (due to fast lenses availability).

This might be another reason, why fullframe seems to thrive everywhere? People want that modern look (modern compositions) to their people photos, away from grandpa's old school.

Having said that, Fuji might get away with their smaller sensor restrictions, because I believe that most Fuji guys tend to be old guys. Fuji is so expensive, that they attracted veterans which had already expensive DSLR gear before, and which were used to spend high $,$$$ on lens stuff.

Being old probably means, being used to old-style portrait looks, i.e. indeed that tele looks. That is what Fuji X can do.

OMG First, full frame was better because it's a bigger sensor.. now it's better than bigger sensor systems because.. it's smaller?!?! Make up your mind.

Grandpa shot on an Instamatic, or else a Minolta X370, which I have one of; and frankly the Fuji simply blows it away for image quality. 24 digital megapixels will handily out-resolve any 35mm film emulsion.

But yeah, DP Review's most popular gear at 5 out of 10 being Fuji based on Instagram likes.. that really tells us how many old school veterans buy them :-D And how old fashioned their output looks on said Instagram.

Happy new year, full frame troll. Go take some pictures.

As I said, the fullframe "superiority" over both APS-C and also over small cropped (i.e. not real) medium format is not due to sensor size. It is due to availability of fast lenses (after applying equivalence corrections to apertures).

Small medium format (33x44mm) is inferior
- for bokeh
- or background separation,
- or low-light cleanness,
because medium format doesn't have fast lenses at all. Digital MF sensors are only marginally bigger than fullframe, so they don't compensate MF's lack of fast lenses.

For Fuji users it is hard to understand that the golden egg is with Full Frame.
They just have been brainwashed by Fuji who has always told them it was with APS-C.

And.... it might be so if you just took a look at MFT - APS-C and FF.
However these days MFT is more or less put out of business now Olympus has surrendered and APS-C has become the smallest sensor amongst interchangeable lens cameras.

So everybody is starting to look upwards again and even Fujifilm does so with its refocussed vision towards the GFX as this will become their main focus over the next years to come.

Fact is that lenses for the system are either slow, or heavy and inconvenient in size compared to FF. It may have better IQ, but 100MP+ is overkill for 98% of us nobody prints large these days.

APS-C is stuck in between sensor size, pixel density and being a lower profit margin product and whereas the mass in sales volume is falling away.

The bottom is out and a freefall for Fujifilm may well occur.

I disagree. And apparently with the continued new products, so do Fujifilm and Canon and Nikon. No one needs 100mp, but apparently judging from the large number of 20-24mp full framers out there, most people don't seem to need more than the 20-26 (counting the Canon M6II, 32)mp that crop sensor models offer, either.

There's no Fuji "brainwashing." The images are out there. Apparently at least 400,000 people last year liked the Fujifilm images enough to go out and buy the cameras and lenses used to make them. Not seeing any lie here. But seeing a fair amount of full frame traditionalism going on in the marketing of larger, more expensive, heavier cameras as the baseline for taking good pictures.

If an X-T3 is good enough for cover work on Vogue Magazine, then it's good enough for my friends and my cats.

And I wouldn't call Panasonic's m43 based BGH1 "surrender" but that's just me.

Equivalence is what it is, the point is, what do you truly need. For every giant F2.8 zoom, there is a smaller set of F2 crop primes generating equivalent results. And for every F1.4 FF prime there are people who don't need it because it would be stopped down 99.9% of the time. My point is, there are options in every system and you can buy into the system that gives you the options you want / need / can afford. For 9 out of 10 people, that's a smaller-than-FF system, so the statement "you might as well buy FF" is manifestly beside the point, when FF is not what is desired - instead, many buyers prioritise portability, user interface, film simulations, affordability over raw sensor size, and they put their money where they so choose.

DrewRick, that's a theory. But the reality (look at Olympus' fate) shows, that your assumed "prioritise portability, ..." seem lowest priority by now for most.

Another factor is, that mirrorless full-frame re-discovers compactness again currently. Also, their ergonomics are excellent (Canon R, Nikon Z) and even Sony has woken up finally (a7 S III). So Olympus and Fuji seem redundant now, due to user priorities and because FF hijacks former APS-C / MFT properties.

So, Olympus goes first, and Fuji might follow in the next 5 years?

I give Fuji a few more years than Olympus. Because Fuji lenses are overpriced, they are also highly profitable for Fuji. That certainly helps their life span tremendously, for surviving a shrinking market relevance for a good amount of time. With Leica, that is even more extreme, but seems to work.

If Leica were APS-C or even MFT, they probably would be gone by now, though.

dpthoughts Amazon rankings are a mixed bag of real statistics, pre-orders counted as sales for the entire time period until delivery, and what amazon wants to sell that day. They themselves say it should not be used as an indicator of sales. Your prediction of "Fujifilm = Pentax" does not follow from the available sales statistics and reeks of desperation.

DPthoughts lost me at compact f2 primes equivalence to f2.8 FF larger lenses being "just a theory." No, there's that stop of difference we crop shooters have been bludgeoned with for years-but this time it works out in our favor.

But you know, FF trolls gonna FF troll.

it wasn't me 🙂 I did a text search for "just a theory" but didn't find anything. Compact f2 APS-C primes are equivalent to compact f2.8 FF primes. That is not "just a theory", but also works out perfectly in real life, of course.

Another example: your 56mm 1.2 is exactly the same optical achievement, than a FF 85mm 1.8. The latter is usually more compact and affordable, even though it achieves the same thing optically (bokeh, noise).

Nothing to do with trolling. That is math, science, and ability to observe reality.

Some people find it hard to swallow that certain advantages of a system in todays world are getting obsolete against the other system.

I really loved my Fujifilm system, however now time has progressed and new systems have entered the market that can do the same and better it is getting time to sell off my Fuji equipment and move on. That's a sad reality and one Fujifilm is not willing to deal with.

They want me to upgrade to Small Medium Format. Which in an IQ sense may have a slight advantage, but has severe other disadvantages that outweight the little IQ benefit for me. So my next camera will be full frame.

Knock Knock Who is There I cannot find anything of substance in your post other than "I decided to change systems, so that means my old system is now bad"

Since when do you need to pay Apple for every picture you take? Where does this nonsense come from?

Blame Zeiss instead for selling the first rental camera with Adobe Lightroom CC... who paired with Googles Android for the record.

There are a few things we have to thank Apple for.

- Killing off Adobe Flash was one of the best things Apple ever did.
- ProResRAW for video is a very good codec embraced by the industry
- HEIF solves the problems there are with JPEG and contains more bit-depth yet gives images a smaller file size.
- We all love to watch Pixar movies which originated out of Apple
- Without the ipod we would still be stuck with the CD player and without the iPhone we would still be using Nokia’s and hammering digits on a keypad for typing text...

To add something recent:
- ARM processors replacing x86 for desktop computing (M1), doubling battery life of laptops

Do a little research about FireWire and how it wasn't widely adopted because Apple demanded a license fee of a dollar per port on every single motherboard from every vendor.

Recall how Apple computers never got Blue-Ray discs because they wouldn't play ball how Steve Jobs wanted them to.

If a vendor puts Apple stuff in their firmware-Apple will want a piece of it. I get that.. but maybe I *don't want to freaking pay Apple every time I buy anything that takes pictures, just to get 10 bit JPEGs.*

@Knock knock.. nice try, Bud. But I worked for a tech company and back in the year 2000-before Apple invented any of those things-we could play mp3s on a PDA, we had Transmeta's proto-iPad in our lab in 2001. Apple's software distribution/payment model was almost completely plagiarized from ours, which Amiga debuted in 1999. I was there.

Apple didn't invent any of those things, not even Heif. The standard was laid out in 2013 by "Requirements for still image coding using HEVC". chiariglione.org. 2013-07-29. Retrieved 2018-08-24. .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_Format (copy and pasted from the Wiki article footnotes.

Apple were the first to adopt it into their OS, however. Their version generates .heic files. Which you can bet they'd want a license fee for someone's cameras generating that file extension. However there are ways around it, so it looks like I was partly wrong anyway-.heif could be done without paying Apple thanks to the ITU.

@Mr Bolton: agree that Apple didn't invent most of the tech. But they are incredibly good at early adopting the right things and driving them to perfection. Like online streaming instead of physical media, App packs instead of DLL hell, HTML5 instead of Adobe Flash, HEIF instead of JPEG, USB-C instead of FireWire+charging+audio+...
Also, I love the regular Unix shell on my MacBook, which I consider much more standard than proprietary DOS or PowerShell attempts by others.
In the end I don't mind with which particular IT company Nikon&Co would collaborate with -- even open source standards would be an option. But it appears clear that camera companies are hardly able to keep up on their own.

One stop out of 14 of dynamic range means you just turn on your flash one stop sooner. The quality improvement from FF over APS is exaggerated. Light and lenses > cameras and sensors.

I've had it with dumbed down apsc. APSC, whether sony nikcanon or whatever, continues to live in the stone age, continues to pretend everyone will buy an "entry level" apsc. Fuji APSC is ridiculously overpriced. I have a 6 year old FF with OIS so my primes work fine. I've moved on.

Manufacturers will make whatever sells. For people buying their first camera it doesn't matter what the sensor size is, they will not understand the benefits anyway. What matters is price, and Full Frame cannot compete on price with APS-C.

Sony released more APS-C camera bodies than FF in 2019. They also released two new APS-C lenses last year. It doesn't seem to me that they are abandoning it.

Fuji doesn't have FF, so they will continue to push APS-C.

Nikon released new APS-C camera and lenses for their new Z mount system. It is rumored that Canon is also planning an APS-C camera for RF mount next year.

Releasing cheap FF cameras can cannibalize their mainstream $2000 - $2500 camera bodies. While they can do a fully fledged APS-C camera at $1000 without any problem. In the entry level it will be a choice between a heavily crippled FF camera vs fully featured APS-C.

Well B&H is a camera store I don't know how many beginners know that it even exists. I checked Amazon Mirrorless Camera category: (#1 Kodak for $15), #2 Canon M50, #3 Sony a6400, #4 Canon M50 with mic, #5 Sony A7III, #6 Canon M50 with bundle, #7 Sony A7SIII, #8 Canon R6, #9 Sony A7RIII, #10 Canon R5.

Also beginners will not buy a $1000 lens, it's more likely they go for the kit lens or a super zoom like Sony 18-135, or a cheap $300 Sigma prime.

ProT3ch -" What matters is price, and Full Frame cannot compete on price with APS-C"

LOL - It already does!

CaSoNikon all three have cameras that sell FF in price well below the X-T4 and some of these cameras these days have more to offer than Fuji does. You are ignoring the fact that this market is changing rapidly.

This market is all about about volume and profitability.

A camera like the X-T4 is not profitable at a marketprice of 800 dollars so they need to sell it for 1300+. The profits are too low in this segment to make enough money to bare the cost for R&D of newer models

The difference in production costs these days just sits in the sensor, not in any other component that goes inside a camera.

You do need some high profit sales to fund the lower end models and to fund for R&D. It is called Return On Investment

But please keep sticking your head into the ground
APS-C will be on the last legs and is a goner before the end of the decade. It will go the same path down as MFT

I am sure there are exceptions but most cameras use fujitsu micro processors.

Panasonic makes mobile phones, would it be easier for them to use Qualcomm processors?

Not sure Nikon spend much R&D on their processor, as Expeed is a Socionext Milbeaut renamed... so Fuji and Panasonic are spending the R&D bucks... (possibly Nikon pay for some customisations, possibly not...)

Ricoh Theta Z1 uses Qualcomm Snapdragon processor (most likely Snapdragon 625)
Ah, is Ricoh / Pentax one of the main ones?

The problem with using Qualcomm chips that they include a lot of silicon not needed for Cameras like GPU capable of running 3D games, or 5G wireless modems. These chips also run at higher clock speeds. Use the newer and more expensive manufacturing process. So it would be more expensive, produce more heat and drain more battery.

That said probably all camera manufacturers use ARM reference design CPUs. To be honest both Qualcomm and Samsung also uses ARM reference design CPUs in their latest generation mobile chips.

Sony make phones in case everyone forgot. Since they merged mobile and camera divisions, maybe eventually they can start using Qualcomm CPUs in cameras too?

Of course it would help if they had the software to match the hardware, things like smart HDR, focus stacking, HHHR etc.

What a hilarious and original joke! Can I buy your services for my comedy act?

Apple cel phones are.

The beauty of real camera is it still works after I drop the phone and it doesn't. The camera doesn't become useless in three years when Google stops updating its security. It can do with a 135mm lens what no cel phone can do at a distance.

Camera vendors need to create an experience more like the ZX1 where shooting and upload are relatively seamless, the advantage of which is that the onus is on the phone to provide network and edit software upgrades and etc. while the camera keeps on doing what it does best-take pictures.

But this would involve real Android/iOS software development money being spent and so far, judging from various camera vendors' phone apps ranging from complete crap to somewhat sorta almost usable if you're patient, camera vendors aren't yet spending it.

Mobile phone images are still mush when not reviewed on a phone and cropping in is just a mess.

'The beauty of real camera is it still works after I drop the phone and it doesn't.'

My Pentax K3 is built like a tank, but I'd be very surprised if it survived the kind of falls my OnePlus 2 has survived.

If one were to shoot full frame photos it has to be shown in 4k hi-res monitor. It'd be a shame to show off pix in smartphones. 📸📸📸

I wish it would come in a new Fuji X-H2.

It's kind-of a bait-and-switch, sell an APS-C body with a single native kit lens (must be low quality). Once the user realizes they need better lenses to reproduce the quality they see from other photographers, tell them you're very sorry - the only good lenses that fit their body are your uber-expensive FF lenses. This method abuses the sunk-cost fallacy, customers don't realize they'd be better off (both financially and photographically) selling their one-camera kit and start over in a native APS-C system. A lot of them end up paying and lugging around three or more FF lenses with their APS body but only using half of their image circle.

Sorry, but that's simply a normal Canadian expression used by everyone for years.