Their BIGGEST Mistakes: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Panasonic & Olympus

In this episode of the Picture This! Photography podcast, Chelsea and Tony Northrup talk about every major camera brand's biggest mistake! Some mistakes have caused them to lose market share, others have just infuriated fans.

[williamburkholder]

There is one thing I would love to see ALL camera manufacturers do. That is to improve their camera manuals so they actually explain WHY to use each feature, not just how to use it. While they're at it, they should hire some editors who can write native language versions of the manuals.

[geniusa]

Talking about Olympus (now OM) at 9:56 ... you made a big call in this Video, that I really respect: "I don't care for sensor size, I care for results". Lately you recommended the Canon R6 as a better option to the new OM-1. You said you'll test the OM-1. I'd love to see a in depth bird fotography comparison from you both! Maybe you could include the Olympus 100-400 mm f5.0 - 6.3 Zoom Lens and the Canon RF 100-400 f/5.6-8 IS USM Zoom Lens with 2x converter for the Canon, because I think Zoom Lenses are the better option for finding birds. Same basic price, range and weight for both sets with the Canon 2x converter, good time to show the picture quality advantage of a modern FF camera, while staying at the same price and weight of the MFT competitor.

Winter is over, the weather gets better by the day - grab the two cameras with these Lenses and show us the difference in real world results! Bokeh, Stabilization for stills and Video, Image Noise and loss of detail at high ISO in dim light and fog, High speed pictures of fast moving wings, Hit rate for starting birds using the pro capture option, handheld Hi Res function used on birds... show us if they are just OM marketing gags, or if they are actually usable features. Its not about winning, I wouldn't mind to see the Canon R6 to succeed.
For the shooters with the big pockets you could make a third category going along as a kind of "best of industry" reference - choose whatever you want or have: The R5, the Z9, the Sony A1 with high end Zoom glass... use it as an expamle on how far off from the two budget cameras the high priced optimum actually is. Of course: Compareable distance and light conditions.

[stefanwagener]

Building up more software competence is the biggest mistake of all of them. Not only quick sharing in social media but also computational photography like automatically combining a black-and-white short shutter photo with a long shutter color photo to an better night time shot like probably most smartphones do. That's why they still keep loosing more and more market share to the smartphones.

[benjamindover]

More intuitive usability, ergonomic controls and modern software functions, like filters and sharing, are the areas in need of revolutionary change. Why do the dials feel like cheese graders? Why cant I use digital zoom in photo mode? Why is transfer to phone so unintuitive? I think they need to test these cameras with people who have not been using them for thirty years. They need fresh eyes on this.

[GameProgrammer]

Well, I am from a software and hardware background. You'd be surprised the latest cameras are at least 5-6 generations behind the latest mobile processors like Qualcomm 8 Gen 1. These come with an 18bit ISP single camera up to 200 megapixels, can process 8k @ 30 fps and 4k @ 120 fps. It has a built-in cellular 5g modem, Wifi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, lossless AptX audio and a host of hardware accelerators like h264, h265 etc. The chip can drive dual displays eg. EVF + monitor and costs like 70 USD in bulk. The chip also supports PCIE4 and low voltage RAM like LPDDR5. It would make an awesome camera phone (unlike a phone camera). Additional hardware accelerators can be built using FPGA which are quite widely used in signal processing. Processing 8k video is not that a large problem when compared to other domains. 45 megapixels @ 16 * 3 (RGB) bit per pixel @ 60 frames per second generates about 16.2 gigabytes of data per second. Most of the mid-range commodity FPGA can process this data with some effort like colour space conversion, de-interlacing, gamma correction, clipping, chroma resampling, synchronization—and remove temporal and spectral noise from the video using 2D Filter etc. All points to a fact that most of these companies are in Japan would need fresh startups to disrupt the market.

[LashahVideo]

I am getting great results from my Fujifilm X-T4, X100V, X-H1, and GFX50R. I have purchased premium lenses for both the X-Mount and GF Mount. I sold my SonyA7R2, A6500, and A7II and switched to the Canon EOS 5DS, 5D Mark IV, and EOS R. And I switched from Canon to Fujifilms and I feel that I have found the best camera system for me (Fujifilm). Many photographers rely on eye detection so much that their composition is suffering. They shoot with one hand, waiting for the confirmation of eye detection. It's tough to nail composition holding the camera with one hand. :) lol, I barely turn on eye detection, I don't need it to take a great photo. For so many years as a DSLR shooter, you did not have eye detection.

[lenzyruffin]

"I did not take part in the math."

Chelsea is my favorite person, ever.

[osirismarbles]

actually...I found the Lumix phone app pretty good. both for controlling the camera and for transferring pictures from camera to phone. transferring individual pics to phone works pretty easily and happens off of the camera's wifi. there are some kinks. the camera on your home network wifi never worked well for me. but directly connected to your phone by the camera's wifi has always been solid and fast.

[sionglooi]

As a sony user I feel their biggest mistake is their pricing on the CF-Type A cards, considering they are slower and the cost/MB vs CF-Type B is so ridiculously high. There nothing exciting about paying for another $1200AUD for x2 160GB to maximise the use of Sony latest camera.

[sl-rtkv]

In fact, Olympus/OM Systems never claims that a premium 300mm f4 m43 lens offers image quality equivalent to that of a premium 600mm f4 FF lens. That is a straw man argument. Instead, Olympus claims the m43 offering is much smaller. Do people use lenses like these in similar situations? Absolutely. People have captured excellent images with both kinds of lenses.

[DonEvans]

I'm in both Sony and Canon ecosystems. By far, aside from the canon R5 overheating debacle, the biggest issue with both systems is the wifi, smartphone control, and transfer. This makes no sense at all. I can make phone calls and get internet on my $400 LTE smart watch. We're buying $4, 000-$5, 000 cameras that can't complete this simple task? Steal a page from the cell phone playbook. Put a sim card in these things and let us share our images....

[tomashrivnak]

I just want to add my 2 cents to the debate and say, that the wifi capabilities are really a big problem. Even for professionals, photojournalists often have to deliver live images from events like protests, press conferences ect. But it takes so long to transfer photos to my phone from my Nikon and everytime I import, it reimports all the previews, so if you transfer 300 images and 20 images later, you have to send another picture to your editor, then you have to import 320 previews and its just so annoying. All Im saying is, the wifi capabilities are really crucial for many peoples work and it should be one of the priorities to fix this.

[ElementaryWatson-]

What the heck, it's 1080p. Why do I need 4k monitor if the video is low res?

[ScreenFiends]

Panasonic user here. I love Panasonic cameras, I think they offer the best bang-per-buck in terms of features. I also come from a background of manually pulling focus. The rumoured continued use of DFD in the GH6 makes me very sad. If we have PDAF we at least have the option of simply turning it off for filming in controlled conditions. It's sad that it's a hill they want to die on. I love my S5 and S1 but PD would be the cherry on top.

[blairbrown]

Tony :subject:Learn how to use your cellphone cameras:My Samsung S20 FE 5G : The photo app stop from taking a photo because it sensed the lens was dirty. Amazing. It was right. Yet another thing a cellphone can do better then any camera. We need smart cameras. Thoughts? Take care.

[shred]

Tony; “Canon and Sony have been one and two since the 80s”. What? Sony didn’t make SLRs. They didn’t make them in the 80s or 90s and it wasn’t until Minolta decided to get out early in the digital age that Sony bought the mount and got started in DSLRs. Yes they were into DV up to professional level way back, but not stills cameras.

[TheFalkingFive]

strong disagreement in regards to fujifilm. what fuji did with their medium format system is genious - shooting their medium format camera with an adapted sigma art 105mm 1.4 can create looks no other brand can, at the moment. in my view it was a big mistake of nikon, to do the same as sony and canon - they had this big mount - why not give people a bigger sensor inside? its important to have a unique selling position - there are tons of photographers using full frame today - if u are professional, u want to differentiate ure work. its not good when a beginner can buy a 600 dollar full frame body and create basically the same pictures... u want people to say "wow - these pictures look really special"

[bobcartledge]

I think the biggest mistake ALL the manufacturers are making at the moment is thinking that, during a pandemic where incomes on all levels are negatively impacted, what photographers need is $3000 or $4000 or $6000 cameras. "Have a Z7 II." "But I can't even afford a Z50." "Oh, then maybe a Z9?"

[legendp]

I would add the Samsung NX1, amazing specs, phase detect autofocus and 6k downsampled to 4k before anyone else was doing it (and 10bit hdmi no log mode despite the good BSI sensor (only had 40megabit internal codec at launch, can now shoot 180 megabit with the firmware mod), lenses where also fly by wire with no way to adapt electronic ef lenses and have them work. I think an nx to ef mount would have saved it (being able to use canon lenses with an adapter on sony made switching easier). NX1 felt so close, shame Samsung never followed up with a NX2

[CZOV]

Canon is sooo great, they even REMOVED SAVE SETTINGS from R6 which i had on old CHEAPER DSLRs so one has to reconfigure the entire camera from scratch if it resets! Stupidity at its brightest! Not to mention the nerfing of shooting speed on the entire R3/5/6 line if battery goes under 50% Canon prioritized BATERY LIFE over ability to shoot fast? FFS, who wants to save battery but not be able to take photos! And this is a hardcoded software 'powersaving' mode. I rather be able to shoot at full speed another 30 minutes than have a half-full battery which can't shoot at all or take single shots at 2fps! Ah well, is it a half-full battery really, or a software lie telling you u have 50% when infact u have more like 20%? If this is how they 'fix' battery life, no thanks. Now i buy 3rd party batteries because all of them become useless at 50%, so i have to change 4 batteries a day to be able to shoot normal, and i am not paying 100 bucks for Canon craplife batteries when i get the same for 20 bucks, 50% is all i need of each one!