Technician Tuesday: I’ll stick with the old(er), thank you very much.

The Early Days.

I started playing with cameras over three decades ago. At that time, it was only film and 1600 speed 35 mm seemed like a revelation. Yes, it was grainy, but you could shoot indoors without a flash!

Even Then I Was a Curmudgeon.

Later came the digital cameras. I stuck with point and shoot film cameras for the first few years of digital cameras. I didn’t like the limitations of ISO 100 film (only outdoors on a sunny day and if you’re indoors you’d better have a really good flash) and early digital cameras went back to the same limitations.

Eventually I got a DSLR, which was exactly what it said: a Digital version of a Single Lens Reflex camera. It took photographs and saved them to a memory card, but it had the same SLR mechanics. There’s a mirror that lets you look through the lens from the viewfinder, until you actually take a picture. Then the apertures close, the mirror flips up, the apertures open long enough to expose the sensor (CCD in DSLRs, film in the original SLRs), the apertures close and mirror flips down, and then the apertures open and you’re back to looking through the lens via the viewfinder.

I’m Still Opinionated.

The last couple years I’ve seen advertisements for mirrorless cameras. I did some research over the weekend and found out they can use different lenses like SLRs and DSLRs, but they show the view through the lens digitally on the back display screen. In other words, if the power’s not on and the circuitry isn’t talking exactly right, there’s no good way to know exactly what the lens of a mirrorless camera is seeing.

However, they can be smaller than DSLRs.

And then there’s video. The original SLRs did not take videos at all. That was not ever their purpose. The original DSLRs did not take videos either. There are many DSLRs now which do take videos. From what I read, that required quite a bit of work for camera manufacturers to figure out. Again, the original DSLRs were Digital SLRS, and SLRs were still photographs only.

I’m Happy Where I Am. There’s Still Lots to Learn and Explore.

So, am I going to get a mirrorless camera? I don’t expect to get one, not any time in the near future. My DSLRs are working just fine for me. And they still have many depths I haven’t plumbed.

I know video cameras purpose built for video are a whole different world. Just the lenses for those cameras seems to be a while different world. Ugh. I’ll explore those worlds another day.