I'm cheating on Canon and need to come clean...

[thekingb]

No, not with Nikon. With Sony. Specifically with the new mirrorless Nex 5N, which I bought so that my wife would have a camera with great image quality but one that's smaller and easier to use. And I have fallen in love with this little gem.

It won't replace my 7D for many uses (particularly telephoto and macro shots), but I am blown away and can see why someone might "downgrade" to a mirrorless and never look back. It has pretty much all of the manual controls of a DSLR (although I haven't found exposure lock yet...). It's smaller and lighter. And it has some distinct advantages over my 7D and Canon DSLRs in general:

1. the ability to touch the screen where you want to focus, and then have the camera track whatever you touched
2. instant, in-camera panos
3. full time autofocus during video

The kit lens is even very good despite some heavier than expected distortion on the wide end. But here's the kicker: based on my limited use thus far, it's pretty clear to me that the NEX 5N's high ISO performance is significantly better than the 7D. Ouch. That makes the relatively slow kit lens far more useful.

Here's a sample shot taken at 55mm, f/5.6, 1/80 and ISO 3200. JPEG straight out of the camera with no PP. The focus is on the far right bottle. Lighting was intentionally terrible. You can click through and see the full res version.



So what do you think? Anyone else with mirrorless experience? Will Canon get on board and make one? Will the mirrorless cameras threaten the traditional SLR? Might the technologies merge in the future?

[M_Six]

Very nice cache of single malts. I'd love a glass right about now.

I've been sorely tempted to try out a Nex 5N. They can be had for relatively short money now that the 7 is out. Not sure I could justify a third body, though. Plus my FZ18 and S95 both sort of sit unused. Still, interesting notion for indoor shooting.

[Daniel Browning]

Neat! I'm in the market for a small camera, I'll have to take a closer look at it.

[Dr Croubie]

Mirrorless will never replace fast auto-focus for birds, fast-moving subjects, whatever. I've tried using my 7D on live-view and the black-screen makes it almost impossible to track anything after the first shot, I'll take an SLR for that any day (SLT or TLR would be even nicer, of course, from an image-blackout point of view only).

But for anything else ... hmmm ... That's a tough call. If I had the cash to travel (and then if i had the cash to afford a new body on top of that), a NEX-7 with a 21mm Distagon is a (somewhat-rich-) poor-man's M9. I'd happily leave the 7D at home for travelling, the 15-85 on top of that makes a not very pocketable camera, a mirrorless with one wide and one normal prime would be my choice.

I'm still hanging out for canon to make one though, then we can use existing EF and EF-s Lenses via adapter and retain autofocus (A mirrorless 645 sensor would be my wet dream, using EF and EFs lenses via adapter with auto-sensor-cropping much like nikon does with their DX-lenses on FX-body. TSE lenses would mount nicely for über-wide MF images without buying a Hartblei HB1)

[Daniel Browning]

Mirrorless will never replace fast auto-focus for birds, fast-moving subjects, whatever.

I disagree. In the past, mirrorless cameras have generally used only contrast-detect autofocus (CDAF), which is generally much slower, though often much less error prone and sometimes more accurate. And I agree that CDAF will never phase-detect autofocus (PDAF), which is what is generally used in DSLRS. However, I think what you are not considering is that some of the current mirrorless cameras (such as the new Nikon 1 series) can do PDAF using pixels in the image sensor itself. [Edit:] In the future as this technology is improved and perfected, this will not only match the capability of DSLRs, but in fact surpasses it in many ways. For example, 0ms viewfinder blackout, 100 frames-per-second with autofocus for every frame, autofocus points anywhere on the sensor and not just the middle, etc. We now have only to wait until the technology trickles down.

[thekingb]

We now have only to wait until the technology trickles down.

It's exciting to think about. If the advantages of mirrorless tech could be married with the advantages of the optics of DSLR lenses, that would be an amazing combination.

Daniel, it's the largest of the mirrorless cameras due to the lens size (the body is actually pretty small), but still much smaller than a dslr.

To Dr Croubie's statement about live view AF, I can tell you that the NEX 5N's AF is much faster than my 7D's live view AF. The NEX 5N will probably replace the 7D's video function entirely unless I want a very narrow depth of field with a fast prime for an interview style shot -- that is, with a stationary subject that allows you to focus once and leave it alone.

[Dr Croubie]

Well, maybe I was wrong.
Live view on my 7D is slow, but from what I've heard from you and others, it's not live-view that's the problem, just Canon's version of it.
And is there any camera out there that doesn't black out the screen when you take a shot? Or one that you can turn off instant-review? If you can get the screen-blackout down to the same time as mirror-blackout, then yeah, you could even use live-view for birds.

hmmm, so what niche is left that a mirror must fill? Or was a mirror always the compromise because there was nothing better (in film and pre-live-view days)?

[Daniel Browning]

And is there any camera out there that doesn't black out the screen when you take a shot? Or one that you can turn off instant-review?

Yes on both counts, but it's only in smaller cameras right now; the technology hasn't made it to the big three (Canon, Nikon, Sony) DSLRs yet.

hmmm, so what niche is left that a mirror must fill?

For now, it fills several important niches while we wait for several technologies to make it to DSLRs: chiefly on-sensor PDAF and good inexpensive EVF. That will take a while, but even after that, the mirror will probably stick around for a long time for the same reasons that books will never be completely replaced by e-books: no batteries required, subjective "feeling" based reasons, and more. But I think for most people, mirrorless will replace mirrors (just as I think e-books will largely replace dead trees) because of the huge number of advantages.

[iso79]

I want the Fujifilm Xpro 1 so bad but I just pre-ordered the 5DMarKIII so it may be a while.

[Jon Ruyle]

Mmmm... Ardbeg! My favorite!