gdanmitchell
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 p.8 #19 · Debating switching from Sony to Canon | |
Two points to make about this.
1. If you can shoot 10,000 images with Camera A and 10,000 images with Camera B, the differences between them must be quite small and/or the pluses and minuses of one must come quite close to balancing out the minuses and pluses of the other. If the differences were of the night and day order that many posts imply... this would quickly be obvious. Clearly it isn't.
If it actually takes many thousands of frames from each system to be able to finally come up with a (likely subjective) notion that one is marginally better than the other, it seems likely that the differences are not gigantic — and perhaps even smaller than subjective preferences.
2. I'm SO tired of the old canard that people who don't own both things are not credible. Most people cannot own both (or all) versions of a thing and then spend days, weeks, months using them equally in order to tease out some final marginal preference. In some cases folks know a LOT about things that they decided to NOT get after doing a lot of comparative research. Let's say you are going to buy a car. There's a good chance that you (at least if you are the research type) do a lot of study of the two or more options, that you carefully compare features and evaluate their importance to you, and that you perhaps even test drive the options. You might even know more about the features of Car A and Car B than most owners of either car at that point. Then you decide — let's say you buy Car A. At that point, your hard-won and rather significant knowledge of Car B does not simply disappear.
To provide a real-world photographic example, I've considered a move to a particular kind of system for portions of my photography, but have held back for various reason. At one point a new product in that category had me almost convinced, so I got my hands on it and did a series of side-by-side tests with the alternative system that I was currently using, going all the way to making comparative prints of the test subjects. I can guarantee that very few owners of either system test them in this way. In the end, the result of the tests was that, based on some hard knowledge... not to buy the new thing. Paradoxically, I suppose that if I had bought it that the knowledge I gained would be relevant... but since I did not buy it that same knowledge isn't relevant?
On a different subject from the quoted post, while I don't have an opinion about whether Canon or Sony (or X, Y, or Z) is the "best" camera company, I do think that the point about different development process timelines for different brands is important. I've written before that Sony's brilliant idea of quickly bringing out the highest resolution sensor in a mirrorless camera that could use "the other guy's" lenses was a brilliant marketing decision. Sony could not, at that point, afford to move slowly and carefully, but they could (and did!) benefit from a quick breakout move. (There's more to it than that, but this is the Readers' Digest version.)
Canon could not do that, not because Canon was or is incompetent, but because they held a different position in the marketplace. If Canon had brought out exactly the same camera as the A7rII... it would have been laughed out of the marketplace if it had a Canon label on it. "It fails to meet the standards of their DSLRs!" " You have to use an adapter to put your lenses on it!" "The interface is strange!" Canon, as the biggest camera company, could not possibly be as nimble as Sony — Sony was functionally a "startup" when it came to Mirrorless, while Canon was IBM. (I was tempted to write "was Apple" there, but too may people think Apple still runs like it did in 1980...) Canon had to take a slower approach so that they could introduce mirrorless products that at least equalled and more likely exceeded what their previous DSLR products could do. Otherwise the blow-back would have been terrible.
They appear to be executing that strategy quite well.
Note: This does not imply that Canon is better than Sony nor that Sony is better than Canon — it is just about recognizing their differing situations and how they handled them. Both make excellent photographic equipment.
;-)
Dan
arbitrage wrote:
Funny how the people claiming that have never even touched one of the two cameras. I'll leave it at that since I had both in my bag and shot 10,000s of images with both. People can believe what they want to justify what they bought. I'll shoot both and pick the best. I'd never spend $9K CAD on a camera that just "edges" out a camera I already owned. If that was the case I should have put that $9K towards an RF 600/4 or something.
R3 and R1 are pure speculation at this point. No one knows how they stack up (pun intended) to the A9II and A1.
If Canon wants more of my money they just need to produce that 600/4 DO....simple....they'd steal back every bird photographer that ever left to Nikon and Sony if they did so....Show more →
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