Camera sales have fallen

Things like steadicams or rails with motors could be interesting low-cost and small DIY Projects since the camera itself is very small.
Check out this guy's videos. He has plenty of money, but still shows us budget minded people how do DIY photographic tools for low cost. I made a camera slider from an old curtain rod, but it kept getting stuck. I eventually got a cheap one on Amazon. The trick is to get the camera movement and its rotation synchronized so the camera stays pointed at the subject.

 
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The cameras in today's phones do surprisingly well for photos taken at relatively close distances, in relatively good light, thanks to improvements in CMOS image sensors and digital signal processing.

But there is no escaping the laws of physics: a tiny lens the size of an Aspirin tablet collects far less light than the much bigger lenses on traditional SLR cameras.

This means tiny camera phones are working with less light (fewer photons) falling on the sensor compared to an older SLR, particularly one with a giant lens attached. That in turn means camera phones tend to produce noisier pictures in low light conditions.

Small lenses with short focal lengths also tend to be very bad at capturing small objects that are far away. They have poor directivity, in physics terms.

The Formula One race photographer in the attache image has that giant lens on his camera for good reasons. A cellphone camera would be utterly useless for his purposes.

As an aside, I've watched far too many people turn into distracted zombies after they got a smartphone. The technology inside is amazing, but they are as addictive as crack cocaine, and millions of people's lives have disappeared into a haze of distraction within weeks of their getting their first smartphone.

I'm not naive enough to believe I'll be the exception, the one human who can snort cocaine all day, every day, without getting addicted.

So I stay away from smartphones.

That means I still use a compact digital camera for informal situations, and an older Nikon digital SLR when I want better picture quality.

I would be happy to have an affordable compact camera with image quality as good as a decent smartphone, but without an actual cocaine-phone attached.

-Gnobuddy
 

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Samples of Zenit 12, Belomo 58 mm lens, Kodak 100 negative film.
Shock horror - NO RUSSIAN FILM MANUFACTURERS QUOTED

Ilford Films:
https://www.ilfordphoto.com/about-us/history/

I used their film and papers quite a bit in the 80's.

I also worked on some of their injection moulds as an apprentice mould toolmaker in the 70's. No doubt you're an expert about mould toolmaking and injection moulding, I can't wait to hear.

I hear the sputin tanks and their optics (filled with vodka) are doing well on their special holidays abroad! Keep bigging them up!

"MTBF is MUCH lower than the competitors." Your words, that is soooo funny, is that Mean Time Before Fuc£$d?
 
About 5 years ago, I took a photo of a Harman Kardon C1 preamp on my RED covered dining room table.
Lit from the 12-light chandelier above the table.
I restored the HK for my neighbor.

The old Apple phone, a 3GS, shows the red tablecloth in a different shade of red. - it should be a richer, darker red.

HKC1.JPG
 
I still use a Kodak digital camera.
Its used mostly for taking pictures of stuff to put on ebay.
Not a mobile phone expert so would struggle taking pictures and uploading them to the PC.
But…but… if you used a smartphone you could do all of that on the phone. I do admit that some interfaces for websites are easier on a PC though.

BTW I am 60 so I am not a kid 🤣.
 
My first real camera was an old screw mount Pentax that was given to me by a friend. It was from the late 50's or early 60's and didn't even have a built in light meter. The shutter spring was weak so that the fastest real shutter speed was about 1/200th of a second, even though the dial went up to 1/1000th. I took some amazing pictures with that thing. After seeing some of them my friend sold me his not quite as old Ricoh and a few lenses for about $50 sometime in the mid 70's. It had a light meter, the shutter worked right, and it took my Pentax lens.

I discovered that you could estimate the shutter speed by looking through the camera body without a lens at an old analog NTSC TV set in a darkened room. Snap the shutter and you will see a brief flash of the TV screen. Anything slower than 1/60th of a second should show a complete frame. If the shutter is set at 1/120 of a second you will see half the frame of the TV image, with faster shutter speeds showing less and less of the TV image. On the old Pentax 1/125. 1/250, 1/500 and 1/1000 all showed about 1/4 of the screen.

An NTSC TV set refreshes the screen 60 times a second. Other systems use different rates with PAL at 50 Hz.
 
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I have a bunch of old large format lenses with shutters, and back in the old days before single board computers, I built a photo transistor amplifier which was connected to the microphone input on a PC running Audacity. The lens/shutter was placed over the photo transistor, a light shone on the lens, and the shutter activated. The light striking the photo transistor when the shutter opened would be registered as a pulse in Audacity which gave the time interval.

Some of the old shutters very pretty sluggish, and disassembly and cleaning were frequently required. And then they required periodic exercise to keep them healthy.
 
FWIW, Leica has "re-introduced" the M6, with what I can see as one improvement in the metering. Cost is about 10X the 1984 version.

I won the football pool in 1991 and went down the street to buy an M6. My previous Leicas were an M2R and a IIIF. The M2R was bought at Willoughby's in NY as a sale item with a 35mm 2.8 Elmar for about $200 in 1971.

Someone mentioned shooting tons of film for their college yearbook. We used to go through 100' of Tri-X every week!
 
It appears tobydog is barely educated, and a bit of a football fan, who loves to get smashed at pubs.

Exercise your mind, find out which British VIP wanted to be a device inside his lover.
Hint: First wife died, later he married his lover.

Also do a Google search for MTBF.
Also, search for R-73 missile, and what is so special and alarming about it.

Part of my opinion of the British in general, and their superior attitude.

Not at all essential to the world, we can do without such halfwits.

Political, yes, but barking dogs need to be sprinkled with water, and if that does not work, turpentine or gasoline is effective.
Those chemicals seem to irritate the fleas in the fur, and they BITE.
The dog is generally not seen again.
Works for cats too...
 
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Canon EOS 350 DSLR works with Helios lenses, the film plane to mount distance of about 45.5 mm is achieved with an adapter.
The Zorki and Fed camera lenses are about 28 mm, and they also work well on suitable digital cameras.
Color rendition and overall 'bokeh' (rendition of out of focus objects) are appreciated by users.
Some prefer those to the original (at times plastic bodied) lenses.

The sharpest negatives used to be Nikon, they beat the Germans hands down.
Now?
I will have to check up.
 
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Not a mobile phone expert so would struggle taking pictures and uploading them to the PC.
Quite intentionally, I have the cheapest flip-phone I could find, with no Internet access or any fancy features.

Even this very basic phone can be set to appear as a USB mass-storage device when attached to my PC with a USB cable. In other words, it behaves like a USB thumb drive.

You can then use your file manager in the usual way to drag pictures or other files off the camera onto your PC, or vice versa.

-Gnobuddy
 
All my Android phones (not tried with the new one), can do that, the one with Android 11 would ask for permission.

With that I could post pictures taken with it drectly to this site, the new 12 one does not do it directly, I will have to look it up.

Like above, it is easy, but some phones have weak sockets, use the same cable always.
Or work out a way to send files over Wi Fi / Bluetooth.
 
In the 80s, I was commissioned by the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore to photograph LORADS, Singapore's newly installed Long Range Radar and Display System. I was quite privileged to be granted access after the necessary security clearance because very few people, military personnel included have seen this.

When I walked into this huge darkened room, there was a long row of monitors that span from one end of the room to the other. I've never seen anything like this before. Every monitor had a military personnel manning it. What struck me soon after was the eerie silence. If people had to talk, it was done in hush tones.

After walking around to find the best angle, I finally settled on this composition. I set up my Hasselblad on my tripod with a 50mm Distagon attached and proceeded to shoot. The main subject was the System so the monitors must stand out.

It was all done with available light. I think the exposure was 1/2 sec , maybe even 1sec. Aperture was F/11. Film was Kodak EPR64. At such a slow speed, it's impossible to make out who the personnel are which works out just fine with the client. He didn't want his staff to be recognized.

This photograph was not "staged" not like in advertising. I had to work with what is there because it was fully operational.

LORADS2.jpg
 
Even this very basic phone can be set to appear as a USB mass-storage device when attached to my PC with a USB cable. In other words, it behaves like a USB thumb drive.

You can then use your file manager in the usual way to drag pictures or other files off the camera onto your PC, or vice versa.

All my Android phones (not tried with the new one), can do that, the one with Android 11 would ask for permission.
I got a new Motorola G Stylus phone with Android 11 three days ago. The 4G only versions were on sale for $179. It claims to have a "50 Megapixel" camera, so I spent a few hours wandering about outside playing with it. Unfortunately, it was a gloomy day and all of the fall leaves are already brown and, on the ground, but I just had to play with it. Upon my return home I plugged the USB-C cable into the phone and into the PC instead of the charger. A little text box popped up on the phone that said something about USB charging with a choice for other options. Click that box and choose "file transfer." That turns the phone into a thumb drive with two choices, the internal phone memory and the micro flash card that I stuck into the phone when I put the sim in it. Transferring files is as simple as drag and drop on the PC. My older Moto G7 Plus worked the same way. I have lots of pictures taken with a Moto G5 on my PC, so it obviously had download capability, but I gave that phone to my daughter several years ago so I don't remember the details. She just got the G7 Plus yesterday.

I took a lot of pictures of bare trees, their reflections in the still water, and other rather mundane shots, mostly to judge the resolving ability of the system. The camera system does OK, but my little Sony Cybershot DSC-HX80 pocket camera does far better and consumes less pocket space. There is no point in posting any pictures from that trip because compressing them removes the detail that I was testing for.

I have owned several Sony cameras and camcorders, but the purchase experience associated with this camera has convinced me to never buy Sony products again. I bought the camera because of several features that were listed right on the box the camera came in. After getting it home I find that in order to use some of the features I have to set up a Sony account on the camera through WiFi, tie the account to a credit card and purchase the app to enable some features. Despite being listed right on the box, the time lapse app is not available for the HX80. Their support group responded by telling me to get the HX-100. Further posts from me on their forums were deleted within an hour of posting. If I wanted Apps, I would have bought a freakin phone.......

I mentioned that I have an iPhone XS. I got it because I needed an Apple phone to control my hearing aids. At the time the XS had the best camera of all the iPhones including the newly released 11, so I got it. There is an app called Halide that lets you take and save pictures on the phone in RAW format. If you are the kind of person who has the patience to tinker with a picture in a computer after it was taken, this is a cool feature. It is also a lossless format, so the files are huge. Just make sure you get a phone with lots of memory and use a workaround like iMazing to avoid having to fund a huge iCloud storage account. Apple will delete YOUR picture from your phone if you delete it from their cloud. Sounds like theft of copyrighted material to me, but who's going to challenge Apple. Use iMazing to suck all the pictures off the phone and store them in a computer that does NOT have an iCloud connection before cleaning up your iCloud storage. There have also been reports of Apple deleting pictures and music off of people's home computers too.

The picture shows the phone and the Sony HX-80 along with the $99 Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS15 that I got over 10 years ago. It was used for all but the first lightning pictures in Post #18. This proves that as stated sometimes the best camera is the one you have at the moment. In my case it was the one that I deemed "expendable" at the moment when I spent about 4 hours wandering around Captiva Island in a thunderstorm at night. I kept the camera in a baggie which was in my pocket except when I was actually taking pictures. I have used this as my expendable camera for 10 years and it still works but it did pick up a noticeable spot on the image sensor during a similar outing a few years ago. I also get a used tripod at a Goodwill store every few years that I can stick into salt water and beach sand, use it until it breaks or corrodes, then toss it and get another.
 

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I bought a NIB SLR Pentax film camera / lens, (I've already misplaced it, and the model # escapes me at the moment - but it had a bayonet mount lens) for $20.00, just for nostalgia reasons, at a Eureka Springs junk / antique store a couple of years ago.

Prior to that, I had an OM-1 which, when new, seemed to me to be the greatest thing since sliced bread. The tiny point and shoot cameras eventually relegated it to my warehouse of junk where it disappeared in a break in along with a Nikkormat and the lenses / accessories for both. I still have a few random Minolta Celtic lenses, I think.

I bought my father the top of the line version of the Polaroid SX-70 for his birthday, and it was a good camera, that I could have been very happy with, except the cost of the film was too much for me at that point in my life. No big deal for him.

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