DPReview readers’ showcase: The cameras you imagined

Your imagined dream cameras

We made a mistake. We underestimated you.

A few weeks ago, we asked you to tell us what camera you wished you could always have had and why. We expected y’all to tell us about your favorite cameras that you owned or wished you could have owned – and enough of you did for us to populate our Part One with your choices – but like a true go-getter facing a carefully laid out plan with hours of research and planning across dozens and dozens of stakeholders against monumental odds, the rest of you Leeroy Jenkins’d* this thang!

Hundreds of you cosplayed as Dr. Frankenstein to conjure all manner of plausible and implausible cameras. In the following pages we take a look at some of the themes DPReview readers coalesced around. And folks, some of them are a little out there!

Who knew DPReview was full of such dreamers.

*For the record, Leeroy Jenkins was a skit.

Everything old is new again

(To the tune of ‘My Favorite Things’)

A Graflex Speed Graphic and Contax G1,
the Hasselblad XPan and the Canon AE-1,
wrapped up in yesterday, but spec-ed out beyond,
these are a few of your favorite things.

There’s a Rollei,
and a Canon FTb,
from 4×5 and 5×7,
with 6×9 and 8×11,
to every flavor of TTL,
each of these cameras,
they’ve cast quite the spell.

When you think of the analog,
you most want digital,
this is a brief catalogue,
of everything visual.

Of the time you dreamed of your favorite things,
these are the cameras, that made your heart sing.

Baby got back

Not far behind requests for digital versions of old analog cameras was the reader dream of a digital back for old analog cameras. It’s not hard to understand why: who doesn’t want to breath new life into their 35mm, 120 and large medium format treasures of old?

We saw a few people mention the Re-35, wishing it would finally launch as a consumer product. Announced in 2011, this project prototype had a digital film sensor that lived in a 35mm film canister and could be wound out over the film back. Once installed, the film camera would behave as normal with photos captured by the sensor being saved to built-in memory on the canister.

The only problem is, it’s an April Fools prank. No such digital back exists and there are no signs that it will anytime soon. And there are good reasons why the digital back concept will never fly.

Still, we can dream.

Obsessed with megapixels, are we?

So many requests came in for cameras with 100, 200, 500 or 1000 megapixels. We’ve seen a few 100MP cameras, such as the Fujifilm GFX 100, but there aren’t many consumer cameras that go much higher without some multishot magic.

To go higher today you need to get into the custom built camera space, such as the 3,200 megapixel camera in the image above. Purpose-built for astronomy, it came about when researchers at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory couldn’t find a sensor big enough, so they just went ahead and built the world’s largest digital camera themselves.

But how many megapixels is enough? It’s a question we’ve been asking for nearly a decade.

One ring (mount) to rule them all

‘My dream would be that Nikon, Canon, and Sony had all adopted a common full-frame mirrorless [lens] mount, allowing their lenses to be interchanged,’ wrote DPReview reader ‘Greg Ohio.’

It’s an intriguing idea. An open universal standard for lens mounts would certainly be very pro-consumer. But it’s safe to say we can file this away under ‘nope.’

If the shift to mirrorless is any indication, not every manufacturer is open to third-party support for lens manufacturing. And even rival systems that do share a lens mount, like Panasonic and OM Digital Solutions in the Micro Four Thirds system, withhold full cross-compatibility on things like their aperture rings and their IS syncing.

Add to this that lenses are becoming more complex, crammed full of electronics that work in conjunction with specific bodies, have features powered by the camera body, are designed for specific software lens corrections, and/or tout special features built on a manufacturer’s ‘secret sauce.’

Considering all of the above, and that this dream would require manufacturers to reveal to each other what their cameras are doing both physically and computationally, it’s hard to image them giving up their R&D secrets and/or their desire to sell their own gear to secure maximum return.

Open season

Who amongst us hasn’t cursed out a camera’s menu system? Seems there is always something that we have to hunt for, something that isn’t clearly labeled to explain what it does, or something that’s just annoying.

One DPReview reader has a solution: why not just embrace open source OS systems for cameras?

‘I am tired of asinine software design, artificial limitations and paternalism by camera companies,’ ‘panther fan’ shared.

‘Having the nicest features of all of those cameras combined would be nice. But the open software and the ability to program it yourself is soo [sic] much more important than some other simple features.’

A little off the top

Several readers dreamt up versions of flagship pro-level cameras in bodies that are half the size and weight.

A Nikon Z9 with no second hand grip and half the weight? Have at it.

A Canon EOS R3 reduced down to the size of a Canon EOS R5 without giving up any buttons or feature? Dream big, amigos.

The Sony a1 is already pretty slim, but why let that stop us, let’s make it thinner and cut some vents into it to cut down on heat and ounces at the same time.

Sure, why not.

Same same, but different

DPReview fans really like Fujifilm’s take on retro-inspired digital cameras, so much so that several readers dreamt of existing cameras being rebuilt and crammed into other bodies that resembled analog cameras of yesteryear.

We have to give a nod to Nikon, which has made two retro-styled cameras, but perhaps others manufacturers may want to take notice as well. What would Sony’s Minolta-lookalike alpha-BC look like?

Never gonna get it

Here’s a DPReview classic: requests for mirrorless cameras with no video features that will cost less because they don’t include video.

It may seem possible – after all, one would think a camera with fewer features would cost less – but I’m afraid it’s a true fantasy. There’s every reason to believe video doesn’t add cost to a camera. Mirrorless cameras are constantly exposing their sensors to the scene and actively watching it, meaning your mirrorless camera is essentially already capturing video. It thus costs nothing extra to give you some basic ability to record video alongside your stills. Indeed, the better cameras get at stills photography in terms of faster readouts for better AF, more lifelike EVFs and less rolling shutter, the more they’re suited for video.

Then there’s the small issue of camera manufacturers liking to sell cameras. In the context of a social media/creator world ever more demanding of video, bringing a stills-only camera to market is asking it to have less mass appeal than its competitors’ models. It would even compete against the manufacturer’s own hybrid models, splitting sales while adding development, sales and marketing costs.

Nevertheless, photo-only cameras exist – but this is why you’ll find them only at the top, most-expensive end of the market. Dreamland may be the only place you’ll be able to pick up a video-less mirrorless at a low MSRP.

(Don’t) bring the noise

Along with dreaming up mega-megapixel cameras, sub-$1000 uber-cameras and pocketable medium formats with a collapsible 200mm lens, several DPReview readers dreamt up cameras that produced image quality with no noise, even at the highest ISOs.

Sensors have improved over the decades in terms of noise performance, but it’s an impossible ask that noise will one day 100% vanish. A base layer of noise is always present in cameras due to photon shot noise, a property of light which means that photons hit a camera sensor at random intervals.

Understanding that light is inherently random means recognizing that our sensors are capturing different amounts of light at each pixel. Some pixels with the same exposure will have caught more photons than others. Where there are a lot of photons (highlights) these differences don’t make much difference. Where the signal is weak (shadows), the variation is a more significant proportion, and more noticeable as noise.

In the end, the best way to decrease noise in your images is to find more light, or bring your own.

Now, that’s not to say that sensors and camera processors aren’t improving in their management of noise, while the post-processing marketplace is making even faster strides at ‘quieting’ it. But for a fuller explanation of why noise can never be eliminated, pop on over to DPReview’s Richard Butler’s deep dive in dynamic range and signal-to-noise ratios. It’s a good read that gets into the science and challenges some assumptions we have about how cameras work.

50 shades of monochrome

It seems that with the recent announcements of the Pentax K-3 Mark III Monochrome and Leica M11 Monochrom, monochrome cameras of all flavors are on the DPReview community’s mind. Pick pretty much any camera and someone requested a monochrome version.

Monochrome cameras remove the color filter array, a layer normally placed over the sensor to capture color information, so they only capture grayscale. Photography aficionados, a/k/a DPReview readers, know that this process confers certain advantages like micro-detail and light absorption.

This fact had some intrepid shutterbugs asking for cameras with an option to slide in/out the color filter array from the camera. It’s a nigh impossible request given how color filter arrays are precisely positioned at the pixel level (i.e.: to less than one thousandth of a millimeter) and sandwiched between the sensor and a layer of precisely-fabricated microlenses.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t imagine a world where we switch out color arrays the same way we use color filters today.

Dream the impossible dream

‘My dream camera needs a ‘mega-35′ stacked, organic sensor, roughly 42.667mm x 24mm, shooting more than full-frame quality video in native 16×9 aspect ratio and cropping-in for full-frame 3:2 stills,’ wrote DPReview user ‘Shutterstoop.’

Many users aimed high, wishing for cameras that smashed together multiple models into one.

‘I dream large: an at least 500 megapixel 4×5 sensor,’ wrote ‘ProfHankD.’

‘A combo a1/a7c/Fuji Xpro/Leica Q. If they made such a camera in full frame or APS-C, I’d be all over it,’ wrote DPReview reader ‘Silat Shooter.’

‘Panasonic, Fuji, Sony lovechild,’ DPReview reader ‘Clarkey’ wrote. ’35mm full frame, lockable dials for ISO, aperture, shutter speed, weather-sealed, vented for cooling, [with] Sony phase detect AF, Panasonic Lumix DC-GH6 video features [and a] 35-200mm f2.8 power zoom.’

The kitchen sink camera dreams didn’t stop at just camera bodies: ‘It’s a Transformers camera, a smartphone with a small button that turns it into super medium format, Pentax 645 style, with a huge 200MP sensor and an F0.95 lens, At an affordable price! Nothing less, non-negotiable,’ wrote DPReview user ‘Maoby.’

Yup. DPReview readers dream big, but… come on now. Come on now. I mean, come on now.

Make cameras fun again

Cameras have gotten really good and really advanced. Today we have subject-recognizing AF tracking, quad pixel sensors, creative modes, computational photography, focus stacking, IBIS…the list goes on. There’s a lot of digital knowhow under the hood. But what about that magic ingredient that separates the good cameras from the great cameras? Fun.

A generation ago, from pro to compact cameras, there were a quirky, clever and fun designs, like the Sony F505 pictured above. Where have they gone?

As DPReview reader ‘Tony Hall’ noted, ‘It’s time to make cameras fun again.’ We couldn’t agree more.

‘The Cybershot and Coolpix cameras of the early 2000s inspired fun and photography,’ he continued. ‘My Sony F505 was a cool-looking camera that seemed like something Robocop might have pulled out of his thigh to document a scene. Photographers wanted to play with them and subjects wanted to have their picture taken with them. The best cameras spark joy in the photographer and subject and make the process seem fun. Of course the missing piece from those old cameras is the joy of amazing image quality when viewed on a computer. So look at the cameras from the past that were a joy to be in front of or behind and give them modern performance and image quality. Everyone is starting to resent the poor quality and experience of camera phones and long for the fun days of photography, so get back to your Cybershot and Coolpix digital roots, companies!’