Mirrorless blues
It’s that time of the year again! Photokina is here and so are the new flagships of most major players in the camera business. In no more than a few hours, 3 big brands announced their new high-end camera: Panasonic and its GH5, Olympus and its E-M1 MkII and Fujifilm and its GFX 50S. On this occasion, two things hit me: 1) all these cameras have suitable names for a dish washer and 2) even though they’re mirrorless, they‘re as big as an elephant.
The big mirrorless promise was to get a big-sensor in a small package. Hence you could have a DSLR-type quality in a camera just a bit bigger than a compact. It was Olympus and Panasonic that launched the mirrorless craze but from the start, things got mixed up. In September 2008, within a few days, Panasonic announced the G1 a faux reflex-styled hybrid while Olympus shown mockups hinting at a compact form factor.
From the start, mirrorless were bound to pursue two different paths: a reflex-like body or a big sensor interchangeable lens compact (I will deliberately exclude video-oriented gear like the GH line from Panasonic). The first big mirrorless hit has been the Panasonic GF1: a big-sensored compact that came packaged with the awesome 20mm f/1.7. For the first time in the camera industry a credible poor man’s Leica was real. If you haven’t, you should read this essay by Craig Mod right now:
At the time, the real breakthrough was to offer a big sensor, interchangeable lens and compact camera for an affordable price. What’s more, the 20mm f/1.7 lens is a very decent pancake lens, so the package was particularly attractive. Alongside the GF1, Olympus was offering the E-P1 and then E-P2 (which came bundled with an external viewfinder), in the same form factor.
Except for the video-oriented gear, mirrorless’ big selling point was the size. When Sony entered the market, it still was (with the Nex 5) and even Fuji, with a bigger package, insisted they would provide the best-in-class image quality in a form factor similar to a Leica.
Hence, lenses were developed accordingly. Panasonic introduced an other pancake (the 14mm f/2.5), Olympus developed collapsible zooms, Fuji’s lens lineup was somewhat bigger but still very decent (with the triplet 18mm f/2, 35mm f/1.4 and 60mm f/2.4), etc.
But something happened in 2013. All of sudden, high end mirrorless cameras became an imitation of DSLR. Olympus launched the E-M1, Fuji launched the X-T1 and Sony hit hard with its Alpha 7. Sensors became more and more pixelated.
Hence, the lenses became bigger too. With the addition of trans-standard lenses like the 24–70mm f/2.8 from Sony, the 16-55mm f/2.8 from Fuji or even the 12–40mm f/2.8 from Olympus, the lens lineup became much less compact. This madness continues today with the recent announcement of the Olympus 25mm f/1.2.
In my opinion, this lens epitomizes the problem with mirrorless today. First, it’s important to understand lens equivalence. Basically, bigger sensors tend to produce cleaner ISOs. Hence, even at smaller aperture, their output is similar to brighter lenses on smaller sensors. What’s more, bigger sensors imply longer focal lengths at a given angle of view, so that the background blur is roughly the same.
As result, this lens merely produces the same output as a 50mm f/2.4. You could have the same thing with a cheap 35mm f/1.8 on an APS-C sensor. Worse, because it’s simply enormous, APS-C cameras bundled with a standard 35mm are lighter and more compact. Why does Olympus go in this direction?
Micro 4/3 has an insane advantage over APS-C hybrids: size. But they don’t use it. Just like Sony thinks it’s OK to offer only enormous lenses for its small bodies. Therefore, consumers don’t understand mirrorless cameras’ big selling point and see it as downgraded DSLRs.
In a nutshell, what most new systems lack is coherence. When you look at mature systems like Leica’s M, Nikon’s F, Canon’s EOS, they all are über-coherent. Unfortunately when you take systems like Micro 4/3, Leica SL, Sony E-mount, etc. they all feature a variety of different lenses : pancakes, fixed lenses the size of an elephant or bright zooms for pro sport photographers…
Choice is a good thing but lack of coherence is not. These new photographic systems don’t offer a vision of what they’re made for. If we take the Leica M system, it’s designed for street photo. Hence, it’s really bad at sport photography, for which Nikon or Canon DSLRs are much better.
Fuji is a little bit more coherent even if they tend to do too many things with the DSLR-like X-T line / big bright zooms vs. Leica-like X-Pro and X-E. What I hope is that camera companies will start making actual decisions, radical decisions. They should really be building cameras for a purpose rather than for marketing specs sheets.
