Bitzer's Daily musings: DSLR or CSC or back to 35mm

24 October

Oh dear, yesterday was a disaster! We got up OK but then I took the wrong pills, I took my evening dose, not my normal morning dose. A number of the evening dose have a sedative effect, so you can guess how I was yesterday. Jan was the same though, and she didn’t manage to mix up her pills. Anyway … Tomorrow is another day, as they say, (whoever they are). Yet I’m still very tired, although not as bad as yesterday.

This morning has been taken up with reading the new issue of AP, and it’s more or less done. I’ve gone back to one article though to read again. That one is about a guy who decided to do a round the world backpacking trip, but instead of taking his normal DSLR kit with him, he bought a second hand Nikon D5100 and a couple of lenses. The article is about how he’s managed with the reduced level of kit. Why the move backwards from his normal Nikon D750? Easy really, weight. His D750 is at least a semi-pro camera and all his lenses are pro level; all excellent kit, but not so good when backpacking.

Another article is about the size and weight of pro-level kit, this time penned by Steve Gosling. For years Steve had been hauling a large backpack of kit around with him when out on a shoot, but like all of us, he isn’t getting any younger. He came to the point where a trapped nerve in his back made him re-think his photo-kit. So he sold all his DSLR kit and has moved over to the Olympus 4/3rds system, and he loves it. He has found that there is no loss in image quality and a processed RAW image can be printed out to really large sizes too.

Best of all, he now has a smaller backpack to hump around.

Slowly Steve gets around to asking if the days of the DSLR are numbered. His conclusion is, yes! And I for one think he is right in that. It was weight alone that caused me to move from my Sony A77 to the Nikon D5200 I now use. At the time of the change my budget was really tight and the only camera that would meet it was the D5200 with a 18-55mm and a Sigma 70-300mm lenses. Ideally, one of Compact System Cameras (CSC), would have been better for me.

But even the basic range was at the point, 14 months ago, way outside my budget, even for just the camera and kit lens option. As time goes on I can see more and more CSCs being bought, and sales of DLSRs dropping. The camera market went through a similar process when 35mm was king of game and was quickly kicked off the top spot as DSLRs got betting and better.

At the moment though, you can see that the camera dealers are still fighting to sell the DSLRs. Look at the ads in any photo mag and you will find that in the majority of them, DSLRs are always at the top, with Canon and Nikon taking up most of the room. Yet both makers have their CSC models, but we rarely see them being advertised. I’m sure that will change soon enough when they get the idea of losing their DSLR kit sales.

Today’s photo then is the very first shot I took with my D5200 …