> There were many attempts, some listed in other comments[1][2].
No, these were not such attempts. A touchscreen camera is NOT what I want. The point isn't to make it phone-friendly or phone-like, but to make it open. Knobs and buttons are good.
The Olympus AIR and Sony QX series cameras would be awesome if they came with open APIs so I could program them. They came with proprietary Sony / Olympus kludges which ran on smartphones. The Olympus AIR is officially dead; the app is no longer maintained, and doesn't work on modern phones. Olympus was actually starting to try (in contrast to Sony), and released things like 3d CAD models, but the product was discontinued before it was finished.
Tossing Android on a camera is not the same as an open camera. An open camera would allow me to:
1) Write apps for it, taking advantage of what it can do.
2) Make accessories for it. This includes an open mount standard (of which MFT is the only one; I have the spec for the asking), an open hotshoe standard, open batteries, etc.
I'd be able to do things like super-resolution, custom white balance, custom autofocus systems, custom grids (rule-of-thirds / etc), and so on. I'd be able to program a handful of them to all have the same white balance, settings, and trigger, so I could shoot from five angles at once. I'd be able to use them for machine vision applications or video conferencing, for the coding. For power zoom lenses, I'd be able to eliminate focus breathing by adjusting focus and zoom together. I could make a panorama app, a focus stacking app, or an app which did smart image stacking for low light. I could toss on a machine learning algorithm on it, and have a custom shutter control so it decided when to shoot. I could use IBIS to track the stars for night photography.
That's what an open camera would consist of.
NOT a touch screen, Android, and connections to Instagram and Youtube.
> Not to mention mirrorless replacing DSLRs.
I was shooting mirrorless long before that.
Indeed, 10 years ago, you could buy a Sony A7R. Go to DPReview, and compare high ISO images from the A7R versus a top-of-the-line $6000 A9III and tell me which one is better. Or compare them on DxOMark.
10 years buys us:
- Higher video resolution
- Better autofocus
- Instead of obscenely fast shooting speed, we now have incredulously fast shooting speed
Unfortunately, the images aren't noticeably better, though.
120fps is kind of useless (unless you want to spend your life sorting through images; that's over 7000 images for a minute of shooting). Some models do give more resolution (notably, not the A9III in this comparison; the A7R had more), but that's only usable under bizarre conditions (even shooting 24MP, with an f/1.4 lens, if one eye was in focus, the other eye would be limited by DoF and not the sensor). Plus, a 4k monitor tops out at 8MP.
I will mention: If cameras used the same kind of smarts as a Google Pixel Pro, the images would be much better.
