Folks:
I’ve completed a draft of my review of the Canon 5D Mark III camera. Comments/corrections would be appreciated. Given the DxO Labs results from the Nikon D800 and the 5D Mark III, I think it is time for me to admit that my prediction from roughly 2006 has proven to be spectacularly wrong. When Sony purchased Minolta’s camera business, I said that the professional SLR market was big enough for just two companies. Given that Canon and Sony were much bigger firms with more capital than Nikon, and that Nikon was reliant upon Sony to make sensors, I expected Canon and Sony to build products that Nikon could not match. Now it looks as though Nikon is crushing Canon in those aspects of sensor performance that are relevant to image quality. And the article even has an example of an iPhone 4S producing a better JPEG than the $3500 Canon body.
So… I know that I was wrong, but I still can’t understand how I could have been so wrong.
Samsung reportedly makes the new screen in the iPad3 (which is THE new feature of the iPad3) but that hasn’t given Samsung’s tablets a big advantage. Also, Sony doesn’t have a good track record lately of creating great products and have too many irons in the fire to really excel in one of their niche markets (SLRs) IMO.
Are you contemplating switching to a d800 and selling your Canon gear?
jseliger: If I had a big project to do, e.g., a book of landscape photography, I think that I would probably buy the D800 and whatever lenses were required. For the minor projects that I am currently doing, the 5D Mark III is not the limiting factor in final image quality (I have to look to lighting, laziness regarding getting up at 5 a.m. to catch the best natural light, laziness regarding not setting up a tripod, laziness regarding postprocessing in Photoshop, etc.).
I figure what’s kept Canon and Nikon on top of the D-SLR market is their history of being on top of the D-SLR market. History is a powerful force that you could well have predicted in 2006.
Sony and everybody else rightly figured out that they couldn’t compete and moved instead to the mirrorless interchangeable market, which would have been harder for you to predict in 2006. (Micro 4/3 wasn’t announced until 2008.) I’m not sure who you could crown the leader of the mirrorless market, but that’s certainly where a lot of the innovation is now happening. (My own next camera purchase is likely to be a Fuji X Pro 1, but I’m not buying until it’s officially supported by Adobe Lightroom.)
Anyway, it’s good to remember your failed predictions. I’ll never forget that I smugly predicted that Steve Jobs’s moves after coming back to Apple (killing the clone market, bringing out candy-colored iMacs) were going to kill the company. Needless to say, I didn’t call that one correctly.