The all about glass thing goes much further than simply sunk costs.
Each manufacturer of quality lenses has a particular thing they’re good at or useful for. Canon is known for very high quality long telephoto lenses. We’re talking ~1000mm and some times more. Back when I sold professional camera equipment the vast majority of very long telephoto lenses were either cheaper/bad screw mounts or Canon. Either made by Canon or Canon mounts. And so far as I know Canon’s are still considered the best in that segment. Nikon’s lenses are justifiably famous for being very good with light. They tend to work better in low light, have broader aperture ranges. This is both good for shooting in low light, but also makes the camera “faster” to work with because you end up with a broader range of exposures available on a single lens, or a single setting that’s appropriate in broader range of settings.
In my experience sports, wild life, and paparazzi photogs have traditionally gone Canon because of the need for practically usable long lenses and zooms. I used to sell a lot of super telephoto lenses to the Canon guys. Press photogs and photo journalists seem to more often carry Nikon (or Leica back in the film days, who have similar benefits). They’re working closer in highly variable lighting conditions, and need a “fast” shooting setup often with minimal lenses.
You can certainly get adapter rings to use a lens mounted for whatever brand on whatever camera you have. That’s effectively how Canon made their nut in video. And most manufacturers will have some lenses available or made for them that will accomplish what the other brands are known for. But its often cheaper and more practical to just use a body from the manufacturer who makes the lenses you need to get the job done. If lenses with features like Nikon’s tend to have are what you need to get the job done. You’ll probably be buying Nikon lenses. Which means you’ll be using a Nikon body.
Those sorts of edge of capability, niche, situational needs are not readily apparent to the hobbyist photographer. Or even a lot of fine art guys. Sony’s lenses are made by Zeiss. Who are a top tier lens manufacturer up there with Nikon and Leica. But IIRC there’s a bit of lack in terms of 3rd party lenses and conversion rings on the Sony side. And I’m not aware of any particular role that Sony’s cameras and lenses are suited for over any of their competitors. I don’t really think they have one.
I do know that on the video side Sony’s cameras are often difficult to work with down to menus and controls. And there are serious interoperability concerns down to their fetish for proprietary formats and connectors. At film school you had to personally buy special cabling to connect their cameras to a non-Sony computer. The equipment room gave us free Sony tapes. But most of us bought something else out of pocket because Sony used (or uses) a lube that messed with other brands of camera or tape decks. Among other issues. Effectively if you didn’t own a Sony. You would never rent or sign one out. Even if it was the best thing available to you because it was just too annoying to work with them.
My impression of the DSLRs has been similar. Memory stick, though long gone, locked them out of the professional space for a good long while on a whole bunch of products. For just one example. Sans a compelling reason to adopt them. And often featuring compelling reasons not to (though that situation is vastly improved now). They lost whole generations of professionals who are now locked into other manufacturers by the cost of their existing equipment.
While true, the fact that you could capture that in much darker conditions, more easily, etc. today is something that contemporary digital camera equipment and improved lenses have gotten us.
They were documented, but good luck making a living selling your photos when the other photographers present are able to take more and higher quality pictures. It is like using 1980s cgi in a major motion picture, sure it works and it was the best available at the time, but good luck relying on it for your living.
You’re right about them being thought of as inferior to Canon and Nikon, but Sony cameras are bloody good. I switched from Canon a few years back and currently shoot on a Sony A7ii which IMHO is every bit s good as any Canon I’ve ever used. The real drawback though is the lack of lenses - the A7 is tremendous to use with beautiful detail and colour reproduction, but it really hurts not to have the big, long lenses that Canon and Nikon take for granted.
Oh and of course, many Nikons are built around Sony sensors.
‘And I’m not aware of any particular role that Sony’s cameras and lenses are suited for over any of their competitors. I don’t really think they have one.’
I think that’s one of the reasons Sony hasn’t been able to get more than a single digit percentage of the pro market. They haven’t articulated why people should drop serious money on one of their cameras rather than the Nikons and Canons all their friends use. I’d argue that the sensor in the A7s is definitely in a league of its own when it comes to low-light photography which is why it is popping up in places like nighttime wildlife photography and astrophotography. But that is one, very expensive camera and you still need good glass.
You’ll probably not be surprised that the menus and options on the Sony cameras are just as confusing as their video camera equivalents. They’ve even hidden common functions deep in menus within menus within menus. Hideous.
I’d also say that Sony fall down in several areas - they still don’'t have the smart remotes and intervalometers Sony and Nikon produce (and their smartphone app sucks), their batteries are pitiful and they have gaping holes in their lens ranges especially at the longer lenses where Canon really comes into its own.
But, despite all the pain of being a Sony user, and all the strange looks I get when I use one, I’ll say I’ve never used a better camera than my current A7ii - it’s fast, small and light; the images are gorgeous and it has more functionality than I will ever use. If I had the money I’d be scampering off to buy the A9 and/or A99.
That one seems like an excellent example of “the camera you are actually carrying is the best camera”(a truth that particularly favors cellphone cameras); but also a shot saved only by the fact that hazy sensory overload is thematically appropriate in context; so the complete failure to have anything in focus, avoid blowing out the highlights and washing out the darker areas; and copious blur aren’t show stoppers.
The real beauty of the Nikon and Canon systems is that they’ve been around a long time. So photographers can invest in decent lenses secure in the knowledge that they’ll still work for a long time in the future.
I merely dabble, but the fact that there were a couple of decent EOS lenses buried in a cupboard meant that when I went back to a DSLR (after a long time carrying compacts) buying Canon again was a no-brainer. For a pro, the proprietary lock-in is much greater. That and the fact that having learned one Canon camera, adapting to the controls on another Canon body is a breeze. Sony’s interface design on the other hand is a mess …
Yeah Sony seems to kill it on sensors and size. The only better color reproduction out there is Panasonic. And they’ve yet to put out plausible DSLR and mirrorless interchangeable lens products. Unfortunately. That finally popping up would kill my wallet.
And every Sony product seems to lack for accessories/tools and selection of important bits. Which is a huge problem for professionals. It just adds to the issue that Sony isn’t really the standard for any one thing.
I mean you can name a type of photography or situation and a knowledgeable person can usually just tell you which brand to go with. Extreme environments? Nikons deal with cold and hot better and hold up better to mud dust and dirt. And they have loads of accessories to take advantage of that. Underwater? Nikon is good with light but Canon has much better and faster auto focus. and the accessory base to take advantage of that. So in a situation that’s sort of a wash, Canon is the underwater standard. And has been as far as I can tell since the 70’s.
These are the ways pros settle on a platform. You don’t have that. You miss the early, critical buy in. And you lose an entire generation of professionals.
If Sony could put out the lenses and what have to take advantage of that sensor’s low light capabilities. And get that sensor or similar ones in all their cameras. Then they could establish at least one key niche, or steal it from the other companies. Good low light performance? As good or better than Nikon? Get the right lenses out, focus on diving accessories. Beat Canon’s auto focus, especially on speed. Boom your now the underwater king. I just don’t think Sony has the focus to pull that off.
I’m not a huge sports guy myself, more like a casual fan, and mostly baseball. But I’m sure you like “perfect” photos in some contexts – if you’re flipping through a guide to birds with photos, it’s nice if they’re actually clear, right? I’m with you, I like “imperfect” photos as well, but you can still shoot for effect on contemporary gear. I did film/chemical stuff in high school and really enjoyed it. And perhaps something has been lost.
It’s primarily an issue of lens quality, but the camera definitely comes into play. As @Brainspore mentioned, in the past, sports were often documented differently, or more inconsistently. However, good lenses have been around for a while. It’s just that they’re really expensive. For instance, the lens that @jerwin linked to (or its Nikon equivalent) is basically required if you’re a serious sports photographer. It’s over six grand. A lot of maturing photographers will rent the lenses for jobs (at a couple hundred bucks per day), until they can afford to buy their own. I doubt most photo rental places would have the Sony lenses available, meaning you would have to purchase the straight out. I’m also not sure how good the Sony lenses are. Canon and Nikon make some incredible lenses.
Concerning camera quality, I’m not sure what else photographers really want at this point. I have massive prints of photos that I took with the ‘cutting edge’ DSLR I used when I was a photographer over a decade ago. They look great. I know that burst, write speed, and noise control are a big deal for sports photographers, but every professional level camera I’ve seen over the past five years has been incredible in those regards.
But, if you have press credentials, you aren’t competing against a bunch of guys with Speedgraphics. You are competing against a bunch of guys with the latest that Canon and Nikon and maybe Sony have to offer. You might get lucky and have a once in a lifetime shot, but by the time you get out of the darkroom, your competitors will already have a half dozen, less grainy, full color, more precisely focused alternatives to your once in a lifetime shot, already up on the web, and ready to publish.
Good luck taking nice full frame shots of players on the field from 50 yards away on your phone. It’s incredible how good smart phone cameras are given how tiny their lenses are. However, those tiny lenses place severe limits to what they can do. Which is why professional photographers, especially ones who need to do a lot of telephoto or macro work, own dedicated cameras with interchangeable lenses.
This is an excellent point. The real advantage of an expensive camera over your phone or your point-and-shoot is that the instant you press the button it takes a picture.
I’ve taken lots of pictures I’m happy with on my phone. However, I have to search around on the screen to find the button. Sometimes I miss it, and I miss the photo I wanted. The subject may move out of the frame, or somebody else moves into it. I have a lot of cat photos where one of the little bastards has decided to stop acting cute just after I get the shot off. There’s a higher percentage of those on my phone.
This can be critical in sports photography. If you’re half a second late, you may miss the action completely.
Here’s a non-sports example of the important of timing. The link to the original story from the Dallas Morning News is dead, but there’s enough that you get the idea. Bob Jackson won a pulitzer when he caught Jack Ruby in the act of shooting JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, and Jack Beers didn’t because he shot six tenths of a second later.
Having said that, you can definitely take great pictures with just about anything.
Some cameras still manage to be a huge letdown when it comes to delay-before-first-exposure(either just because they suck; because of overly aggressive power management; or because of some not-always-optional “let the autofocus be confused” period); but the increasing speed and duration of burst-shooting is one nice effect of reasonably fast busses and comparatively gigantic RAM caches becoming cheap.
Back in the bad old days, even fairly classy DSLRs often had enough buffer for only a handful of shots; after which you had to wait for images to dump to relatively slow flash memory. The cheap seats often made you wait after each shot. These days, actually-useful burst modes(or even continuous video recording; albeit often at lower max resolution than for still images) are comparatively accessible features. Doesn’t help you if you miss the moment while fumbling with the camera, or waiting for it to ready itself; but being able to just keep your finger on the trigger and do 10+ FPS for a few seconds makes it a lot harder to miss the moment.
The film development costs added up; but this is one of those things that the analog cameras were actually pretty good at. Only limit on how fast you can feed film through is the minimum exposure time and the mechanical durability of the film base; and while only video camera film was really intended to be run through the camera at a fair clip; 35mm could generally endure being motor driven at a fair frame rate; and the mechanisms for doing so are a lot simpler and cheaper than what you need to dump a silicon sensor’s state 10s of times per second and provide a RAM buffer big enough to accommodate the results.
High shot rates are also enormously useful(for producing good results; and anguishing purists) since they allow you to be very, very, aggressive about ‘bracketing’ for less mobile subjects; which is the brute-force-and-ignorance approach to getting the right settings just by programmatically taking a series of shots with different combinations of likely options. Also handy for capturing that one brief moment where nobody has their eyes closed and everybody is smiling.
