Sony A7R

I am a streamer/content creator: Most of what I encounter in order is Sony, Canon, and sometimes time Lumix. Sony has held the crown for the best auto-focusing system for a long time now which for content creators can be very important. Canon is also pretty good, but Sony really has gone all in making sure their system works really well for many scenarios.(People, animals, face and eye tracking.) Lumix's auto-focus system is passable and only if the lens itself works well with it. Personally I use a mixture of Sony and Canon lenses on a Sony A7S III along with a Sony A7R IV. I used to have a Lumix S1H that I loved the image rendering, but buying lenses for L-Mount was difficult since it is such a new mount. I would love to use Canon exclusively since their button layouts are far superior to Sony's absolute mess.

> starting around the iPhone 13, phones got really good. ILC cameras also got really good. I'm not at all doubting that smartphones are the primary cannibalization vector, but even for people who prefer to use cameras with significantly larger sensors than can be put into a smartphone I think the cameras themselves reached a point years ago where it became difficult even for ILC enthusiasts to justify upgrades on a regular basis because what people already owned was "Good Enough". I reached this point with the Sony A7R Mk3 and other people probably reached this point sooner. For years it felt like Canon and Nikon were kind of aware this would happen with ILCs and were dragging their feet on camera body tech making incremental upgrades behind where the technology should have been if they were competing full speed, and then other vendors like Sony just came smashing in without being part of this implicit agreement and pushed camera body tech along extremely quickly for a few years (with Canon/Nikon having to follow along to some degree to keep up) and it didn't take many iterations of this pushing the technology to where it could be for ILC camera bodies to be something you feel no itch to upgrade from year to year because the shiny new thing is an extremely marginal upgrade. So the cannibalization of the market probably had two fronts, the larger one from smartphones, and a smaller but still significant one from "Good Enough" (which is an issue smartphones are starting to run…

I bought a Sony A7R IV full frame mirrorless camera for around the top end of that range, though MSRP is higher. Completely worth it (for me) to dive deeper into photography. I absolutely love it, despite the high cost, seemed a worthwhile investment that I use frequently to provide value for myself, friends, and family. Aside from artistic expression, it's useful to create headshots for others, photograph friend's weddings, etc.

Yes and no. Battery life is much worse but when you go all in on next gen Mirrorless cameras there are gains that are just impossible otherwise in a DSLR. The thing that convinced me was using an A7RII 5 years ago in NYC at night. The simple fact of the matter was that the camera could focus and validate setup in the dark better than my own eye with my personal Canon DSLR, even with the wide open nifty 50. I think we are on the edge of major innovations in camera tech. The size advantage makes it easier to carry more batteries as well. Really the biggest thing is that Nikon is just brutally behind in tech compared to Sony and even Canon. The market has moved past DSLRs. Sony showed up and showed how to do it and that was it.

So true. I ran into this problem when streaming on twitch. After I switched from a webcam to a sony a7r2, I never looked back. I even use it for zoom calls too, because why not?

> 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…