[sudosysgen]

The user interface in my A7ii is actually Android, mostly. Responsive Android is absolutely doable if you design it a certain way, and there is no need to remove features like removable batteries or literally anything else.

There is also absolutely no need for it to introduce artifacts into your images. RAW+JPEG is already good enough for this.

The actual advantage of an open camera are huge. For example, it would be trivial to adapt the camera to literally any mount, from EF to E to G and so on, which in and of itself is completely disruptive.

Phone processors have other aces up their sleeve. For example, unlike the Canon EOS R5, they can actually process 8K video indefinitely without breaking a sweat.

As for battery life, you're once again very wrong. The biggest draws in battery life in a camera are the processor and the sensor. Using a phone processor would allow for much lower energy usage as the lithography is incredibly more efficient, and all the high-battery-usage parts of a phone would disappear, such as always-on LTE modems, background processing, and so on.

For boot, Android with a camera sized battery and no modem can last weeks in standby, months in sleep mode. Your camera already doesn't turn off, but instead enters a low-power state. Try removing the battery of an A7 or EOS R, discharging the internal energy storage, and see how long it takes to start.

The actual advantage of this is that it allows you to become a camera manufacturer for much lower costs, meaning that you don't have to limit yourself to a single mount, and can outsource some R&D externally. For example, you won't need to be Fuji to have accurate film sims, you won't need to be Canon to have native level EF compatibility, and you'd even be able to do revolutionary things like autofocus manual lenses.

Beyond that, you'd be able to do things like temporal noise reduction, 3D depth mapping for haze removal, and so on, that can be either used for automatic processing and/or made available in RAW format for further editing.

Basically, you're describing "what if a phone company made a bad camera". What I'm talking about at least is "what if photographers made a camera untethered by the restrictions of existing cameras using commodity hardware". I think the second has the potential of seriously providing value.

[jsjohnst]

> For example, it would be trivial to adapt the camera to literally any mount, from EF to E to G and so on, which in and of itself is completely disruptive.

That’s a bit hyperbolic, the collar isn’t the only difference between those lens connectors.

[sudosysgen]

It is a bit hyperbolic, but both the EF, E and Nikon G mounts have been essentially fully reverse engineered as far as driving a lens. The issue is that the communication to the body of some information isn't fully understood yet and might never be, which prevents third-party lenses as well as adapters from working properly.

If you were to make a camera that is fully open, maybe even modifiable on the info it sends to the lens and what information it wants back, then you would get aftermarket adapters for Canon EF (you could also make one yourself with publicly available info). Sony E would be a tougher nut to crack, but there is a fair bit of info already out and there are already E mount adapters feasible.

So yes, maybe trivial is hyperbolic because of the Sony E mount, but very feasible.

[jsjohnst]

I agree the mounts have been mostly reverse engineered, but that doesn’t detract from my point (which I might not have done a good job of articulating). The point I was trying to make is that each mount has different focal characteristics which would make it non-trivial to support on a single body (with a swappable collar adapter). Doable, yes, but not trivial. Even ignoring the focal differences, electrically (aka lens to camera communication) wouldn’t be what I would call trivial either.

(For background, a friend and I worked on designs for making an open camera platform a few years ago)

[sudosysgen]

Oh, I didn't mean that the physical mounts have been mostly reverse engineered. I meant that the camera→lens communications have been fully to almost fully reverse engineered.

Mount optical characteristics are very simple. Just make sure your base mount has a larger diameter and a shorter flange distance, and you're golden. If you are designing your camera around that it is almost trivially done.

The code for implementing a basic E mount is on github, for the EF mount you just have to go looking around on some forums or buy it from the guy behind Metabones, same for Nikon G.