[chamsom]

According to this essay, the options for his kids are a $50 toy "camera" and an $850 niche camera possibly targeted at people who usually own the $2,000 line of the same brand. Surely there's something in between?

I can't help but wonder if this is a purchase for himself.

[999900000999]

My thoughts exactly.

This is a bizarre article. The elephant in the room is on the lower end most mid-range phones will beat a digital camera under 300$.

I wouldn't give a kid an expensive camera. Kids drop things. If you give Junior an 850$ camera and he loses it that's on you.

Then again, this is HN. Maybe he makes 700k TC per year and money is no object. Even then he admits for a few hundred more you can get a much more capable Fuji camera.

I purchased a used Fujifilm Fuji X-A5 for around 250$ off eBay, and a new XC 15-45 for 120$. It's not the best camera by any means, but I'm relatively stress free when using it compared to more expensive options.

Truth be told when your starting out you don't really need amazing gear. This goes for every hobby.

[goblin89]

This picks apart image quality from an iPhone 15 Pro Max regarding noise and usable dynamic range: https://youtu.be/bSm3LXNF7pI?feature=shared&t=1360

For anything more than basic software-processed output and utility snaps or selfies, this high-end phone loses pretty terribly to an average hybrid consumer camera.

[CobaltFire]

Absolutely. We have an iPhone 15 Pro Max, a Kodak Pixpro FZ55, and a Panasonic G9 II + Panasonic Leica 12-60.

The iPhone can't even hope to touch the cheap Kodak, much less the actual mirrorless.

[petre]

That's if you don't factor in the shitty ergonomics of an iPhone used as a camera compared to an actual camera.

I've got an Instax Mini Evo, so I believe the guy.

[ksec]

Glad there is sanity on HN. Try say this anywhere else you get attacked by Apple Fan boys.

And partly that is Apple to blame here. For their PR and marketing.

[goblin89]

Arguably, the divide between real and pretend marketing photo making capabilities is less with Apple than with some other companies: https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23637401/samsung-fake-moo...

[999900000999]

What’s the net output for the majority of photos?

Probably a social media post at best. I don’t think most viewers are going to be that critical. The best camera is always the one you have on you .

[aspenmayer]

> The best camera is always the one you have on you .

And if all you have is a phone, then you will only ever have phone camera quality photos. For many, that is good enough, but it’s not really an argument to not buy a dedicated camera, so that you may carry it, and even use it to shoot better photos than your phone could.

[goblin89]

Whether you post it on social media or not, if you want to do photography more or less for its own sake, a phone (particularly mid-range) is unlikely to have a satisfactory camera. If you need an ability to make utility snaps, then absolutely.

[SoftTalker]

The majority of photos are looked at once, maybe shared, and then sit consuming a few MB of storage never to be looked at again.

[Clamchop]

Price sensitivity re: children and breaking things is going to depend on financial situation and intention. This is a person that shoots a $10k Leica, so I'm going to guess there's more than enough money and a strong intent to share an "authentic" photography experience (a camera of traditional form) with their kids. The latter appears to be this camera's gimmick.

They describe this camera as "cheap" even!

[0_____0]

The Kodak Brownie addressed exactly this issue and was released 125 years ago!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_Brownie

[neepi]

He should try some of the new ass end mirrorless cameras that are designed to be cameras and not fashion accessories. That might scare him off his Leica and this turd.

[999900000999]

Leica is obviously social signalling.

He gets to let us know he REALLY cares about photography.

Photography is ultimately subjective anyway, if he feels a 10k camera worth it that's cool.

IMO if your new wait for a sale or buy someone else's failed ambitions off eBay. I'm no pro but plenty of very capable cameras can be had under 1000$. The lenses are the expensive parts

[petre]

> Leica is obviously social signalling.

I used to think that as well until I got one of their lenses for m43. It's a niche market which Fuji also captured quite well.

[ninjin]

I think it is fair to mention the aspect of Leicas being fashion accessories, but it is equally unfair to pretend that they are just fashion accessories. Let me try to explain.

If what you are looking for is image quality (especially when considering quality per pound spent) Leica is not where you should be looking. However, they fill a very unique niche: small(-ish) and light(-ish), full-frame sensor, and operation that is nearly identical to a film rangefinder. What does this mean? It means that you can have a system where you shoot the same lenses, filters, etc. on both digital and film bodies and the cameras and lenses will behave the same way. This, in addition to me subjectively liking the way that rangefinders operate, is why I have a digital Leica. Although I unashamedly shoot Voigtländer and Zeiss film bodies (both made by Cosina in Japan) as they are compatible and come at a fraction of the cost of a film Leica. Before I head out, I ask myself: "Do I feel like film or digital today?" and then I pick the body, my favourite 50mm lens (because to me, that lens is so important that it dictates the rest of my system), and off I go.

You are correct that mirrorless cameras in many ways is where "the game" is right now, but do not make the mistake to counter the foolish Leica elitism with an equally foolish elitism of your own. As a photographer your aim should be to have a setup that works for you, to realise your vision, and while my setup works for me and my digital/film setup, I readily recommend others that do not care about film to explore the mirrorless Fujifilm X-series as they are fun to shoot and price effective. If you want to explore film, the sensible thing is to just pick up an old point-and-shoot or SLR before you invest into a costly system as maybe you will not like film in the end?

As for the "Leica fashion" market, I am actually kind of thankful for it as a Leica shooter because it fills up the second-hand market so that I can get two or three generations old digital Leica cameras at less insane prices. Although what I really wish for is a cheaper competitor to Leica with a full-frame, M-mount, digital alternative so that I could dump Leica and still have my system work. For example, the Epson R-D1 from 2004 had better ergonomics than any digital Leica until the M10 was released in 2017, but 6.1 megapixels and a sensor that becomes borderline unusable over ISO 400 is sadly not viable unless you are going for some sort of retro-digital look. So, the "sane" digital Leica choice these days is likely a used M10 or maybe M10-R (or a Typ 240 if you are "poor", like me) and the M11 largely looks like a lot of money for next to no benefit (but I am thankful that it exists and drives down the prices of the digital Leicas I want to shoot).

[spaqin]

That's a lot of words to completely disregard the fact that autofocus M adapter exists for Z and E mounts, allowing you to keep the same lenses, but with AF on digital - see Techart. Nikon Z system cooperates best thanks to a thin sensor filter stack, not too far from Leica's.

On vacay I can carry a practical 24-120 zoom and a light M-mount 35mm for portraits or lower light situations, without the pretense.

[ninjin]

I just do not understand the hostility where all there is is different approaches. A charitable take (there are plenty) for example would be that I (like many) have about twenty years of legacy gear investment that I need to consider and/or was unaware of the rather recently introduced (2018?) Nikon Z system. You clearly have "a system" that works for you and that is great! Can you even get autofocus on a 1930s Elmar with that setup? Because would just be bonkers to think of from a technical perceptive.

Personally, I prefer to shoot manual to keep the operation the same between film and digital and I am fast and competent enough with a rangefinder patch that I do not feel that autofocus gives me that much and I only shoot primes (28 and 50mm). The Nikon Z system looks really interesting though, so thanks for bringing it to my attention. It is great to see innovation in this space that is not just Fujifilm; I will make sure to try my hands on one next time I am in one of the big camera stores.

[pkolaczk]

> Truth be told when your starting out you don't really need amazing gear.

Amazing probably not, but you also don’t want the cheapest and crappiest gear especially when you’re starting. A pro can usually workaround the limitations, but for a novice they would be like a wall and would only cause frustration.

[CobaltFire]

My wifes new Kodak Pixpro FZ55 ($130) absolutely smokes my iPhone 15 Pro.

I shoot a Panasonic G9 II and thats a completely different level.

[phonon]

Hmmm...the main (48 mp) camera sensor on the iPhone 15 Pro is about 10 x 7.5mm and has optical image stabilization.

The 16 mp camera sensor on the Pixpro FZ55 is 6.17 x 4.55 mm and has no optical image stabilization.

Maybe you just like the "look" from the Kodak more?

[southernplaces7]

Bear in mind that sensor size in megapixels can be full of shit in terms of image quality. Cramming so many pixels into a tiny sensor such as that of a smartphone camera obligates a tiny size, resulting in poor-quality light capture and thus worse images in several ways. Hence the heavy use of reprocessing tricks in phones.

On the other hand, the much larger pixels in a camera with an ostensibly smaller number of megapixels can create superior visuals, especially if coupled with a more robust lens.

I've used 24MP Sony mirrorless cameras that blow any smartphone I've ever seen out of the water on image quality and depth, even though many phone makers these days cram absurd amounts of tiny pixels into their little cameras.

[phonon]

You overlooked that I listed the actual sensor sizes above! The iPhone's sensor is almost 3 times the area of the Kodak's. In general, small inexpensive consumer cameras use small sensors to keep the price low and to make it easier to add a large (5x) optical zoom in a small package. (Larger sensor = larger lens).

[southernplaces7]

You're right and I should have elaborated a bit more. I was referring more generally to camera sensors vs phone sensors, in this comparison, it applies less, but im still willing to bet that the lens and the individual pixels in the kodak contribute.

[CobaltFire]

So I don't actually like shooting at 24mm (the iPhone 15 Pro 48MP FL). If we adjust that to a more typical 35mm (I prefer 40mm personally) or 50mm we end up at either a 1.5x crop or a 2x crop of the iPhone's sensor.

That gives us ~21MP for 35mm and 12MP for 50mm. The 35mm crop is almost a match for the sensor size of the Kodak, and the 50mm is smaller.

Then we have to deal with the inescapable processing that the iPhone does, even in "RAW" mode (which, while better than JPEG, is not anywhere near RAW). We are stuck with JPEG but no major processing on the Kodak, so no imagined detail.

We can compare lenses as well, but to do that properly I would need to do a like for like comparison. I may actually do that between the iPhone, Kodak, and Panasonic.

All in, your simplistic approximation just highlights how much you've bought into the marketing instead of understanding how cameras work.

[phonon]

True enough. If you're using a significant amount of digital zoom on an iPhone, the optical zoom on the larger camera will become an advantage. Once you switch to the native 77mm camera range on the iPhone it should even out again/advantage the iPhone. And of course the Kodak has no 13mm equivalent lens at all.

[bdangubic]

I roughly make 700k TC per year and money is always an object :)

[PaulHoule]

He says he doesn't collect cameras but instead he sells them. My take is that the bottom tranche of cheap cameras is awful but that you have a huge selection of used cameras on Ebay, in his shoes I would have expected to get something used but good for $200 or so.

One of the reasons I go around with two Sonys in my backpack is that I can go to an event and take action shots while I put the other body with a 90mm lens and have somebody else who doesn't know a lot about how to work a mirrorless shoot headshots. On the other hand, I do collect weird cameras and you might find I have two stereo cameras in my other bag.

[Karrot_Kream]

Do you let guests shoot the 90mm in full auto mode? Personally I've found that the general population has a really hard time operating a camera. My partner and I can both do photography though I'm more serious about it and we frequently travel with cameras. When we want someone else to take pictures, even on Auto mode I find others have a hard time. If we're in a hurry and want a picture taken by someone else we just hand them a phone.

[PaulHoule]

Usually it would be aperture priority (f/2.8) in a situation where I know what the light is so I can set the ISO and leave it there. I develop with DxO so I am not worried about noise or the shutter speed too long but I do worry about hitting 1/8000 sec -- so usually it would be a situation where the lighting is predictable.

The autofocus can be set in a mode where it will reliably lock on the subject's eye. I would demo how you have to be a certain distance to get a headshot, since it is a prime lens, if they are too far away I don't worry too much because modern cameras have a lot of pixels.

[ezst]

For me it's the AF. Every. Single. Time. People on smartphone, used to near-infinite depth of field, just forgot/never learned about focusing, and handing them a camera just too often results with the background being in focus and the subject blurry.

[Karrot_Kream]

Yeah that's been my experience too, or if the lens is open wide enough they don't watch the AF and have it focus on a belt or something weird and then blur out faces and eyes.

The other big one is HDR. HDR on phones makes lighting a lot less of a factor but a lot of times if I'm asking a friend to take an indoor picture they underexpose the shot because they don't have good lighting.

[jcynix]

For kids, I'd buy a small used micro four thirds camera with a pancake lens. Cheaper and later expandable if they enjoy taking pictures.

Or, if it needs to be a zoomable lens, I'd look for some used (but well maintained) Digital Ixus or PowerShot.

With either of these they can learn much more about photography than with a toy camera.

[semi-extrinsic]

Canon PowerShot is the way. I grew up on those. It's the perfect type of camera for letting kids/teenagers figure out how photography works as they grow up.

I've taken pictures with a 7MP 1/1.8" sensor PowerShot that look so good the prints still hang in several family members' houses. And not because they are photos of people, I'm talking macros and underwater photography (the latter with an original Canon waterproof case and a DIY-contraption with an optically slaved 1970s Nikonos flash).

If you put the work in and ignored the DSLR crowd, those cameras were fantastic. I had a full tilt LCD screen in 2005. That feature is completely standard today, but it took the DSLRs a full decade to catch up. On the later models you got 20x, even 40x optical zoom with decent apertures.

With CHDK we had global electronic shutter working down to 1/30,000 of a second. We wrote code than ran on our cameras to do motion detection for stuff like lightning photography. We scripted timelapses with exposure control that factored in sunset timings. We scripted focus and exposure bracketing for HDR and infinite DoF. That was twenty years ago, on an undocumented 32-bit architecture that people painstakingly reverse engineered.

The only thing we could never get was bokeh on the telephoto end. Optics is a harsh mistress.

[CobaltFire]

As a long time micro four thirds shooter:

The Panasonic 20/1.7 is an amazing little lens but its autofocus is absolutely horrible. I used to carry it and an E-M5 (the first one) and the shots were great but AF was near useless.

[giraffe_lady]

Photography nerds rarely bring this up but pretty obviously the best camera for kids is an old smartphone. A 2020-era iphone has a better sensor and is cheaper than this thing, assuming they don't already have one around. Photo transfer problem is solved, and the interface is already familiar to kids for better or worse.

[Karrot_Kream]

Folks who are into photography and want to introduce it to their family/kids want to gently introduce the skills of photography while enabling their interest in taking pictures. Smartphones are great at just "taking pictures" but don't offer a lot of creative input. Table stakes like depth-of-field and color balance are either impossible to configure or very difficult on a smartphone. Controlling exposure is very difficult as most smartphones try to just aim for neutral exposure. Software can change exposure settings, and on Android I use a paid camera app that gives me control of shutter speed and ISO to control exposure.

But you're correct that if picture quality and ease of use are the main points of contention, a used iPhone or used Pixel phone is probably all you need to get sharp pictures and decent auto-HDR.

That's not to say that an $850 Fuji body is the only way forward. I'd probably buy a younger kid a used point-and-shoot and buy an older kid one of those cheaper compacts. That Fuji body is almost as expensive as a real mirrorless that I shoot with for paid work.

[Someone1234]

Kids point and shoot cameras have none of those features. In fact, an old smartphone has far more photographic controls than almost any kid's camera will.

If the choice is a $50 Kid's purpose built camera or a smartphone, the smartphone is the clear winner. Nobody was suggesting an old smartphone over an $800+ Fuji.

You have to have used a kid's point & shoot to understand how terrible they truly are. My kids had one which couldn't even disable the flash entirely. The sensor is a cheap 1 MP out of a webcam. The modes are three: Photo, Video, and Review. There is no manual controls, no photographic tools, maybe MAYBE you might get some fun filters.

[Karrot_Kream]

Right I'm not talking about a kid-specific point-and-shoot. There's lots of used point-and-shoots on eBay of varying quality from the 2000s and there's still some compacts being built now, though those tend to be marketed toward vlogging.

[Someone1234]

That's what we did.

Most "kids cameras" sold today just use cheap webcam sensors (e.g. 1 MP, low dynamic range) that are sold for excessively high prices. They have few physical controls, no viewfinder, and are bulky.

Instead, why not grab a used iPhone SE, the camera sensor is still fantastic, and it will likely cost you less than most kids cameras. Remove everything except the Camera App, leave it in Airplane mode, and it will last roughly two days on a single charge (over a week idle).

PS - You can find deals on used cellphones by looking for "network locked" ones, since you won't be putting a SIM in it anyway.

[addaon]

There’s also the last-gen iPod Touch, which is getting a bit long in the tooth but as a cell-phone-without-a-cell-radio is nearly perfect for this application, and is an incredibly nice form factor.

[majormajor]

A 2020-era iPhone has good default-setting software. That's good for learning about framing.

Beyond framing, though... The sensor is pretty meh; use an app like Halide to take fully-unprocessed raw shots (not still-Apple-processed Raw out of the camera app) to compare. The processing is good, with a caveat - it's good at producing a certain look, but there's limited ability to go beyond that with the default software.

Still, old iPhone + Halide will let you learn a decent bit about exposure and shutter speed and ISO. Not being able to control aperture is gonna be your biggest drawback in terms of learning about photography. But having a sensor that's a bit less forgiving than a Fuji one might be good for playing with - make the hard decisions about framing instead of just assuming everything will always be well-exposed. (I haven't used the X-half, but a considerably cheaper used X-whatever would be much better than a 2020 iPhone for non-computationally-processed shots).

[moffkalast]

I would dare even say the provided examples from the camera are objectively worse than what a mid range smartphone could do 5 years ago with a sensor probably just a tenth of the size. So much low light noise, is that lens decorative or what?