rickydoodah Loc: Leeds, UK

I use mainly Fujifilm and read the manual cover to cover when I get a new body, but at over 300 pages it is a bit of a chore. However, I recently purchased a Sony 7C and I found that they have a description for each menu item in-camera at the push of a button. Whilst it doesn't give a full explanation and options, it does give a pointer as to what I am looking at and I've found it as useful as a manual and easier to access for most options. I wish Fuji did the same.

charles tabb Loc: Richmond VA.

I get my Sony camera manuals from Friedman. He writes manuals on just about every Sony camera that comes out.
I don't feel he can be beat.

Charles

OldIkon Loc: Indiana, USA

I have been collecting manuals for my classic (pre-1980) camera and accessories collection, much of it through the previously mentioned Butkus.org website. This timely post fits right along with thoughts I was having about how much simpler the old 35mm cameras were to operate. Until they developed multiple automatic operating modes, most could be operated without a manual. If I needed a book, it was about the techniques of good photography, sometimes with large sections on film developing and printing.

Not being from the video gaming generation and being more an "in the moment" photographer, I find myself frustrated by the non-intuitive buttons, wheels, and combinations. Therefore, I don't make the most of the equipment I have. I agree that I shouldn't have to buy a 3rd party book in order to successfully operate my camera - that should be accomplished by a properly written Owner's manual.

I appreciate all of the advances that electronics and digital sensors have given us. Being freed from the 36, 24, 16, or 12 frame limits of film - along with the cost are a great advantage, in addition to all of the additional capabilities of our cameras. Trade-offs rule! More complexity requires more manual. The computer software industry showed us that we needed someone other the the software companies to provide more easily understandable operation manuals for complicated systems. This thread is evidence to that.

LDDDAD1

As a certified English teacher ( at one time in my life) I have often thought I could make a bundle translating camera manuals! lol!

User ID

Sometimes you only think you know where all the controls are but there are
surprises, things not obvious, things you weren’t actually looking for but often prove useful.

And, other less pleasant surprises ... A manual tells you how you can assign AF start to an alternate button but it doesn’t express the concept of BBAF, and so the instruction for assigning an alternate AF start button neglects to say “Dear user, FYI, the shutter button is still also an AF start button, so go elsewhere to disable that if you want the actual BBAF protocol instead of a useless extra AF button”.

Just one common example there above. The more advanced the camera, the deeper the secrets that it’s hiding from those users who rely solely on the OEM user manual.

planepics Loc: St. Louis burbs, but originally Chicago burbs

I still have the manuals that came with my Canon AE-1 Program film camera...and the camera, which I last used a couple years ago in a college photo-1/darkroom class. I'm not sure how long the leftover Ilford B/W film is, though.

lsaguy Loc: Udall, KS, USA

I'm not going to wade through all the comments so if someone got here first I apologize. I got a pristine manual for my D300 from KEH for a whopping $8. Now I have the paper manual, the one loaded on my phone just didn't work for me. Good luck and have a very merry Christmas.

Rick

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

All my manuals are in Apple Books on my iPhone and iMac. It is a great portable PDF reader.

Easy is hard. Good manuals ARE difficult to produce. I wrote many software and portrait photography training manuals and video scripts during my career at Delmar, Herff Jones, and Lifetouch.

It takes writing every day for years before a good tech writer earns his/her “chops.” The Japanese are translating a very differently-structured language into English for several local variants. It often comes out “Jenglish”. So I have some sympathy for the job they do!

The information is there, if you can pry it out and give it context. Learning from camera manuals is often circumspect, requiring read-try-do-read a book-read the manual-try-do...

luvmypets Loc: Born & raised Texan living in Fayetteville NC

Thank you for this info!!! I have found the Nikon D810 manual at KEH and purchased it. This makes me very happy!!!

Thanks again!!! Merry Christmas and may we all have a much better 2021!!

Dodie

david.udin

Having done some tech writing, I can testify it is extremely difficult to do well, even after you answer the basic questions of how basic to start and how far to go. The camera manual writers have it especially difficult with these questions. I have felt all the same frustrations described in this thread, but it's usually of the form "why would I want to set such and such parameter?". The writer's job here really isn't to teach you how to do photography, nor to give you definitions of common (more or less) terms of art. I think they are pretty much forced to just give you a road map, not a Fodor's or Frommer's tourist guide to how to best do photography with the canonikuji XDFEOS-4200SIIR.

The books that people have been recommending are addressing just such questions. So do the many, many (free) youtube videos and web sites. I'm currently going through learning a new camera: google is my friend. Most searches will not only tell you what X does, but lead you to many (sometimes contradictory) sources on why you would want to set X. And there are many videos that will tell you how the presenter sets up his or her canonikuji XDFEOS-4200SIIR and why. After a couple of those I'm actually finding not a consensus, but a feeling that I know what will work for me.

And being able to search a pdf gets you past the organization of the manuals--ranging from fairly logical to huh?--and the frequent lack of an index! I usually put a copy of the pdf on my smartphone, but I've found that there is no substitute for watching youtube videos and reading weblogs with the camera in my hands and pausing to try out everything the presenter is talking about.

Two cameras ago I didn't get a chance to do much of this before taking a new camera to the Galapagos and Peru, with some missed and botched shots as a result. Just having the manual along wasn't sufficient; you can't learn the camera from the manual unless it's from the same "family" as your last one, so you pretty much know it already. In this case it was my first mirrorless, so I needed to make a major adjustment to my overall approach to taking pictures. One camera ago was another camera body from the same line with the only significant difference being that it has a dial for exposure compensation instead of having to push a button and turn a shared dial. I only gave the manual a cursory glance-through. My latest is from a different maker, so it's back to the internet...

One of the very best things about digital photography is that it costs nothing to experiment. Practice, practice, practice.

Cheers,

David

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

Life is like photography, if you don't read the manual, you don't know the rules.

BebuLamar

Some of the cameras manual that came with the cameras are terrible but still I prefer them to the third party ones.