Mac Loc: Pittsburgh, Philadelphia now Hernando Co. Fl.

Yes sir!

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

Yup!

I've started a crowd-funding website to buy every last DSLR on the market and all of the manufacturing rights and patents. Once my purchasing is done, I will sell them as collectors items. So as you see stuff start to disappear, from the shelves, you know why. . . It's my retirement plan . . .

GeneG

My first real camera was a Brownie Reflex, and it took GREAT pictures. (OK, I was ll years old at the time.)

User ID

Likewise I wouldn’t be surprised if you had a digital SLR. They were once “the next new thing”.

Actually made a fine living continuously trashing last year’s “next new things”. A very fun job and somebody’s gotta do it.

But now that no one pays me to do that, stuff just accumulates. Being a terrible housekeeper, yes there really are some blank CDs in the storeroom along with a few old 20MP digital SLRs, vinyl LPs and various other long expired merchandise.

If the sun ever returns maybe I’ll do a big spring clear out sale.

SouthShooter Loc: Southern USA

Like everything else they’ll probably become obsolete but that will mean years of bargains on used equipment!

John Hicks Loc: Sible Hedinham North Essex England

I always read what chg Canon sends in but on this occaission I cannot agree with him, I cannot imagine Canon want to take the chance of losing all the users of DSLR cameras and ef and efs lenses overnight the it is suggested as the return on their r+d on that equipment will not be fully realised.
As good as the R5 is they risk losing all the pro photographers who use the1dx mark 3 and those who use the top end f2f dslrs, it would cost a minimum of twenty five thousand pounds to buy a R5 and good selection of lenses.

I don't think Can forgets that Fuji make a medium format camera that with three or four lenses will come to twenty five thousand pounds that changing the the r5 + lenses would cost

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

I agree "no longer making" EF / EFS lenses is a misstatement. What I had heard, but misstated, was they will release no new EF / EF-S lens designs beginning 2021. I too think there will be some wonderful deals on the top-line DSLR equipment, especially the FF models designed to last for decades. The cameras at 20MP+ have more than enough resolution for the majority of photography needs.

User ID

Back when trashing last year’s next new thing was my job, some of that trash followed me home. The habit remains, even today, of adopting the “outgoing” model as my personal “newest greatest” ... cuz now I hafta pay for the stuff. As you point out, the deals are on the outgoing models.

ChrisRL

Nothing photo-equipment-related is going anywhere.
How do I know this?
Simple.
Digital is a social medium.
Analog can be, but also can be a private medium.
Depends on "social" and which society we're talking about.


Point in question:

During a recent visit to Hong Kong (yes, last year during the riots for democracy there), I noticed two things that people here in the US don't.

1) there were many (and I mean hundreds) of film processing and printing one-hour outfits still doing business, and also many (and I mean tens per neighborhood) of camera stores still open and doing business;

2) there are many (I mean tens in the area) camera service and repair stores, still doing business. All of them had analog cameras in their display windows. I'm talking Arcas, Contaxes, as well as Canons, Nikons;

3) I visited my old go-to camera store, last visited in the 90's, and not only was it still open, with over a thousand cameras up and for sale, used and new, but

but

there was EXACTLY ONE Leica Digilux 2 digital camera among all the tens of Leicas, Canons, Nikons, Alpas, Contaxes Rolleis, etc for sale.

There were NO OTHER DIGITAL CAMERAS either on display or for sale from that store.

I was completely stunned.

BTW the sales team in the store was the exact same sales team from 30 plus years ago who not only recognized me be asked me how life was in Los Angeles, from where I now hail.

Anyway, enough preamble. Here's the reason why.


The Chinese Government keeps track and regulates everything digital in China.
That specifically relates to all things that have pictures.

There are some among us (humans, even in communist China) who don't like that.

So they still do what we have always done. They shoot film, make one-hour prints, and give them, as the precious and sometimes private gifts that they were here and continue to be over there, to each other. (You know, photo albums and such. Quaint, I know.)

Hence all the analog cameras, and all the one-hour and custom labs and print shops.

Huge, huge business from mainland China. For those of you who don't know, there are more people over there than there ever was over here.

So.

Yes, digital is great, fine, super, etc.
But only in certain societies.

In the biggest population on this planet of ours, analog seems to not only have NOT gone away, it is well, and flourishing.

DSLRs? Well they were long considered the pinnacle of 35mm film camera designs. But there are mirrorless 35mm cameras, like the Leicas, that still rule the roost as well. And apparently those strange but wonderful devices such as the persnickety but perfectly serviceable Leica Visoflexes that can move one single type of camera firmly into the reflex field, so that M users can have reflex system capability as well.

But who needs them? Film is dead and DSLRs are dead, right?

Sure. Sell them all, and let the dinosaurs like me and the new photo stores in Hong Kong and other societies keep on snapping them up at bargain-basement clearance prices while our kids all go for their iPhone 25's or Android Super Duper XXXs, and then "graduate" to the latest plastic digital equipment with every more petapixels that most will never ever need or use. Not on social media, anyway.

Please. A well-built analog camera lasts for a very long time, mirror or not.

My IIIf still works well enough to shoot a "modern lifestyle" assignment last month. What year was that made in?

If it's a dinosaur, it seems to me to be in great health, for a bag-o-bones. And I still have fully functional, and sometimes in service, Nikon F3HP, F4S, F2A, F plus Leica film SL and SL2 bodies.

Compared to the longest-lasting digital dinosaur? Probably, according to the Leica forum's longest single thread in existence, the 5MP Digilux-2's March 28, 2007-originated one, still very much alive today, that would be, what, some 13 years?

The IIIf was for sale, brand new, in 1950, 17 years after the original Leica III came out. Mine still works some 70 years later. And there are still people, yes, even here in the USA, who know how to service them properly.

Plus it's still a commercially viable image acquisition tool: my local (Hong Konger owner run) film lab, print store and scanner service still functions here in Los Angeles, and is reasonably busy still even through this pandemic. So film is still available, the lab still runs, prints and digital copies are still possible.

What can I say? The 70-year-old dinosaur may be long dead and gone - but nobody sent it the memo so it just keeps on tickin'...

Quel horreur! Digital sacrilege!

Will new camera companies keep on trying to sell new cameras to kids?

Surely. Apple foremost.

And hey, I own one of those too. Nothing wrong with it.
And yes, it replaced a whole slew of analog cameras, and yes, specifically, the comparable ones, made of plastic, some even with plastic lenses, or built around a roll of film that one just sent to the lab to be broken open for the film roll to be taken out and processed... well yes. Digital will replace shoddily made plasticky snapshot cameras from the Kodak Brownie on down.

But.

There are no. None. Zero. Plasticky made SLRs on the planet. It takes real engineering knowhow to make one of those work. D or no D.

Nikon F. Pentax Spotmatic. Alpa Swiss. Even my very first SLR as a spotty teenager, the 1952 Zenit M39. All pretty much built like tanks. My SL and SL2s still work like clockwork, maybe because their progenitors were indeed drawn up by folk who used to be Swiss watchmakers. Listen to their mechanical shutters go off at 1/4 or 1/2 second and you will know exactly what I mean.

Will today's manufacturers still continue to make (Sacrilege!) mechanical cameras with mirrors in them? Well I know of at least one who will continue, probably because the others won't.

Does that mean the old cameras will turn into dust?

Well, that depends. Even as recently as the 90's (and that's a whole 30 years ago, BTW, for those who don't want to count up that far), people were actually making equipment that lasted beyond the current 3-year warranty cycles. And they didn't go for planned obsolescence, where said equipment is designed to fall apart to dust exactly a day after said warranty expires, or their designers get fired).

Especially not the analog photo dinosaurs. They built stuff to last. And last they have.

And pretty soon, who knows? Our societies here in the first world might get really tired of our imagery being thought of as disposable digital toilet paper. And being plundered and exploited by the very social media corporations that could be as venal to our self-interest as the Government of the People's Republic of China is to their own population's rights to privacy.

And so, well, we might well think about keeping all of our analog cameras, darkroom equipment, and the like, just cos.

As a pro, I've dumped a lot of that gear over the past 30-40 years.

But as a pro, I've since bought a lot of it back again, when one day, one job just needed a real tilt-shift f/32 job by somebody who still knows who or what Scheimpflug is -- or a real TLR job (yes, there are such things still), or something we used to have, but replaced it for "better".

"Newer" is not necessarily "better".

There.

Now you know everything.

Sorry for the rant, HTH, Jm2c, YMMV etc.

axiesdad Loc: Monticello, Indiana

Isn't the question really something like, "Will DSLRs disappear so quickly that I need to change platforms NOW if I want to continue to enjoy my hobby?" Of course current technology will one day be obsolete, who knows how soon that day will arrive.

ChrisRL

You need to take photos. Good art.
By whatever means necessary. And the more means available, now or 1000 years from now, the better.
IMO.

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

The lives of 3 billion DSLRs ended on <fill in blank>. The survivors of this mirrored-camera Armageddon will call it Judgment Day. They lived only to face a new nightmare: the rise of the Mirrorless camera

Alas, Judgment Day has come and past several times:

January 1, 1000
October 22, 1844
March 20, 1997
August 29, 1997
April 21, 2011
December 8, 2020 (pending confirmation at 3pm)

BebuLamar

I do not believe you that when someone buy a mirrorless a Nikon DSLR would explode. But do you know when Canon stops making the DSLR?

Mac Loc: Pittsburgh, Philadelphia now Hernando Co. Fl.

ChrisRL

Is Canon the sole manufacturer of the SLR?
Really?
Maybe someone should send the others a memo.