Mirrorless or DSLR

8/26/2018 Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, MI 
Nikon D5500 ISO 3200 18mm F/3.5 1/60th 

 The camera industry is in flux, from Digital Single Lens Reflex aka DSLRs to Mirrorless cameras - the best of which look like an SLR.  I own both, I have an early Fujifilm fixed lens mirrorless (Fuji Finepix S) and my daily use Nikon D5500 DSLRs (I have two of them.)  

A mirrorless camera varies from a digital point and shoot in that it has an optical viewfinder, not just the video screen on the back.  I bought the Fujifilm camera before I decided to spend money on a DSLR, because I wanted a camera that had a viewfinder.  In bright outside light the video screens on the back of the camera can be hard to see.  It was more like the experience of a 35mm SLR that I had grown up with and trained on.  

The SLR style mirrorless cameras have a viewfinder that views a small internal video screen that displays what is on the imaging sensor.  This has an advantage when shooting video, in that you can use the eye level or optical viewfinder when shooting video. When shooting video on a DSLR, you have to rely on the video display because the mirror can't move back and forth fast enough to view through the lens - that may not be impossible, but it certainly is impractical.  

The internal video display in a mirrorless camera gives a different view than a DSLR under difficulty lighting, because it is displaying the camera corrected video view, not the image coming through the lens.  This can make low light photography easier, but for someone trained in working with the image coming through the lens, it is less authentic.  The video processing takes away some of the control of the image.  What I see is artificially lighter.   

At this point I am firmly in the DSLR camp.  Not just because I own the hardware, I went shopping last summer considering switching, but I stood there in a dimly lit camera shop and looked through the mirrorless camera and saw a video enhanced image, looked at the same scene through a DSLR and saw what was really around me, as it was, not an enhanced or processed image.  I know how to work with that raw image, how to get the most out of it.  I like the authenticity of the DSLR.  

Nikon has made what I believe is a strategic mistake with DSLRs and Mirrorless, the lenses are not really compatible.  The simple answer why, is they took advantage of the mirrorless camera not having a mirror, to shorten the distance between the lens mount and the imaging sensor.  Yes, they make an adaptor, so DSLR lenses will work on a mirrorless body. But that is always going to be an adapter, a compromise, not something that was designed to work this way.  

The result of the mistake, when I buy a complex mirrorless camera, I have no reason to remain brand loyal.  In the 35mm days, the same lenses that worked on the mass market Nikormatt, worked on the top of the line Nikon F series; on Cannon the same FD series breach-lock mount lenses that worked on the FTb, worked on the F-1n, and later on the AE1 series. This stayed this way for the major manufactures until autofocus came in. Once you owned a couple of those lenses, you had reason to remain brand loyal. (The FD lenses were amazing glass - I wish I still had a few of them.) Changes in auto focus made this a bit of a mess, I have a Nikon S mount lens what will fit, but not autofocus on my D5500's, a detail that was not explained when I was shopping.  

I am afraid DSLRs are a dying breed.  I would really like to see a major manufacturer take up the flag to continue true DSLR designs, if they want to offer the best of both worlds, make a broad selection of lenses that work on every new camera they offer.