[obican]

I hope it ends up being a better effort than the half assed Df. Everyone who was involved in the development of that camera's interface should be fired.

 

Specs were amazing on paper. 

 

1. Build a retro looking body. People like retro.
   
2. Use the excellent 16MP sensor, low light is amazing and old AI-S lenses people want can only match that resolution anyway.
   
3. Take the AF module from D610. Yes it's a rather limiting one but people will go for center point AF anyway.
   
4. Make it very lightweight, people like lightweight.
   
5. Make it compatible with  ancient Nikon lenses by adding that long forgotten meter coupling tab. More of a talking point than being of actual use but do it.
   

 

Then it all went downhill.

 

• Body is extremely ugly and fat, unlike any of their old film cameras this one wants to associate itself with.
  
• Surely you can make the camera all stills oriented but why omit video at all? That's bullshit. 
  
• Focus screen is fixed so you can't use split prism finders for actual manual focusing experience.
  
• Design team never used an old film camera in their lives. Ever. 
  
• Seriously, who puts a lock on every single dial you need regularly?
  
• Yaaay look, all external dials for everything. You can use them without looking at them.
  
• You still need two eyes though. You also need to take the camera off of your eye. 
  
• For real, interface is really really fucked up.
  
• Oh and that flashy shutter speed dial is completely optional. 
  
• Actually use AutoISO and pretty much all the dials become useless. They are essentially for looks only.
  
• We know you want to use the aperture dials on the lenses to feel like a real photographer. Shame that none of the modern lenses have those dials. 
  
• So the interface will end up being worse than any Nikon DSLR ever and that's quite an achievment in itself.
  

 

If their mirrorless design team is the same people who came up with Df, it's going to be absolutely awful. If they put the guys who came up with D5, D500, D810 or D750 or D7000 which provided the excellent egronomics for D600/D610 for it, it's going to be great.

 

You need two hands to change between PASM, really. That while a OMG SO RETRO Fuji user can do it with two flicks, without ever taking the camera off of their eye. Both cameras have physical shutter speed and aperture dials. One can actually use them well.

 

I wouldn't put too much trust in anything Nikon or Canon does. I can do this same rant about Canon, concerning how they came up with a very decent competitor to Sony's RX100. Only problem was that Sony was actually at RX100 III at that time, almost ready to release RX100 IV.