XPost: rec.photo.digital 
 From: dd-b@dd-b.net 
  
 edward ohare  writes: 
  
 > On Mon, 06 Sep 2004 14:13:30 -0000, andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid 
 > wrote: 
 > 
 > 
 >>This is doubly strange when you consider that the final paragraph in 
 >>this snippet can also be applied to digital rangefinders.  That's what 
 >>I'm trying to get at: the sheer lack of logic in this proposal. 
  
 > Certainly.  First of all, Thad has done a wonderful job of dealing 
 > with criticism and has been responsive to that criticism voiced by 
 > enough people that it should be considered.  However, it is my 
 > conclusion that what the proposal is about is a group for what Thad 
 > considers to be **real** digital cameras.  The problem is defining 
 > what is a **real** digital camera. 
  
 I think this is completely unfair. 
  
 *I* will certainly go on record as saying that a Nikon Coolpix 2100 is 
 a "real" camera.  So is a Holga.  Neither of them (in somewhat 
 different ways) is as powerful or flexible a camera as an Olympus 
 E-20.  And an Olympus E-20 isn't as powerful or flexible a camera as a 
 Nikon D70, which in turn isn't as powerful or flexible a camera as a 
 Canon 1Ds.  And then MF and LF gear is off at more of an angle away 
 from this stuff -- it's *worse* at a lot of things, but better at 
 others, whereas the previous sequence is largely one of increasing 
 capabilities (the only downside being price, weight, and learning 
 curve). 
  
 It seems to be a given (which I don't like, but which seems to be 
 "given" by the way people use newsgroups rather than by any arbitrary 
 rules made by people, so there isn't anything I can do about it) that 
 discussion will be divided based at least notionally on the equipment 
 used. 
  
 There's already an MF group and a 35mm group and a digital group. 
 There's some tension in the digital group between people buying P&S 
 cameras and people using DSLRs.  There's a fair amount of 
 cross-posting between digital and 35mm, and there's some discussion of 
 digital work in the 35mm group (the DSLRs are all currently closely 
 based on 35mm designs, and all but the Olympus E-1 share lenses 
 heavily with 35mm cameras).  The P&S traffic *used to* end up in the 
 35mm group, and there's still some of that (but much reduced, as 
 interest in film-based P&S cameras has declined). 
  
 And I don't think anybody really wants to get off into a full reorg of 
 the hierarchy; that's a *huge* project and fairly likely to fail. 
 *AND* the facts on the ground are changing so fast at the moment that 
 many decisions made in a complete reorg might be wrong next year. 
  
 Of the things we can do *today*, taking the biggest group in the 
 rec.photo hierarchy and cutting it kind-of in half looks like one of 
 the few things we can do now that will be relatively useful in making 
 the groups more useful now. 
  
 So the question before us (and the question posed by this RFD) is, 
 where to draw the line? 
  
 It's true that people are buying cameras like the Canon Digital Rebel 
 and making exactly the same sort of use of them as people make of the 
 Olympus E-20 -- not exploiting the additional power and capabilities. 
 And many people are using consumer digital cameras to their full 
 abilities and beyond, doing professional work with them and such.  As 
 I said above, people and uses don't actually map perfectly accurately 
 to equipment. 
  
 I don't think it's a life-or-death issue *either way* whether ZLR 
 cameras are explicitly in, or explicitly out.  However, my personal 
 preference is to draw the line based on lens interchangeability; that 
 seems to me to most define a significant *change* as you move up the 
 hierarchy.  That's a spot where the learning curve is steepest, if you 
 like.  And, while doing so, I'd still name the group "dslr", and 
 explain in the charter that from history most people understand SLR 
 cameras to mean those with interchangeable lenses, although that's 
 *not* what the term means by etymology. And that 
 "interchangeable-lens" is both too long (for convenience; it does fit 
 in the 20-character limit we were recently told was the current 
 standard) and too hard to spell. 
  
 (A charter done my way would include the Hasselblad with the digital 
 back and such.  I suspect that those photographers would actually find 
 a more congenial crowd in the MF group, but I wouldn't try to make 
 that decision for them in the new charter.) 
 -- 
 David Dyer-Bennet, ,  
 RKBA:   
 Pics:   
 Dragaera/Steven Brust:  
  
 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)