Timer control or exposure delay?
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Are cameras and menus too complicated?
- Thread starter woof woof
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Timer control James
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- Phil
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No!
Anyone getting hung up on the myriad of options available instead of concentrating on just what they need is guilty of falling for the ‘tail wagging the dog’.
90% of the time when I pick up a camera, I look at the top plate to check the ISO setting (in case it’s not A) put the camera to my eye to check the aperture and focus point selected, adjust as required, shoot, adjust.
Generally the only settings ever changed are the aperture and exp comp. that makes my modern cameras much simpler than the manual film cameras I learned on.
And in order to gain this simplicity I spent 20mins with the camera out of the box setting it up to suit me.
Now if my general shooting was of a different subject, I’d have a different camera and have set it up in a different way. But once set it’s simple to use without ever having to use the menus unless I wish to do something I’ve not done before (first time I used video, I checked the settings were suitable).
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Got to agree with Phil on this , the settings are there so you can achieve the finished article to a fair degree of perfection . If your looking for something different then it can be altered in menu . I’ve been down the road of canon,Nikon, Panasonic, Olympus etc and they all have there little quirks and different terminology for the same things .. it’s just a matter of learning them .. I do find that Nikon. (My current brand) although having a larger and more complicated menu system is probably the best to adjust to though once learnt
Also agree. Many of the menu items (and theres 58 on some of the models custom setting bank) are really fine tuning. Example bracketing order Under >MTR > Ovr, MTR > Under > Over: is quite a fine tune IF you're bracketing and how often do you bracket. Or setting the number of focus points. Again quite a specific tuning element.
So in a nutshell the menuing systems are complex but only there to be able to configure the number of features of the camera. So should the question be do cameras have too many features these days?
I suspect the answer to that is a combination of designers responding to feedback from consumers and wanting to keep up with the competition.
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I do think the advent of using a camera to shoot video as well as stills has complicated matters a lot to . my personal view is they should have stayed as separate entities , but that's up to supply and demand I suppose does someone that shoots 98% movies want the 2% of stills or vice versa , I have 4k video on my Panasonic but used it once in a year not my ball game . but handy I suppose at times never yet tried it on the nikons
StephenM
I know a Blithering Idiot
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I think that there's a difference between options and complexity.
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Well it's a definite No then, as I've never found the menu's on my digital cameras complex.
In fact - compared to previous film cameras with a lack of buttons and screen estate - my digital cameras are a breeze, setting up eye focus on the old film Canon's required the instruction manual - no one could have possibly guessed the sequence.
I think they (the cameras) are complex purely because of the number of features the menus and the buttons have the potential to control, but I don't think they are complicated because once you know what the camera can do, how to do it is fairly intuitive. Take the way to take a direct measurement white balance (again 99% of the time you wouldn't because you can shoot raw and adjust in post). If you didn't know the camera could do that then its one less complexity to have to deal with, but if you know it can actually doing it is fairly easy.
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I like the idea of this, but it's over-simplifying reality.
Sony A7:
Want continuous shooting? There's a menu for that.
Want a different AF mode? There's a menu for that.
Want autobracketing, self timer etc? There's a menu for that.
Want manual focus aids instead of AF? There's a menu for that.
Want to adjust ISO? There's a menu item that lets you assign it to a control wheel.
Etc.
Yes, you can just take the camera from the box, set the date & time and then start taking pictures, but if you aren't going to make use of the stuff that's buried in the menus then you have wasted a lot of money. Something that I really liked about the Nikon D610 when I had it was that it was JUST like handling a film camera on the surface, and using an F301 that I bought in January wasn't very different apart from lack of AF. But the Sony is NOT like that, and while you can assign all the usual functions to rotary controls on the outside of the body, if you want to use the abilities of a very powerful photographic tool then some menu-diving is not optional. There is a 'favourites' button, but that brings up a (smaller) menu.
OTOH I DO like the fact that there are 3 rotary controls that can be assigned 1 each to aperture, shutter speed and ISO, so with that set up *can* work like a traditional camera.
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But surely (and I've never owned a Sony) you can take it from the box and go through the menus to set your preferences for all the modes you might wish to enable.
Surely if you want to use manual focus aids you don't have to go to a menu to go through options?
The 7d is the most complex camera I own - and when I bought a 2nd one - it took me 10 minutes to go through all the menus to set it to behave exactly the same as the first one - and never had to revisit the menus again except to synchronise the clocks.
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This is the second sony I've owned. Foolishly I assumed it would be like the A58 but 'just a bit more', and it took a youtube video plus an hour of fiddling to create 3 basic patches that I can use everyday. Manual is not entirely helpful. A part of the problem is that menu items are not grouped logically, but scattered across many menus and not always given logical names, however it is possible to save and upload patches again.
If I mount an old manual focus lens then it automatically uses focus peaking (if that has been turned on in the menu - off by default) and if a compatible AF lens has an AF/MF switch then the viewfinder zooms to 100% to allow fine focus adjustment - but not if the lens does not have a switch (this may also be different in continuous focus, rather than centre point single shot focus). I need to spend another hour fine-tuning, but this is NOT like any DSLR I ever handled.
FWIW I'm a science graduate with 40 years experience, used to working with computers and moderately complicated equipment on a daily basis. The menus aren't impossible, but they're not helpful either.
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Then the answer is 'Sony menus are too confusing'
