Is it though or is it better to ditch the dying mount before prices plummet?
Whichever way you look at it, both the traditional Nikon and Canon mounts will eventually become like the Sony A-Mount.
That is probably not going to happen that quickly with either Canon or Nikon. Their mounts may be called 'dying' because they have new mounts, but there are still more DSLR's being sold than mirrorless cameras, and while both companies will start to develop more for their mirrorless mounts, they will not be walking away from a market that still wants products for their old mount cameras in a hurry. Imho
Their mounts will certainly not fade away as quickly as the A mount is doing because there are so many lenses and so many more users.
I don’t buy the “use your old lenses on the new body” approach as that’s just a short-term approach to saving some costs. Native lenses will always have advantages on many different fronts.....
No one is denying that with the benefits of the new mounts images should be better than an equivalent (if there is one) lens on their old mount, but not every can change systems every five minutes. Not everyone can buy a lens whenever they want. Some people struggle to buy a camera and a lens. If they can use lenses they may have in the short term then that can only be a good, especially if the lenses were to work as well as if they were mounted on a DSLR.
Plus there may not be native lenses available in the focal lengths someone may want, and even if they are they me not be at a price someone is willing to pay if there is a similar legacy lens available. There is currently a £1000 premium in the 50mm f1.2 RF lens over the 50mm f1.2 EF lens for example.
Maybe that is one of the reasons a7 users have been using lenses from other manufacturers via adapters since the beginning added to the limited lens options available for new mounts.
This where a lot of people are going wrong especially in the Canon thread, yes there might be no performance disadvantages (trade offs) of EF lenses when compared to how they perform on their existing DSLR bodies, however compare them with native RF lenses and It’ll be a different story.
If EF lenses were that good and couldn’t be improved on, Canon wouldn’t have invented a new RF mount.
The RF mount brings new advantages which can only be taken advantage of with newly designed native RF lenses.
People forget that they also need to add the adaptor which makes the lens longer in length too.
If you want the best possible setup, buy native RF mount.
The reason that both Canon and Nikon had to create new lens mounts was that their DSLR mounts lenses are designed for a DSLR (well 35mm film first obviously
). If they just took away the mirror there would be no size reduction and no potential to improve the performance of the lenses because the sensor would still need to be the same distance from the sensor. So to make cameras with a shorter flange distance they had to change their mounts. Canon chose to keep the same diameter of the EF mount, add more electronic contacts and change the bayonet connection while decreasing the flange distance. Nikon decided to massively increase the diameter of their mount as part of their change whilst also deceasing the flange distance. New mounts were inevitable when going mirrorless, both companies have decided to do things in slightly different ways, and objectively, both have the potential to be technically better than the current Sony mount in the future. Time will tell if they both take advantage of that.
And how come adapters are suddenly a big problem when it is on another brands cameras!
