On the down side, "If it's good enough for the royal family..." - why pay for a pro?

oh my goddd ... if even the royal family can't pay for photographers, WHO WILL ?? 

Foveon-based, big-pocket Sigma DP2M (or DP3M). Best IQ after D800.

i've read several reviews about that camera and there are many drawbacks :

- slow software
- slow writing RAW files
- battery lasting just 100 or 200 photos ?
- slow autofocus
- noisy above ISO 400
- need tripod even in good conditions ??
- no cable release !
- max shutter = 30 seconds, no bulb mode


i mean for 1000$ it doesnt look like a bargain ... the Sony RX100 is just 650$ and comes with a zoom (24-100mm equivalent)

i've seen a few samples images, they all look good but if they've all been shot on a tripod well i'm not that impressed, even an old D40 would do it and probably better when paired with a 100$ prime or with the 18-55 kit lens.

then again they all rave about great colors and sharpness, what the he-ll ... you can get even better colors using PS or LR properly, as for sharpness well they're using a good prime lens, i would be surprised if it wasn't sharp.

by the way, it's sharp but not tack-sharp as a 2000$ lens.

so what's the point of this camera, i don't know.

i'm excited to see many companies pushing this market niche but so far i see too many drawbacks, maybe in a few years it will become mainstream, we'll see.

From my experience I would say not. Obviously you can take a decent stock image with a P&S ... but it is much harder to do so and usually only possible in near-perfect conditions.

Apart from the noise, the shutter-lag and the crappy lenses the worst thing is that view-finders on P&S cameras are mostly designed to be used at arms-length nowadays ... and you can't take good sharp images like that.

My walkaround (or in my case mainly 'cycle-around') camera is the smallest, lightest, cheapest DSLR I could find at the time, the Canon 500D. As far as I'm concerned it is 10x better than any P&S camera I've tried. I've wasted tons of money (and lost stock opportunities) on the latest super-dooper, "just as good as a DSLR" P&S cameras ... only to be disappointed and invariably selling them on, for a fraction of what I paid, with barely 100 shutter-operations registered. My family and friends appreciate it though!

exactly.

you CAN do great images with modern high-end P&S but it's still frustrating and price-wise it's not cheap too.

they're small but they're slow and they're good only in daylight.

i mean a 500$ D5200 with kit lens 18-55 beats the many Sony NEX / panasonic/ Nikon 1/J1 hands down in any department.

i would love a pocket mirrorless pseudo-DSLR as fast as a real DSLR with small lenses etc but so far i see nothing worth the hassle.

Fuji had the balls to launch the X series, but nikon and canon will never follow the same path, too conservative and scared about low sales.

the next killer camera can only come from companies like Fuji, or maybe Pentax, Sony, who knows, but never ever from Nikon/Canon in my opinion.

it would a risky move for an agency to change the keyword weight overnight, but then again istock thinks to be special.

yes, 30 million images on SS and in 3 yrs it will be 90 millions.

the immediate result will be the death of microstock as a sustainable model for suppliers as it will be impossible to have repeated sales justifying the production costs.

nothing new actually, but you've all been warned in the past about this obvious outcome but you've never wanted to listen.

however, agencies like SS could "correct" the ranking and give more prominence to new images for instance, or randomizing a bit more the results.

in any case the supply is overwhelmingly higher than the demand, with falling sales and with such low fees even the image factories will struggle to stay afloat.

basically, suppliers will be required to double their portfolio each year in the hope of retaining the same payout, but this could be backfire if the ranking algorithm doesn't give any weight to new images and keeps the old ones sandboxed.

Quote from: Xanox on August 15, 2013, 21:08

hahaha that's microstock dirty little secret ... all this BS about exclusivity is nonsense, nobody will care or notice if you're exclusive while selling on other agencies, in case they catch you just say it's been a mistake or whatever.

Actually, IS has been very thorough and methodical for the most part throughout the years. I guess that is part of why the Yuri thing ruffled a lot of feathers.

chasing this sort of infringments is just not profitable for micro agencies, it's a cost with no return on investment, and what's the point anyway when they've 30K contributors ? yeah i'm boring but this BS about exclusives is just nonsense, look at Reportage By Getty, that's an exclusive boutique stock agency ... a few dozens of photographers, each well paid and with a contract, each with his bio page, hard to get in, etc etc

so, they should better focus on making bloggers pay for using pirated images in my opinion, it seems to have worked well a few years ago when Getty launched a crackdown.

hahaha that's microstock dirty little secret ... all this BS about exclusivity is nonsense, nobody will care or notice if you're exclusive while selling on other agencies, in case they catch you just say it's been a mistake or whatever.

the best advice i can give is to start from a GOOD image rather than expecting PS to make miracles.

because, you can actually do miracles with PS but in which field exactly ? if we look at Color Corrections there a re few gurus out there that with Lab Color will get incredible results, problem is it will create a LOT of noise and they never show you the image at 100% for obvious reasons !

as for sharpness, if the original is badly focused you have many good plugins and many other techniques to improve the image but then again it will not look 100% natural and it will add a lot of noise !

contrast, shadows, highlights, same as above and it will be a lot more obvious with images shot by night and i mean A LOT, so much that your only fix will be a de-noise plugin and a downsize of 50%.

of course if you print the photo it will look good but on a monitor all the issues are visible.

sensor noise is THE problem for digital photography, even at ISO 100 in daytime as you can see if you make extreme color corrections, noise will pop up from nowhere especially if your sensor has no AA-filter, and don't confuse AA with de-noising, they're two different things !

Quote from: Xanox on August 08, 2013, 23:17

this recent boom in fly by night companies trying to monetize mobile cr-ap snapshots is ridicolous, they're totally downplaying how difficult is to sell and licence images nowadays !

I think that covers it. Parasites working off the hopes, dreams and efforts of artists who are desperate enough to take peanuts and spare change, or anything, so make some money. Desperation is not a good way to approach an independent photo business and income. Promises cost the FBN agencies nothing, and some can make some money before they shrink away.

my impression is there are far too many self-appointed "artists" nowadays and very few serious buyers, the supply/demand ratio is incredibly unbalanced.

as much as they delude themselves thinking that nowadays "anyone is a photographer" because they use some psycadelic filter on Instagram the reality is that we're flooded by zillions of cr-ap snapshots all looking the same and their net worth is zero unless it's about celebrities or a news scoop and even in that case the random user will have no clue on how to sell it and monetize it.

so many people can't sleep at night trying to figure out how to monetize this ocean of semi-free content available online but guess what, there's just no demand for it, not enough buyers.

millions of people chat on facebook, but so what ? go in every bar and there's people chatting as well, but the only ones monetizing their social activity is the barman selling them a beer !

look at emal .. Gmail is barely making any profit despite showing ads and paid links.
zillions of emails per day, billions of users, and yet it's barely staying afloat.

now, where are these superduper business models monetizing user generated content ? i don't see many despite the whole mumbo jumbo we read on the mainstream media.

we can read about the few dozen "Instagram photo stars", the "twitter kings", and other journalistic BS, but these guys are a lucky bunch, maybe the 0.0001% elite who for whatever unplanned coincidence gathered a huge audience of followers and have a chance to make some money out of it, but for how long ?

as much as i'm convinced exclusivity brings no added value in microstock, agencies like iStock have all the data we can't access and they can judge in real time what's going on, if they haven't killed exclusivity yet it can only mean that somehow they're profiting from it.

same goes for these absurd RC rules and the whole idiotic ranking in diamonds silver/black/gold/uranium ...

so, what's next ? buyers are moving to greener pastures it seems, no matter if IS is aggressively advertising on Adsense etc, the competitors are doing the same (even Yuri, search "stock photos" and there's a paid link to People Images).

i'm afraid their downfall is imminent at this point because it means their loyal buyers are lost forever and they're not going back anytime soon, and why they should anyway ?

it looks like a deja vu of Quark vs Adobe actually ...

"The new Masterfile.com is a game changer"

well, they're quite optimistic !

i think they're testing the waters and will soon open the gates to everybody as they did with ebooks.

however, you can expect they will ripoff contributors with miserable fees as usual.