Are there simple, tidy digital cameras with all manual controls?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Inspired by the thread about 35 mm film cameras, I am reminded of how elegant they were in their heyday, and how I have not noticed a digital camera with the same simplicity.

You could focus and adjust the aperture with your left hand cradling the lens, and adjust the shutter speed with your right hand on the top near the shutter button. Focus, aperture, shutter speed, shutter button. Four controls, one of them a mere pushbutton. So easy!

I have had, I think, five digicams now that allow manual setting of at least aperture and shutter speed. But they have so many modes and such a complex menu system that I have to use the instruction manual to use them this way, and it is always very fiddly to do so. I think their arbitrary and obscure operating logic and oddly worded manuals are harder to comprehend than manual exposure control ever was - and besides, there’s really no proper way to automate these things, because setting them perfectly requires understanding the photographer’s goal in taking the picture.

Anyway, if I ever saw a good quality digicam that just worked this way, I’d buy it. Will I ever see one?

2

Leica M-E

Fuji X-1Pro

Sony RX1

3

Not cheap.

Some DSLRs by Nikon, Canon, and Pentax have pretty straightforward manual controls (imho), but they are more like a T90 than an FTb.

4

Yes, but you’re forgetting that ASA, white balance, and metering are all equally important for the final output. In “the good old days” those weren’t controlled by a camera manual control because ASA and white balance were determined by the type of film you chose, and metering had to be estimated by a separate light meter (or guestimated). So some of the simplicity you mourn was artificial; a camera with a digital sensor and inbuilt light meter is inherently going to need more controls than one using film.

Most mid level and pro level DSLRs will have separate control dials and buttons for all the major camera functions. So do many of the more advanced mirrorless designs, like the Panasonic GH3, Olympus OMD-EM5, and Sony NEXT 7. They require some configuration before you shoot them for the first time, which means adjusting some settings in the menu system, but after that you can more or less forget those menus and just use the relevant buttons and dials to control the camera directly.

5

Your point about ASA is quite right and I should have listed a control for setting it as a necessity for a digital camera. I also said nothing about metering, and in fact at least spot and broad area and incident are three kinds of metering it is well worth having though they add complexity.

But I have a question about white balance for digital cameras, as I don’t actually understand what it is doing. Does it actually change something that happens during exposure? Or is it just a software postprocessing thing that probably duplicates a step the photographer takes later before printing anyway? I mean, changing the effective speed actually changes the gain on the analog to digital converter that reads out the CCD. It does something that can’t be undone during processing after the fact. Does white balance do that? Or is it just a color balance adjustment once the pixels are digitized?

6

White balance is a digital setting alterable in post processing. Different sources of light cast different colors on objects, and if the camera doesn’t know what light is lighting a scene, you can get incorrect results, since ultimately pictures are collections of photons striking red blue and green sensors, there’s no “objective” white balance. Most of the time cameras are very good at figuring out what they’re looking at exactly, so you rarely have to mess with it. Without something telling it the temperature of the light, the camera wouldn’t understand how to make sense of the photon data it was collecting.

Retro design has been a thing recently and there’ve been a lot of cool cameras based on it. NoClueBoy covered some of the examples, but also the Fuji X100 (or soon X100s) is along those lines too. I want that as a second (well, third, I guess) camera myself.

You aren’t really being clear with your requirements. Are you looking for something compact? Something with interchangeable lenses? What’s your price range?

Digital cameras will be inherently slightly more complex than film cameras because the type of film you stuck in a camera was one of the modifiers, and that’s reflected in the ISO functions of cameras.

Pentax DSLRs keep it pretty simple. (they’re kind of a by-photographers-for-photographers niche). No gimmicky/beginner scene modes you rarely have to dig around in the menus, you can use TAv mode which will let you forget about iso (no idea why other camera makers don’t have an equivelant - it’s so useful but everyone else’s auto-iso system tends to be really obscure for some reason), so you’d just use the front dial for shutter speed, rear for aperture. Or you could buy an old lens that would have the aperture. I use this made sometime during the 60s - manual focus, manual aperture, but still takes great pictures.

But yeah, the modern “semi-pro” class of DSLRs can usually be fairly simple with enough manual controls that you aren’t digging through menus.

7

And then there’s flash settings…

But in addition to those controls, camera manufacturers tend to “complexify” digital cameras (especially low-level models aimed at beginners) by adding all kinds of “creative” and “scene” modes. in theory, this simplifies things for the beginner, who doesn’t need to bother to learn any of the basics of exposure: set the dial to 'snow" is you’re photographing a snow scene, “night exposure” if you’re taking a picture of a friend after dark, etc. In practice, though, those modes add unneeded complexity - which is why most higher-end DSLRs omit them.

Also, most digital cameras these days can shoot video, so that adds yet another set of controls. (Which I hate, as I shoot stills only.)

Fortunately, the higher-end DSLRs come with more genuinely useful buttons (and thus minimize the menu-diving), and fewer if any goofy 'creative filters" or “scene modes”. So for someone who actually already knows the basics of photography, they are actually easier to use than the supposedly “beginner-friendly” models.

As SenorBeef said, “white” light isn’t - in most cases, it’s colored. Our brain automatically adjusts for this in most cases: you generally don’t notice any color difference between an object under incandescent lights (which give off a strongly reddish light) and the same object out under sunlight (which is much more blue). But an impartial measuring device, like a piece of film or a camera sensor, will notice and faithfully record that color difference. So if you want to record the scene the way our eyes see it, you have to tell the camera sensor which way to compensate: “this light is reddish, so tone down the reds and emphasize the blue tints a bit more”. That’s what white balance is: you’re telling the camera what type of lighting you’re shooting under.

If you shoot RAW, white balance doesn’t matter, because you can adjust it in post-processing. But if you shoot JPEG, the camera is doing post-processing of the file before it writes it to the card, and once that in-camera post-processing has been done, there’s no way to retrieve the original data. So if the white balance of a JPEG file is very incorrect, you can’t fix it. If it’s only off by a little, you’ll be able to tweak it some - but when shooting JPEGs, making sure the white balance setting is correct for the actual lighting you’re working with is important.

8

This is why I love my Fujifilm X100 - it operates just like a manual film camera. It has a dedicated shutter speed dial and a dedicated aperture dial. And these dials are exactly where you’d expect: shutter speed dial on top, aperture dial on the lens barrel. Each of these dials has an A marking if you want one or both to be automatic. The autofocus isn’t very fast, but other than that, it’s delightfully responsive and quiet thanks to the leaf shutter. I haven’t had this much fun with photography since I retired my old Nikon FM2 and replaced it with a DSLR.

In fact, I love it so much that I just sold it and ordered the new X100S. It’s almost identical, but it has a better focus sensor; in manual focus mode, it even displays an overlapping image in the center like real rangefinder cameras. (It uses the “phase detection” feature of the new imaging sensor, which just means some of the pixels near the center only receive light from the right half of the aerture, and some from the left.)

The only downside of this camera (apart from the price tag) is the fixed lens. If you want an interchangeable lens camera, there’s the Fujifilm XE-1, which is also a very nice camera. Its “kit lens” (18-55 zoom) is the nicest kit zoom I know of - it’s mostly metal, and has a nice smooth zoom ring. It’s not quite as fast or quiet as the X100S though.

9

My understanding is, it does not affect the analog or A/D gain of the camera, but it does affect the conversion to JPEG. So if you set it to Daylight and shoot under incandescent light, your JPEG image may end up with a lot of pixels that are saturated in the red channel and very dark in the blue channel. That means information is lost.

But if you save RAW images instead of (or in addition to) JPEG, you basically have the raw digital output from the CCD. So you can apply a different white balance in post-processing, and it’ll look as good as if you’d applied it when you took the picture.

10

Just for fun one time, I went out to a local garden on a bright, sunny day and shot the same scene in JPEG mode over and over, using each white balance setting on my camera. I still remember how the shot using the Tungsten setting looked: blue, blue, blue! It looked like an underwater garden from a fairy tale.

11

Felt like bumping this one because I had been following this thread earlier and I wanted to give my new hands-on opinion of the Fuji cameras.

A few months ago I purchased the Fuji X-Pro 1, with the 35mm F/1.4 lens (50mm equiv). To be brief, it is my favorite camera I have ever used or owned.
It has everything I wanted: full manual controls with beautiful images and quality lenses.

But the 35mm “50” is a little tight for some subjects and I have found myself reaching for my old P&S camera occasionally when I needed a wider angle lens, so today I went to the camera store (still a few of them around) with the intent of purchasing a 18mm Fuji XF lens.

They also had a used x100 on the shelf, in mint condition for the same price as the lens.

It was a very difficult decision, with camera gurus at the store telling me not to bother with the little camera when I already have a good system camera, but I considered that the x100 has almost as good a lens, though it is 23mm vs. 18mm, and it would be mighty convenient to have it sitting in my not-so-large bag right next to the X-Pro1—no lens changing needed if I wanted a slightly wider shot.

I couldn’t be happier. The image quality is excellent, the camera is fun to use, it will go places that I don’t want to take the X-Pro 1. It’s more of a “all manual” point-and-shoot camera than a system camera. It is also a stealthy camera: with the shutter sound turned off, the leaf shutter makes a barely perceptible brushing sound, nothing like the clack of the X-Pro 1’s focal-plane shutter, which is itself much quieter than the slapping of an SLR mirror.

Sure these cameras have their quirks: they aren’t for birders or sports photographers. I have noticed that the x100 focus is fiddly, as everyone has said on the 'net.

That said, the “focus by wire” of the X-Pro 1 lenses is a hundred times smoother and easier to use than the poor imitation of manual focus on the x100. Maybe scr4 can provide some feedback on how the x100s fares in that department. Additionally, I immediately missed the nice stuff like focus peaking and the Q menu from the X-Pro 1, and I know that that was available in the x100s from the start.

Perhaps the greatest feature of the new x100s is that it has the same sensor as its big brothers. My used x100 does not. But I’m still happy with the images I am getting.

Speaking of which, the new X cameras with the 16MP X-Trans sensor can almost see in the dark.
I am sure other cameras in this price range have good ISO performance, but I was blown away by the X-Pro 1. It doesn’t have a flash, but I have never noticed it. I can take clean pictures in dimly lit rooms at night at ISO 3200 and F/1.4 with no visible noise. I have never had a camera that could do that before. It goes up much higher, but I haven’t had the need to try it.

Either of the Fujifilm X cameras would be fun for people who want old-school aperture rings and shutter speed dials. Note that the new XM1 doesn’t have the manual controls.
If you don’t need an optical viewfinder but still want the interchangeable lenses you can save 400 bucks and get the Fuji XE 1.

12

I like my Canon 60D. I has a large dial on the back and one up near the shutter release. These two control the aperture and the shutter speed. Very easy to do both while looking through the camera.

Only recently did I start using the automatic film speed and let the camera select a film speed on the fly as I’m choosing my exposure. It’s OK.

13

Sounds great.

14

I missed this thread the first time round. I recently updated my Panasonic DMC-FZ30 to a DMC-FZ50 (functionally identical to the older model but with a TTL metered Flash hotshoe). Both are 4-5 year old 12x zoom bridge cameras, but the thing I love is the controls. They both have manual zoom rings, with a manual focus ring if you turn it on. Small wheels on the body under the thumb and first finger allow adjustment of shutter and aperture in the appropriate mode. It is so easy and natural to use, I love it.

Sadly they have moved away from the manual controls in the latest models, which up the zoom to 60x. I like zoom, but I like manual control more, and probably won’t upgrade unless I get tempted by full HD video.