My State of the Camera Week article set off a number of discussions amongst me and my readers, and so I want to try a slightly different take on the subject. Let's look at the interchangeable lens camera market a slightly different way: we have consumers, enthusiasts, and pros.
In a perfect world, mass market consumers would buy mirrorless, serious enthusiast photographers would buy DX, and working pros would buy FX. As it turns out, some consumers tend to overbuy (D3s!), some pros want smaller, lighter, but still flexible cameras (GF1 only better), while enthusiasts tend to split between all three camera types. I see enthusiasts who want to travel light looking at mirrorless, enthusiasts who want performance without price looking at DX, and enthusiasts who have pro aspirations using FX.
Thing is, Nikon has the consumer market covered (and who says I never say anything positive about Nikon? ;~). There's absolutely nothing wrong with the D3100, D5100 (when it gets here), and D7000 and the lens sets that are available when looked at from the pure consumer level. Consumers tend to like all-in-one or minimal lens sets and will give up aperture specs for size, price, and convenience. Nikon has lenses out the wazoo for those customers, now in both DX and FX forms. What Nikon yet has for the true mass market consumer is a smaller, lighter system (e.g. mirrorless), but that's coming too.
At the pro end, things are reasonably healthy, too. Pro FX photographers have a wide selection of current and legacy lenses from which to select, and there's little that they're left wanting for other than some much-overdue updates of some key lenses and perhaps a smaller, lighter body choice.
It's really the enthusiasts that are caught without perfect Nikon-supplied solutions, and I find this not just strange, but playing directly against Nikon's past strength. Nikons have always been highly sought after by enthusiasts, more so than any other brand. So the current lack of attention to them is puzzling.
Unfortunately, as I noted earlier the enthusiast plays in all camera markets: compacts, mirrorless, DX, and FX, so they subset themselves into further subsets, which doesn't help the camera makers cater to them.
Let me define who I'm talking about. An enthusiast is serious about photography. Call it their hobby, their avocation, their second love. They seek quality and direct control. They're not afraid of raw, and in fact embrace it. They photograph regularly, and indeed often plan trips and vacations around photography. They tend to have plenty of disposable income to spend on photography, and they tend to be older in age and mostly male. Most have film experience with SLRs. The big problem for camera makers right now is that this group has become amongst the least loyal. That's because no maker is quite serving them well, so the enthusiasts sample and switch looking for "the right system" all the while driving plenty of word of mouth dissonance into the rest of the camera maker's attempts at marketing.
At the core of an enthusiast's desire are a camera that is relatively small and light, highly competent in performance, lets the user be in direct control of about 10 key settings without taking the eye from the viewfinder or the finger off the shutter release, and has a strong base set of key high-quality lenses they desire.
Such a core enthusiast product set doesn't exist in mirrorless, it doesn't exist in DX, and it doesn't quite exist in FX, either. Pieces of the puzzle exist in all these areas, but not the full set. For instance, on the lens side we need five basic lenses at the heart of any enthusiast's system. In DX that would be a 16-50mm f/2.8 and 50-135mm f/2.8 (that's 24-70, 70-200 equivalent), plus 16mm f/2, 35mm f/2, and 60mm f/2 primes. I pick DX for this because they form the largest group of enthusiasts.
Look how the DX-based enthusiast gets there today: 16-85mm f/3.5-5.6, 70-200mm f/2.8, ??, 35mm f/1.8, and 50mm f/1.8D. A smorgasbord of not quite right pieces. The main zoom is variable aperture and a bit slow, the telephoto zoom is a bit long (and thus bigger than desired for the camera platform), one prime is missing in action, one is dead on, and the other comes from the FX lineup, is a little short, and doesn't exactly fit perfectly. In short, the DX user can kind of get there by cobbling a bunch of things together, but there are compromises. (Before I get bunches of emails: note I wrote "core set." I'm not saying enthusiasts don't need or want other lenses--they do--but overall most tend to want a strong traditional base set from which to build their system. They prefer compromises to the extended choices, not in the base set.)
The FX enthusiast picks a D700 body, the 24-70 and 70-200mm, and gets a set of expensive f/1.4G lenses to fill out the prime slots. It can be done there, and there are some intriguing alternatives (16-36mm and 24-120mm f/4) to consider, as well. The FX enthusiast can and does dip into the supply of older f/2.8 primes, too. But they also end up with a fairly large and heavy system.
In mirrorless, Sony and Samsung aren't close to there yet for the enthusiast group. Even m4/3 has its problems: there's no reasonably fast aperture, high-quality zoom set, though we've got 28mm, 35mm, 40mm, and 100mm equivalent primes. Not quite on mark with the primes, yet still a promising start. But where are the constant, faster aperture zooms (12-35mm, 35-100mm)?
In short, this site tends to cater to enthusiasts, less so to pros and even less so to mass market consumers. Thus my comments in State of the Camera Week were mostly slanted towards the under-served enthusiast group.