Last Updated on 02/28/2025 by Lara Carretero
There’s a craze going on right now for DSLRs and retro digicams. And it all makes so much sense. We’ve said for years that digital cameras feel flat and boring. That’s because brands aren’t being daring with their designs and they’re all using the same parts. What’s more, they’ve all tried to cater to an audience of YouTubers and therefore hurt their own products. So, folks have ended up picking up retro DSLRs instead. So how could the DSLR end up returning? Well, first off, I don’t expect the camera brands to do it. But if they did, here’s how they’d need to make it commercially viable.
The DSLR Will Need to Be Unique, Not Just the Guts of a Mirrorless Camera
First off, camera brands these days lack imagination. What they’d end up doing in the name of capitalism and being safe is just taking the sensor and processor they have from their mirrorless cameras and putting them into a DSLR. That’s what Canon and Nikon did when they were starting out — and so did Sony! No, they’d need to do something very unique instead.
Pentax made a Monochrome version of one of their DSLRs. And sure, there are infrared-converted options out there. But why not make a version that has sets of filters that can be applied internally? Or otherwise, why not have a camera with a completely unique sensor? Sigma has a Foveon sensor and Fujifilm has XTrans. So why can’t Canon, Nikon, and Sony do something totally different?
Ideas For Experiences
Here are a few other ideas that I think could work:
- A Pentax Medium Format DSLR that takes Pentax 67 lenses
- A Canon pellicle mirror camera — Canon was working on one 10 years ago. But it never saw the light of day.
- A Nikonos DSLR — photographers Barney Smith and Brooks Sterling did great work with these film cameras.
These go beyond just making something retro-looking and functioning. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Nikon Zf. But that’s been done — we need more at this point. Still, while I think these ideas are cool, the camera manufacturers could do something even more likely to sell.
Think Retro Digital
It’s time to consider designs from the first DSLRs that really made photographers fall in love. Luckily, Phoblographer has been around for 15 years and we can remember a lot of the cameras that we’ve tested back in the day. Plus, we’ve got the links and the archives images to show them off.
- The Sony A900 had this big pentaprism up top on the viewfinder that made it look totally different than most other DSLRs that instead embraced the idea of curves. It also completely removed Live View in place of a quick preview.
- A New Pentax 645D that isn’t designed to compete with Fujifilm’s or Hasselblad’s cameras. But instead, designed to have a different experience using an optical viewfinder. This camera used a Kodak sensor at the time, and it was pretty beautiful.
- Pentax had special color DSLRs, and unique options like the Pentax K01
- The Canon 5D and 5D Mk II cameras felt very elegant, just like the 6D did. But then they started to morph into something that felt way too serious. And all the fun of shooting with it disappeared.
- Olympus made really small and really compact DSLRs until Canon started doing the same thing.
It’s time to look at the past again — but this time, we’re not talking about the super vintage cameras of the film era. Instead, we’re talking about the cameras from the 2000s. The Nikon D300, Canon 40D, 5D, and so many others were the ones setting the standards back then. And clearly, folks want them again.