My first DSLR ever was the Olympus E510. If you’ve followed me since I wrote for a website called Photography Bay or even at PCMag, then you’ll know that I loved this camera and used it to get lots of great images. At the time, I believe it was no more than 10 Megapixels and it used a Live MOS sensor that was made by Kodak. Because of that, the images from it look far different from anything that Sony or Canon makes. Every now and again, I browse my old Flickr albums from back in the day and I realize that the images from that sensor are very unlike anything made today. In the pursuit of a sterile form of perfection, digital photography has killed off almost all the competition when it comes to sensor making. There’s just Canon and Sony for the most part. And the result is image quality that isn’t as plentiful as there are film emulsions. Sure, you can apply presets afterwards, but it still isn’t at all the same experience.
When you shoot with a different sensor, you have to approach the entire process differently. For several years, I remember when camera sensors gave you better image output when you overexposed them. I feel this today about the Fujifilm X Trans sensor and Canon’s sensors. But most of the industry uses Sony, so it makes more sense to underexpose and then push the highlights back in post-production. However, I don’t want to sit there and endlessly work on post-production.
I don’t ever think that Kodak is going to make camera sensors again; but it could be a very smart thing for them to do. Considering their rich history in photography and all the film emulsions that they’ve made, output from the old Olympus E510 reminded me of certain films like old school Kodak Portra 160 NC.
If Kodak made a camera sensor today, I’d buy the camera that comes with it. I’m sure that it would deliver images that look like Kodak Ektachrome, or even Kodachrome. Lots of cameras have LUTs and presets that can be applied to make the image output look like that. But it’s never really the same.
I wish that more manufacturers made camera sensors. And my hope these days is with cameras coming from China. Right now, they’re all mostly using Sony sensors. But if they could start making their own camera sensors, I feel like the Japanese manufactureres would actually need to start trying again and work on themselves instead of barely doing anything at all.