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Nikon is unusable.
Pentax is the only true path.
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Nay brother let me lead you to the true path of enlightenment. Nikon shall set you free and with your purchase of a new lens you shall receive the blessing of the shutter gods.
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Uuuhhh...
I have no lenses younger than about twenty years -- and some closer to seventy.
My latest camera purchase is a Kodak Vigilant Six-20 (circa 1940).
Lately I've been playing with a 4x5 monorail camera from the '60s.
I say again, Nikon is unusable -- except maybe by wrong-handed practitioners (like my brother).
Having said that, Nikon does make good point-and-shoot cameras, my wife is on her third.
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I give...
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: I have no lenses younger than about twenty years -- and some closer to seventy.
I held on to silver photography quite long; we had entered the third millennium before I got my first digital SLR, and went from lenses of the 1980s to lenses of the early 2000s.
I had one major surprise: The 20 years newer lenses had dramatically improved anti-reflex coating. With my old lenses, I always had to be careful with backlight, or the picture would be completely washed out. With newer lenses, you can more or less point the camera directly at the sun! (But not for long, or it will burn your sensor!)
Lenses you buy today have another great improvement: If you in the 1980s showed up with a 600 mm f/6.7 lens, weight 430 grams, about 12 cm long, people would have refused to believe it. My most recent buy is even more than a 600 mm lens, it is a 4x zoom, 150-600 mm. Or ... It is not, it is a 75-300 mm MFT lens. But if you dig up lens test result from the 1980s and earlier, comparing resolution, contrast and sharpness to modern lenses, you may be in for a surprise.
There is one area where I sort of miss an old quality: Mechanical. Affordable lenses, sold to photo amateurs like me, have a touch and feeling reflecting the use of plastics. They feel plastic. Not solid, not smooth, the way the old metal stuff felt. (And that is a major reason why they are as lightweight as they are.) I know that I could go for professional lenses at triple the cost, but I am not that active as a photographer.
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Yeah, my few auto-focus lenses -- even from the 90s -- are very plastic and cheap-feeling. Near-impossible to use manual-focus.
I very much prefer my solid-feeling lenses prior to those.
What a lot of today's practitioners don't realize is that increased mass increases inertia which improves stability by reducing shake.
The 28-210 zoom I've used since the '80s is 778g and a joy to use.
I also didn't buy a DSLR until 2016 -- when Pentax (Ricoh) released the K-1 (full-frame, dontcha know).
Once I bought the K-1, I began buying more vintage lenses, mostly Super-Takumars which are as old as I am.
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: The 28-210 zoom I've used since the '80s is 778g and a joy to use.
That was late 1980s, wasn't it? I don't remember anything close to that being available in 1980. Or is my memory wrong? What make / model was it?
Old memory from the 1970s: Vivitar announced its Series 1, the 70-210 mm as the first one going to market. A notice in "Fotografi", the major Norwegian amateur photography magazine, reported that the computers doing the lens calculations was expected to complete by the end of April that year(!) (If my memory is correct, it was done on a PDP-11.)
My first SLR had a Nikon 43-86mm zoom, well know for its terrible (lack of) sharpness at the edges. The Vivitar Series 1 was by many considered the first major breakthrough in high quality yet affordable zoom lenses. 3X was impressive by that time, 7.5X for a full-format lens was far out of sight.
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I bought it in 1985 and it's a marvelous work of engineering.
"
The need for one lens able to do everything, or at least as much as possible, was an influence on lens design in the last quarter century. The Kino Precision Kiron 28-210mm f/4-5.6 (Japan) of 1985 was the first very large ratio focal length zoom lens for still cameras (most 35mm SLRs). The fourteen element/eleven group Kiron was first 35mm SLR zoom lens to extend from standard wide angle to long telephoto (sometimes referred to as "superzoom"),[191] able to replace 28, 35, 50, 85, 105, 135 and 200mm prime lenses, albeit restricted to a small variable maximum aperture to keep size, weight and cost within reason (129×75 mm, 840 g, 72mm filter, US$359 list).[192][193][194]
" -- History of photographic lens design - Wikipedia[^]
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What's a 'camera'?
Isn't that what smartphones are for?
How else to instantly upload to that other essential invention ... social media? 
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The problem with smartphones is that they suck out the subject's soul. 
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Leo56 wrote: What's a 'camera'?
Isn't that what smartphones are for?
Obligatory Geek and Poke[^]
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Hmmph! https://www.flickr.com/photos/awrose/103252765/in/pool-camerawiki ain't it pretty?
Story - 35 yrs ago - guy had done some beautiful work and was very proud that the grain was so fine.
I said so? I get that smooth out of Tri-X all the time. He goes uh - OH! you're the one with THAT camera!
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Beautiful camera!
I love looking at old photos taken with those types of cameras.
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Ah yes, one of far too many "need to spend time with thats". ( And the F-1, A-1... the D2s ( which are 5-7s, the Gundlach is a 4-5 ) and the Bronica - which I got paid for using _almost_ what I paid for it. )
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I am very much two-faced about grains. On the one hand, those super-smooth tones from old 4*5" films (or even larger), when the emulsion was stuffed with silver, and not a trace of grain, can be a pleasure to study for their tonal qualities alone.
Then, in significant parts of modern B&W photography, graininess is used as an artistic expression, not unlike the 'dottiness' of some impressionist painters. In journalism and sports photography, graininess and hard, 'graphics style' contrast has been a style of expression for at least 50 years. Even in some landscape photography, grains can add structure to a surface that would otherwise be boring (e.g. a misty landscape).
My photography books fill two meters of shelf space. In them, I can "in no time" find a hundred photos, from internationally recognized photographers, that would have lost some of their qualities if they were absolutely grain-less and with a smooth, 'natural' tone scale. Fair enough for 'scientific style' documentary photos, but if you want your photo to tell a story, you may need something beyond a simple and boring 'This is exactly how it looks'. It may be true, but So what?
Who said "A picture shouldn't show something, it should be something"? In the process of making it "be" something, grains can be a great tool.
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"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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cough cough Pentax cough cough...
I'd rather be phishing!
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Sounds like you are about to throw up, is that right? Maybe you should put that Pentax away, then 
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enforcement of byte order.
clunky base runtimes.
a template engine that is source level so *could* be as powerful as C++'s and better than C#s but sadly, isn't.
and personally, it just feels stifling somehow. i find myself getting into "the zone" in C# much more quickly than java, and staying there longer. I think part of it is the tools. Vstudio is just great though i've never used intelliJ. Eclipse is garbage, IMO. it always crashes on me if i try to use extensions, and it feels open source - designed by 100 different people.
so i think a big part for me is the tools.
If it weren't for all that, I'd probably prefer it to C# simply because of the amount of "cool code" or otherwise code or libraries I could have found very useful but were java only.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Quote: so i think a big part for me is the tools
I started out using Eclipse, but then I noticed many Java developers were switching to IntelliJ. Then I switched to IntelliJ. I will never go back to Eclipse. Try IntelliJ if you ever again need to do some JavaFX.
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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Yes, the IDE being Eclipse also made Java a troublesome uptake. Very good point.
I started doing Android early on and it was Eclipse-based and it drained all of the happy-happy new energy of a new development platform (Android) and I ran away.
Then, they went to Android Studio (intellij) and it was YESS!!!!!!!
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I agree, I work in both Java and C# and don't have a problem with either. I think Java gained a stigma from ye olde Java applets, but for modern-day coding I enjoy using Java and Spring for building REST APIs.
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There are two main issues to me:
1) versioning -- difficult to know which version to run and what functionality I will have -- this is especially after Oracle took over and then it split even more with the OpenJDK and all that nonsense. It's quite difficult. Along with versioning it is difficult to find tools that feel like they are "official". For instance, I am attempting to use JCov (java coverage tool) and it is supposed to be the "official" but very poorly or not documented at all.
2) UI Framework - Oh boy. I remember the original was something like AWT, right? Then JavaFX (but never caught on fully). 3rd party stuff, and controls that are instantly recognizable that they weren't Windows controls. It was all so confusing and there were better options (C#, Visual Studio and MFC, etc).
3) Java Applets they used applets to introduce Java and it was supposed to be gee-whiz. I was like, "a plugin...?? that fails a lot in my browser...?? and needs to be updated constantly...??? which MS doesn't like to support ???" That intro to Java kind of killed it.
After that it felt like a slow cumbersome thing with no direct line to components without lots of management. So, over to C#, which was easy.
Much of this isn't "fair" to Java, but it is the perception.
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Following on with raddevus' points are:
4) Support -- ongoing support is difficult as the Java versions keep changing. Applications that run in "version X update Y" may not run on "update Y+1". And if multiple installed applications require different versions? Getting each to use the right installed version is its own version of DLL Hell.
5) Hiring -- finding people with experience in the needed versions of specific libraries can be tough. If not using the latest and greatest, finding people with experience and a willingness to work in an older version can be all but impossible. Besides, knowing one version of a library may not mean anything in a different version.
Java the language? It's just another language. It's got its pluses and minuses, same as every other language. IMO, the serious problems are everything except the language itself.
C# has its own issues, but post-deployment it's MUCH easier to support.
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