Does mirrorless camera mean that the image won't flip after its taken? Like how the iPhone front camera works?

Does mirrorless camera mean that the image won't flip after its taken? Like how the iPhone front camera works? - 1

Ergerg

No, the mirror is the shutter and it reflects the image up into the viewer. A mirrorless camera is a digital that shows the image onto a digital screen and doesn't have a shutter.

It's important to differentiate between SLR and mirrorless since they're basically opposites.

An SLR, for example, has a diagonal mirror shutter (in addition to a regular camera shutter) that directs light into an optical viewfinder instead of the camera sensor. That way you can look through the optical viewfinder (little hole on the top of the camera) and see what the camera sees without using a lot of battery life on powering an LCD screen. Most of the time, the mirror is down, diverting light that the lense captures into the optical viewfinder. When an SLR actually takes a picture, it flips the mirror up allowing the light onto the sensor, saves the photo, and then flips the mirror back up allowing the optical viewfinder to be used again.

Mirrorless cameras forgo the optical viewfinder altogether, and so are a little more compact than SLR cameras. Any light that comes in from the lense is directed onto the camera sensor (or shutter covering the sensor) at all times. The term 'mirrorless camera' is often used to refer to digital cameras that allow for interchangable lenses (like SLRs have) but do not possess an optical viewfinder.

Superzoom refers to larger, SLR-like cameras that do not have interchangable lenses.

In truth, even compact point-and-shoot cameras and smartphone cameras are technically mirrorless, even though they are not called 'mirrorless'.