A nice read why we like our cameras to be 'difficult'

[VidJa]

and feel great if we master them...

Wired has a nice story why designers and users both like to venture in 'hard to understand' designs.





 

[Jonathan Wienke]

The existence and popularity of Apple products is a pretty persuasive counter-argument.

[Justinr]

and feel great if we master them...

Wired has a nice story why designers and users both like to venture in 'hard to understand' designs.

I think he is confusing difficult with complicated. The most difficult camera to use that I have is in fact the simplest, that is to say it has the least controls, functions, bells and whistles, but it takes more input and thought from the photographer to get right. A friend of mine decided to take up biking, as simple as the bike was (a 125 cruiser style), he still had difficulty riding it and pretty soon got himself a trike instead.

To be honest, anyone who has problems driving a Landie with a sloppy gear box (usually the linkage) is going to struggle with many types of machines and gadgets anyway and I rather feel the writer was tilting at the wrong windmill.

 

[amolitor]

Wired specializes in throwing out some interesting bits and pieces more or less at random, and pretending that they're tied together somehow. This one, at least, managed to avoid the standard "and now for the idiotic conclusion" part of the Wired standard template.

Still, the ideas and concepts are indeed pretty interesting.

[RSL]

It's pretty obvious that the guy who wrote that article isn't a photographer.

[BJL]

The weird thing about that article is that the features of the Fujillm X100 he discusses (the old-school knobs and dials for setting aperture, shutter speed etc.) are generally praised by enthusiasts of the X system for making things _easier_, not for offering the (perverse, exclusivist, snobbish) pleasure of mastering a more difficult tool.

[NancyP]

Yes, I am old-school, having started "serious" photography (roll, shoot, develop, and print) in 1968. There's a lot of fancy technology that I just plain ignore much of the time and shoot "manual exposure +/- manual focus" mode.

[Iluvmycam]

and feel great if we master them...

Wired has a nice story why designers and users both like to venture in 'hard to understand' designs.

The problem is the engineers that design this crap are NOT great doc photogs themselves...they are camera fondlers.

The 2 worst inventions that came down the pike from the camera fondling engineers were the program dial that replaced the shutter speed dial and Fuji's terrible 'focus by wire.'

They keep dummying down the lenses, removing controls like distance scales for zone focus work and aperture controls and turning gear into useless garbage when it comes to serious doc work.

Leica perfected what is needed in a great doc cam eons ago. All the Japanese had to do was copy it and make it affordable. Was that too much to ask of the camera fondling engineers?

Do you want to know what a camera fondler is?

http://www.fujix-forum.com/index.php/topic/25463-which-soft-release-button/?p=269961

That guy spends more time changing buttons than pressing them.  (They kicked me out of that forum. They didn't like me calling them camera fondlers.)

What else am I going to call them? All you read about is "What did you buy?"..."What are you planning to buy?"

Why not  'What did you shoot'...'What are you planning to shoot?'

Camera fondlers are the problem. When I tried to school the Fuji Rumors crew on zone focus they didn't know what I was talking about.  Everything is going to hell with the camera fondlers. Only good thing about them is they keep the cam companies in biz with their continual spending. 

The fondlers are on an endless search for the perfect cam that somehow is just beyond their reach and is the reason why they can't produce anything worthwhile with their cams...all the while loaded with fancy push buttons, thumbs up, custom skins, hand made straps, leather half cases and ever other GD thing they can think of to put on a cam to bloat their ego and make their cam more useless.

More than a few guys on the Leica forum wanted to spend $20,000 for a Leica with no screen. They felt the screen was the root of their problems... SAD.

[fdisilvestro]

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler

[RSL]

Yes, I am old-school, having started "serious" photography (roll, shoot, develop, and print) in 1968. There's a lot of fancy technology that I just plain ignore much of the time and shoot "manual exposure +/- manual focus" mode.

Hi Nancy, I've got you beat by 25 years. I started shooting and doing darkroom work in 1943. And I'll tell you that if you're turning up your nose at the incredible automation built into our current cameras you're making things a lot more difficult than they need to be. Life, for a photographer, has been made a lot easier, meaning you can spend your time composing the designing your pictures rather than spending it on overcoming the shortcomings of recalcitrant equipment.