Camera industry in the dumpster - article

[jjj]

Firewire is certainly supported. The display port on MBP's is the same since a very long time and compatible with Thunderbolt. The power charger connector was the same for a very long time and was changed with the new MBP's and a converter was available. So I find the exact opposite the case where on Windows laptops there is a new charger connector for every new model from even the same company that is not compatible.

Most PC laptops I've encountered use the same standard connector. Dell excepted.
Recent Mac monitor connections include DVI, Mini DVI, Micro DVI and Thunderbolt. You need overpriced and clunky adaptors to get devices to work if you change your Mac, no to mention Apple cables are poorly made so tend to fail. There only current current Mac with a FW connection is the bottom of the range MacPro and bottom of the range Apple products tend to be best avoided as are usually poor value. They only seem to exist so Apple can hit a lower starting price point for whichever range. There's not even an ethernet connector on the new MBPs. So you need yet another an adaptor for that too.
There are several Mac chargers which may or may not be suitable for your needs. I've wasted lots of time trying to get a Lightning adaptor to use with a device that uses micro USB, Apple only offer adaptors to full sized USB connectors and a USB female to male micro attached to one of them wouldn't talk to device. To get around this I had to buy a lightning to 30pin adaptor and use that on a 30 pin to micro USB, bodgy. Daft really as small devices designed to work with small devices like the iPad/iPhone will tend to use smaller connections. I could probably spend almost as much on overpriced connecters to an iPad to connect to other devices as a basic iPad would cost.  This one of the many reasons Apple is so incredibly profitable.

I can't stand the recent Apple bollocks about making everything smaller just so that can make fatuous claims about so and so be the thinnest whatever yet. Because you now need to carry or attach the things that used to be inside Macs with a plethora of cables and adaptors, which not only takes up more room but is untidy and anything but minimal.

[jjj]

If your MBP cannot be upgraded to the last OS it is very old.

Not as old as PCs that can run current versions of windows.    MS try to maintain legacy as much as possible because they know people do not want to buy new equipment just to run a new OS, remember MS are a software company. Apple are a hardware company and it is in their interest to make old hardware obsolete. This is why they give away their OS, because they will make far more back in hardware and accessory upgrades than they will by simply selling software. And it's a better business model than MS it would seem.

I meet a lot of photographers on my workshops and I have not heard a single complaint about Apple products. On the contrary all like their MacBooks which generally runs so much better than the Windows laptops. Not that there cannot be a well running Windows laptops, of course.

Two things there. Newer computers always work better than older ones, so if they've changed of course it will seem faster, but if they'd bought an equivalent PC they'd probably be just as happy. I used PC laptops for years, but cost as much as MBP and were very good. More reliable in fact and I preferred them too - which is why I used them! MBPs however got better and I swapped. Though having recently played with Win Laptops with touch screens and the new Surface Pro, MBPs/iPads seem a bit antiquated in comparison.
Secondly, don't forget what I said above about the fact that the more expensive an item is the less likely people are to admit to any faults. So Apple are buffered against complaints by virtue of being a high end luxury item.
The MBP that I helped my neighbour with was being sold as he never used it and preferred his PC kit.

[jjj]

Yes, any competent product management team will gather information about how their products are sold, used, satisfaction levels, number of repairs, etc.etc. However I have never seen any innovation come from such groups.

Loads of feature requests in Adobe forums have been adopted over the years.

I think Steve Jobs was right when he said that the customers don't know what they want.

He was indeed. Also most manufacturers do not know what the consumer needs either. Jobs included as he came up with some pretty dumb ideas in his time too. Attempting to get rid of cursor keys on computer and using single button mice was him forcing his bad ideas onto the end user. No cursor keys on iOS is where he finally got his way and it's one of the worst things about it. Using spacebar to accept autocorrect suggestions is probably the most useless thing and is turned off on my devices for that very reason.

[Telecaster]

Telecaster, that is exactly what any competent product management team does. They do not share the database, however, so in general you don't know about it.

I'm well aware of that, having been part of such teams. (In my working life I switched between software development and product management multiple times.) There is thus an implied point re. camera makers.   

-Dave-

[Telecaster]

Yes, any competent product management team will gather information about how their products are sold, used, satisfaction levels, number of repairs, etc. etc. However I have never seen any innovation come from such groups. I think Steve Jobs was right when he said that the customers don't know what they want. Also requests from customers even from high-end IT customers in large businesses will mostly be formulated as requests for specific functions and often formulated as an implementation suggestion (like a competitor products has this so your product should have it too) rather than formulation a problem that needs a solution which might not even include a specific suggested function.

I think innovation in the camera industry will come from forward thinking engineers who work with university researchers and see new possibilities and eventually radical ones.

I pretty much agree with this. You need creative innovators to come up with great products in the first place. Then you need good refiners to smooth out the jagged edges those products often originally feature. The second part of that equation is where the customer data gathering & analysis comes into play.

In the SLR/mirrorless world we're well into the refinement phase of the game. The next innovative breakthrough in photography/video/imaging might come from one (or more) of the current camera makers, but personally I think it'll happen elsewhere.

-Dave-

[amolitor]

A good PM group's biggest job it to properly prioritize feature development and release. They use CRMs and whatnot as both a source of ideas for features, and also as a place they can use to model what kinds of revenues they can expect.

It's extraordinarily rare that a customer is going to come up with a game-changing idea for you, it's all incremental stuff, usually very tactical, like Michael's idea. "Here's a thing you could do that would solve this problem I have" roughly. Often what's much more interesting is the description of the problem, rather than the proposed solution.

When a game-changer does come along, PM can still use their customer data, and their contacts within the customer base (focus groups etc) to test those ideas, and try to get some estimate of how much revenue there is attached to it. That list of problems customers want solved can be powerful, if managed well.

Product Management is a discipline, it's teachable, and done well it's at least as robust and reliable as engineering, in terms of its work products: neither PMs nor engineers are always right about how long it's going to take, how much money it's going to cost/generate, and what it's actually going to do in the end. But, done well, either side of the fence can do pretty well.

[daws]

...I'm sure there are lots of pro-Apple wackos around but there are at least as many anti-Apple wackos.

There's no lack of wackos on either side. From Fanboyism and Brand Loyalty:

The Misconception: We prefer the things we own over the things we don't because we made rational choices when we bought them. The Truth?

The truth is that you prefer the things you own because you rationalize your past choices to protect your sense of self.

The Internet changed the way people argue.

Check any comment system, forum or message board and you will find fanboys going at it, debating why their chosen product is better than the other guy's.

In modern consumer cultures like America, people compete for status through comparing their taste in products. (You can read more on how that works here: Selling Out).

Mac vs. PC, PS3 vs. XBox 360, iPhone vs. Android – it goes on and on.

Usually, these arguments are between men, because men will defend their ego no matter how slight the insult. These are also usually about geeky things that cost lots of money, because these battles take place on the Internet where tech-savvy people get rowdy, and the more expensive a purchase, the greater the loyalty to it.

[bcooter]

Actually I'm much more questioning of myself when I buy something expensive rather than moderate in costs.

I like my em1 but if I stops working tomorrow, the costs is equal to the lens adapter I bought for a Leica S2.

The S2 purchase I will question myself if anything glitches, the em1, that's life.

I like some of the cameras I use some of the time, but if there is any issue with any camera it's usually my selection, not the camera.

A R1 RED isn't the camera of choice to run around shooting documentaries, a panasonic gh3 really shouldn't be the selection if your working in Hollywood and btw:  by the time you get a gh3 or 4 to working professional spec it just about equals the price of the R! RED.

In regards to what Sony, Nikon, Olympus, Leica, Canon offer, it is what it is.  

I'd like more of a personal choice, like tethering on an em1, or 4k raw from a gh4, or real autfocus that made sense from a RED but there are other cameras that do that and it just requires me to lift something heavier and usually my wallet go lighter.

In regards to the camera industry selling less cameras, I'm good.  

Not that I want anyone to go out of work, or for that matter any countries economy suffer, but there are way too many photos being displayed anyway, so if the crowd gets smaller, so does the clutter and honestly that won't happen because everybody on the planet seems to be carrying a camera in their pocket.

Personally, I think the more camera companies specialize and stop trying to being mainstream the better.   I know the board of directors of the respective companies won't agree, but I don't care about a new plastic covered blob that has 20% more iso or detail than the last plastic covered blob.

Regarding crowd sourcing of ideas, to me that's a big problem.  It's like shooting a movie and doing focus groups per  scene.  (it happens) though have you ever seen one of those movies.   If you have you won't remember it.

But this shouldn't be about equipment, it should be about images.  Do you shoot something interesting to you . . . then the rest of the world?   That's important and I can promise you whether it's 6mp or 60 the most creative content will win, technical perfection, choice of camera, lens or light plays a very small part.

The thing that gets everyone spinning is so many people are selling and I can't tell the paid spokespeople from the fans.  

You can't click an e-mail without going to a video showing some professional someone, (sometimes real, usually self proclaimed) that isn't talking up some product.





IMO

BC

[Hans Kruse]

Hans,

If you practice ETTR and don't use the histogram, then how do you judge exposure at the time of the shoot (rather than later via Rawdigger or similar)? Blinking highlights are another option, and these tell where in the image that the actual overexposure is occurring. IMHO the two methods are complementary and I use both.

Regards,

Bill

Actually quite simple: As standard for landscape shooting I bracket 3 ways (shots in bracket sequence) with one stop between. My simple rule is: There must be one shot that blinks and at least one that does not. Exposure compensation is used to achieve the above if this is not the case. Either one stop down or one stop up. Then I know that I can choose the best one in Lightroom when I import. In cases of large DR I will shoot 5 ways or extremely seldom 7  ways. The histogram is rather unreliable anyway compared to the RAW histogram and I use this method as I find it distracting to chimp. I'll from time to time quickly check according to this rule and this serves me very well. No need to look at histograms when shooting. I do look at histograms in Lightroom  Using this simple method it is very seldom that I don't have an optimal exposure to work on in Lightroom.

Of course I may check the histogram occasionally in special situations, but the point is to avoid doing it and concentrate on composing and moving around to get the best shots, especially when lots are happening. There are as we all know also times when we are just waiting for the light and one could check histograms, but that would be useless anyway.

[Hans Kruse]

Most PC laptops I've encountered use the same standard connector. Dell excepted.
Recent Mac monitor connections include DVI, Mini DVI, Micro DVI and Thunderbolt. You need overpriced and clunky adaptors to get devices to work if you change your Mac, no to mention Apple cables are poorly made so tend to fail. There only current current Mac with a FW connection is the bottom of the range MacPro and bottom of the range Apple products tend to be best avoided as are usually poor value. They only seem to exist so Apple can hit a lower starting price point for whichever range. There's not even an ethernet connector on the new MBPs. So you need yet another an adaptor for that too.
There are several Mac chargers which may or may not be suitable for your needs. I've wasted lots of time trying to get a Lightning adaptor to use with a device that uses micro USB, Apple only offer adaptors to full sized USB connectors and a USB female to male micro attached to one of them wouldn't talk to device. To get around this I had to buy a lightning to 30pin adaptor and use that on a 30 pin to micro USB, bodgy. Daft really as small devices designed to work with small devices like the iPad/iPhone will tend to use smaller connections. I could probably spend almost as much on overpriced connecters to an iPad to connect to other devices as a basic iPad would cost.  This one of the many reasons Apple is so incredibly profitable.

I can't stand the recent Apple bollocks about making everything smaller just so that can make fatuous claims about so and so be the thinnest whatever yet. Because you now need to carry or attach the things that used to be inside Macs with a plethora of cables and adaptors, which not only takes up more room but is untidy and anything but minimal.

Ok, I don't think it makes sense to continue this OT discussion You obviously mean that since there is no physical port for FW that it is not supported. Apple did the right thing IMHO to supply a cable for FW and the same for Ethernet. Who needs and Ethernet port or FW port can buy such a cable. I really like the slimness and loss in weight of the new MBP's.

As I mentioned before I never had a cable from Apple break. And it has nothing to do with high price defending the product. As mentioned I will change in a split second whenever the products form Apple is second rate or there something much better on the market for my needs.

[jeremyrh]

Actually I'm much more questioning of myself when I buy something expensive rather than moderate in costs.

I agree - I would have thought that was more usual. But this behaviour does not have the convenient benefit of explaining why the anti-Apple zealots don't find their claims borne out by statistics.

[hjulenissen]

I think it's reasonable to expect that all hardware products conform to the following cycles:
...
In my opinion, we entered the mature phase of the camera market with Canon 5d. At least that's how it is for me.

I guess that you are referring to something ala this?
http://productlifecyclestages.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/product-life-cycle-stages.jpg

[hjulenissen]

I can't help smile at this post since you you more or less gave the reason some posts back in this thread   These people you have talked to might have gone back to the their teams and discussed it and I'm pretty sure the engineers could give good reasons not to implement this or the product managers could not show a positive revenue flow from adding this feature. I do agree with you about the value of such feature. But as usual the devil is in the details....

Question:
What is making smart-phones so popular these days? What made personal computers so popular in the 90s?

(One) Answer:
Because they are generic. The makers did not pretend to know every single use-case for their product, so they made them (to a variable degree) open, documented and friendly for small-scale add-ons (application developers).

I would love for Canon/Nikon/... to make their platform more open. The USB/WiFi interface, the raw file formats, the possibility of running applications locally. Apple has shown that this is possible while maintaining a reasonably stable and secure product. If there are a small group of enthusiasts that would really like ETTR-type tools, why not let them develop these tools with as little effort as possible. Why force your paying customers to reverse-engineer raw file formats and your binary firmware (with all kinds of nasty potential issues) in order to do what they want, when they might be perfectly happy with running a small "app" written in a high-level language that had access to basic camera hardware?

I think that Samsung and Sony are headed in this direction rapidly, while Canon and Nikon will be dragged, kicking and screaming, in that direction.

-h

[dturina]

I guess that you are referring to something ala this?
http://productlifecyclestages.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/product-life-cycle-stages.jpg

Close, but no. This seems to relate to a single product, and I ways thinking more in terms of a product category, ie. "car" and not "Ford Focus mk1".

[hjulenissen]

Close, but no. This seems to relate to a single product, and I ways thinking more in terms of a product category, ie. "car" and not "Ford Focus mk1".

I believe that the website (and I) was thinking about cathegory and not individual product.
http://productlifecyclestages.com/

Here is the example of watching recorded television and the various stages of each method:

Introduction - 3D TVs
Growth  - Blueray discs/DVR
Maturity  - DVD
Decline  - Video cassette

[dturina]

I believe that the website (and I) was thinking about cathegory and not individual product.
http://productlifecyclestages.com/

Ah, then it is the same. I stand corrected.

[bjanes]

Actually quite simple: As standard for landscape shooting I bracket 3 ways (shots in bracket sequence) with one stop between. My simple rule is: There must be one shot that blinks and at least one that does not. Exposure compensation is used to achieve the above if this is not the case. Either one stop down or one stop up. Then I know that I can choose the best one in Lightroom when I import. In cases of large DR I will shoot 5 ways or extremely seldom 7  ways. The histogram is rather unreliable anyway compared to the RAW histogram and I use this method as I find it distracting to chimp. I'll from time to time quickly check according to this rule and this serves me very well. No need to look at histograms when shooting. I do look at histograms in Lightroom  Using this simple method it is very seldom that I don't have an optimal exposure to work on in Lightroom.

Of course I may check the histogram occasionally in special situations, but the point is to avoid doing it and concentrate on composing and moving around to get the best shots, especially when lots are happening. There are as we all know also times when we are just waiting for the light and one could check histograms, but that would be useless anyway.

That is an interesting approach, but it does entail taking a lot of shots. The blinking highlights have similar implications as the camera histogram, and these vary according to the camera, but tend to be conservative. With the Nikon D800e, here is a shot well short of clipping as shown by Rawdigger:



The camera histogram shows the highlights just short of clipping:



And the blinking highlights show clipping in step one of the wedge:



Lightroom with PV2012 and default settings is not a good program to judge clipping in the raw file because of the baseline offset and automatic highlight recovery.

Regards,

Bill

[Hans Kruse]

That is an interesting approach, but it does entail taking a lot of shots. The blinking highlights have similar implications as the camera histogram, and these vary according to the camera, but tend to be conservative. With the Nikon D800e, here is a shot well short of clipping as shown by Rawdigger:

I'm not looking at avoiding clipping any highlights. I'm looking at the maximum exposure that does not clip any essential highlights. The latter is relevant in case of e.g. a sun. And Lightroom will as you point out, not show where the RAW file is clipped and I would like to have an option for showing this. So I will visually judge of there is an issue with areas that are clipped slightly. Most of the time this is simple to do and I do use RAW Digger sometimes to double check the area. But this is a very small number of cases. In 99%+ of the cases from my experience Lightroom does a really good job. If there is a sky and clouds that look not quite right what I do is to copy the edits to the other exposures in the bracket sequence to judge the others in the area where an issue has been discovered. In casas where a single exposure will provide a good image edited in Lightroom due to noise, bad colors etc. I will then do an HDR merge with the 32bit plugin from Hdrsoft and then do the editing (tone mapping) in Lightroom from the bracketed seqence. Typically then 5 or more exposures. I will also in many cases shoot a sequence at f/8 and f/11 and even f/16 and you could calll that DOF bracketing and back in Lightroom I will judge which one has the best combination of sharpness and DOF.

Remember the essential reason for this approach is that I can spend as little time judging my exposures when capturing them as possible and concentrate on the compositions and leave the final choice of exposure back at my computer. In fact the same goes for compositions as I will shoot many more compositions than e.g. the one I first come up with and thing is the best. You could that composition bracketing 

[Telecaster]

Actually I'm much more questioning of myself when I buy something expensive rather than moderate in costs.

Yup. I've been intermittently house-shopping since 2011. Haven't been able to pull the trigger yet.

Personally, I think the more camera companies specialize and stop trying to being mainstream the better. I know the board of directors of the respective companies won't agree, but I don't care about a new plastic covered blob that has 20% more iso or detail than the last plastic covered blob.

In any industry or market I think it's healthier when you have a bunch of smaller & more distinctive companies battling it out rather than two or three giants. The latter scenario IMO inevitably leads to the kind of blandness you describe. In the Interwebs I'd rather use (for example) Twitter for one thing, Instagram for another, Vimeo for yet another rather than an all-encompassing blob like Facebook. But that's me...I'm a fan of the modular approach to most things.

Regarding crowd sourcing of ideas, to me that's a big problem. It's like shooting a movie and doing focus groups per scene. (it happens) though have you ever seen one of those movies. If you have you won't remember it.

I could not agree with this more. IMO this kind of crowdsourcing is so wrong. Creative folks should be allowed to be creative! If you're lucky enough to work with innovative people in any endeavor, you've gotta give 'em the freedom to do their thing. Unencumbered to the greatest degree possible by corporate concerns. The film industry already has an appropriate form of crowdsourcing: ticket sales.

But this shouldn't be about equipment, it should be about images. Do you shoot something interesting to you . . . then the rest of the world? That's important and I can promise you whether it's 6mp or 60 the most creative content will win, technical perfection, choice of camera, lens or light plays a very small part.

I suppose all this discussion is about stuff in the last five percent of what makes a camera a creative tool. Maybe it's a symptom of the fact that our gear is so much better at what it does than we are at what we do.   

-Dave-

[Telecaster]

Re. exposure: taking photos in the Grand Canyon area (where I am currently) is not unlike astrophotography. You're often dealing with a fairly compressed tonal range, which then needs to be stretched in post. Since I'm shooting RAW + JPEG for easy sharing with friends & family, ETTR is out. But I have done a bit of it just to see if I can see any significant difference (on my iPad Air, which is pretty representative of my primary intended final output...screen display rather than printing) after processing. Guess what: I can't.

Now keep in mind I can do some in-camera fine-tuning (with my E-M1) to the RAW data & then create a modded JPEG, so if the white balance is off or I'd prefer less/more initial contrast I can get what I want. But I haven't had to do much of that. I've been working some of the JPEGs pretty hard and they're holding up really well. I'll make my final versions using the RAWs but I could manage just fine with the JPEGs if I had to.

I used to be insistent on exposing just so. But I'm finding with current gear it's not as important as it once was.

-Dave-