The Online Photographer

Rolleis to Roll Again?

By Adam McAnaney

According to this, a company named DHW Fototechnik GmbH has purchased the remaining assets of Franke & Heidecke GmbH as part of its insolvency process and plans to restart production of Rollei’s slide projectors, TLRs, and possibly even Rollei-35 cameras. It isn’t clear whether they will be able to use the Rollei name, as they will be required to license it from Rollei GmbH. DHW apparently plans to restart production with 20 employees, using 2,000 square meters of space distributed over three floors. Prior to entering insolvency, Franke & Heidecke had 131 employees. It seems that it will also be possible to have Rollei TLRs custom-built (the article speculates about gold-plated Rolleis, but I assume this was primarily a joke).

The article also states that it is unclear whether the Rolleiflex Hy6 camera will be revived, since certain intellectual property rights are held by Jenoptik and/or Eastman Kodak (the rights to the identical Leaf AFi were transferred to Phase One).

Adam

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The Point of Sufficiency

I thought for sure I'd already written a post called "The Point of Sufficiency," but a search doesn't turn it up, and I can't seem to find it under another name. So I thought perhaps I should just write it again, at the risk of repeating myself. This was triggered by one of Eolake's comments to the "High ISO High Noon" post, in which he said that when it comes to ISO speed, we always want a little more, and then a little more.

That's true—until it's not.

The idea is one that I've at least mentioned many times, for instance here. It's that in the history of photographic equipment and materials there have been various "competitions" or "races" to see which company can provide the most/fastest/best, but then in most cases a point of sufficiency is reached and customers decline to pay for further improvements. 

This happened with film formats (film basically got down to 35mm size, which was small and convenient enough—further efforts to popularize still smaller formats all failed); lens speed (ƒ/1.4 was deemed sufficient by the market, with further increases in maximum aperture being rare and not especially popular*); telephoto reach (the "Olympia Sonnar" for the 1936 Olympics was a widely admired and popular achievement, but now, 1000mm and 1200mm lenses are mere curiosities); shutter speed (consider that the Nikon N8008's 1/8000th shutter speed was a big selling point, but the Minolta 9xi's 1/12000th was met with a yawn); fine grain in B&W films (Panatomic-X was enough; only a few fanatics followed the Tech Pan craze); reducing the size of SLRs was a brief race in the '70s (the Pentax ME was small enough); even build quality in cameras and lenses (the current market supports—barely—one carriage-trade brand. Beyond that, better build quality has not been rewarded with sales). 

And so on.

Note that this is not a technical matter—it's a marketing matter. It has to do with meeting the need for what people want for as long as enough of us are willing to pay for it. The trend is for the race to continue among the manufacturers for as long as the buying public is rewarding the improvements. But sooner or later the buying public has what it needs, and has had enough, and stops wanting to pay for further improvements, and the manufacturers (save perhaps for one or two niche products in each case) basically give up the chase, and go try to find some other idea that will sell.

My prediction (which I've mentioned many times) is that this will happen with ISO speed in DSLRs, too, and with megapixels in Bayer-array sensors of the current type**. I don't know where the end point of either will turn out to be, and I don't know whether we have arrived at those points yet (is 24 MP enough? Is ISO 12,800 enough?), but history predicts that sooner or later, you will have enough and won't want to pay more for more.

Mike

*People will trot out the example of the Noctilux or the Noct-Nikkor to refute me, but those never sold in significant numbers. One could even argue that with rangefinders, ƒ/2 was the point of sufficiency: the Leica 50mm Summicron always outsold the 50mm Summilux greatly, at least until Leica became primarily a status symbol. Before the introduction of the current Summilux-M, Leica decided that a new 50mm Summicron would have to be priced beyond even their market, but that a new 50mm Summilux could be supported. That's why the 50mm Summilux got a remake but the old Mandler Summicron soldiers on.

**The size of sensors is not just a matter of marketing, because there's a formidable technical stopping-point at 24x36mm that has to do with 35mm-legacy camera and lens design. So far, customers—core customers, at least, meaning enthusiasts—seem to find great appeal in larger sensors, up to at least 24x36mm. The next couple of years should indicate whether sensors larger than that are going to be rewarded with sales sufficient to support their continued development.

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Featured Comment by Eolake: "That's a very good point, and I'm sure you're right. One factor though, is that with many of the examples you give, further gain got punished by excessive size or price of the product. With megapixels or speed, this does not have to be the case. But of course, it will still be a case at some point of: how many people will need cameras which can make pictures that can be pin-sharp even blown up to wall size? Personally, with megapixels, I feel that 12 is a sweet spot. I do have a 21MP camera, but it's heavy and I only use it if I go for pictures I think I may want to blow up really big for my wall. With speed...this can go on a while yet, I won't mind. I'd like to never have to worry about shutter speed."

The Ethics of Reviewing

[Bloviation Alert: This might be the longest article I've ever posted on TOP.]

By Mike Johnston

When I was a teacher, I naturally had a wide variety of colleagues. There was one physics teacher who had a seemingly limitless appetite for work. She taught a formidably full load, yet she was known to be very thorough in her teaching, assigning and correcting huge amounts of homework and constantly working with kids individually. She also cheerfully accepted any other burden that was placed upon her by virtually anyone. She chaired, coordinated, facilitated, advised, etc. She showed up at all the meetings. She didn't coach a sport, but that was because she was a spindly thing with approximately the athletic ability of a sea sponge. She was the first one at school in the morning and the last one to leave at night, and I have no doubt that at home she worked late, and on weekends. Washington, D.C., is a workaholic town, and I have no doubt that this particular individual fit right in with the town norm of the 60-to-80-hour work-week.

At the same school there was a music teacher, an older gentleman, WASPy and patrician, supposedly a mountain climber by avocation, who was the opposite. He taught literally half of the nominally minimum teaching load, and some semesters he would be relieved of half of that. His only other responsibility was leading the Glee Club twice a week, and he kept no very firm hand on the tiller of that sprawling enterprise, for the most part flitting around and chatting with his charges and only occasionally waving a baton airily about. He was one of those characters at prep schools whom everyone is obliged to love because they have been there forever and everyone has always loved them. As I recall there were days that he didn't need to come to school at all, and when he was in attendance he was constantly to be found loitering in the teachers' lounge, complaining happily. He would adamantly resist any and all attempts by anyone to get him to lend a hand in any school undertaking or activity whatsoever, protesting with great feeling that he already had enough to do. My observation, from a distance, was that if this beloved personage worked any less he wouldn't have been employed at all; I think if he'd dropped into a mountain crevasse it would have been months before even the Glee Club would have noticed he was missing.

Rollei R.I.P. (Part II)

A friend writes:

...greetings from Germany where I am spending my summer holidays.

My hometown is Braunschweig where Rollei/Franke & Heidecke is located so today I went to the facility to have my 40mm Rollei Sonnar checked out (Leica mount), but that was just an excuse to see them one last time. They have given notice to all employees in July and will close their facilities for good in September, unless a miracle happens and an investor is found.

We were led through the factory, plenty of TLR shells on the production lines as they have a final spike of orders coming in and continue to produce them until the very end. The halls and rooms breathe the history and great legacy, a crying shame but I suppose this is how things go now.

Just thought I share this...

He adds in another note that there are only 15 workers left and that the place feels ghostly already. More here in German, and here's our Part I.

Flip side of the previous post's coin, I guess. How do you say "c'est la vie" in German? So ist das Leben.

Mike
(Thanks to D.R. and Adam McA.)

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iPhone Ties Most Popular Camera on flickr

The leading photo sharing site, flickr.com, charts the popularity of the cameras used by its membership. Recently the Apple iPhone has jumped into a virtual tie for first place with the Canon XTi. Furthermore, flickr states on its "Camera Finder" page that it can only detect the camera used about 2/3rds of the time, and that, therefore, cameraphones are under-represented on the graphs. Yikes.

(Click on the image to see it larger.)

Mike
(Thanks to Dennis Ng)

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The Price of Being Small and Taking Risks

By Ted Johnson

Thinking about the Sigma DP2 has made me continue to ponder the economics of camera manufacturing in the digital age. Electronics are not kind to low volume manufacturers. Components like sensors, LCDs, and the development cost of the software/firmware drop dramatically in price as volume increases. Furthermore, there is an economic benefit to having accumulated experience in designing cameras that isn't easily quantified, but certainly exists. Finally, if you have other products that can benefit from the technology, the cost of development is reduced on a unit basis.

I'm sure that's why cameras like the M8 are so expensive, and why they are not very refined electronically. And Sigma, which I feel is not overloaded with cash, has suffered even more. Another example is the Olympus Pen vs. the Panasonic G series: Olympus can't or won't spend the money on the high level of contrast autofocus that Panasonic has, so it is slower to autofocus. Also, the Olympus has a relatively crude LCD compared to the competition. I am sure these shortcomings are related to direct cost, accumulated experience and the ability to take the technology and apply it to other product lines. It's scary to think that Olympus is at a serious disadvantage vis-à-vis their competition, but I think they are, and will, over the long term, suffer for it.

It also means a fair price for an improved Sigma DP2 might be $1200, at which point Sigma might estimate they would sell 10 cameras, not 10,000. Which might be too bad: a $1200 camera that has the benefits of the DP2 with quick autofocus and file flush times is probably salable in decent volumes. But it takes a lot of guts in any corporation to price to value rather than pricing to demographics.

I was the general manager at Callaway Cars in the mid '80s during the Twin Turbo Corvette production. We charged $20,000 for the upgrade at a time when the base Corvette was $40,000. Plain and simple, it cost a lot of money to do the low-volume remanufacture required to make a good car. GM thought we were crazy and would never sell the option, but agreed to give us an option # and let us run with the program. We thought we'd sell 40 or 50 cars. We ended up selling 188 the first year! There are people who were willing to cough up the dough because they got a good product, but I can't tell you how many calls I got from shade-tree mechanics about how they could produce a better car in their garage. My response was, "okay, go ahead." They didn't have to worry about providing a warranty, sales and service support, and of course a car that was reliable and street legal. It takes a lot of money to do that and the customer ultimately has to pay. The smaller the production run, the more the customer has to pay!

The engine bay of an '87 twin-turbo Callaway 'Vette. Photo: vetteweb.com

The other thing that hits a small volume manufacturer is when something is wrong with the camera even after it has shipped to the public. Again, at Callaway's, we changed out many components in the engine to improve reliability, to the point where almost everything was new. But we still ended up having problems that were related to a timing gear at the base of the distributor. GM had changed the component to reduce cost, and basically the looser tolerance meant some—repeat, some—wore out faster than the original component. In the standard car, other than running a bit poorly, nothing else happened. In the turbo car, under boost, the retarded timing caused the exhaust gas temps to soar and could cause the car to catch fire! "Heat damage" was the euphemism GM used. Anyway, we had to buy a special race-prepped gear to fix the problem, which was expensive to say the least.

I'm sure Leica and Sigma have had similar types of issues to deal with in their development processes, which looks stupid to the public but which is the price of being small and taking risks.

Ted

'I Heard...'

A few years back, Harley-Davidson, the venerable motorcycle manufacturer headquartered in my corner of Wisconsin (we even have a Harley-Davidson Museum not far from where I live) had an anniversary. I wasn't paying attention, but if memory serves it was its 105th. Bikers came from all over the world—you have to go to Sturgis to see more motorcycles at once, or in a day; they're like locusts. The rumble of big V-twin engines with no mufflers gets into your brain. As part of the celebration, the company threw a big concert. But its spokesmen got coy about who the main act would be—all they did was imply that it would be somebody really, really big.

With the performer's identity a secret, the rumor started getting around that it would be the Rolling Stones. So many people repeated this, so many times, that it was taken for granted by many that the rumors had to be true. The Stones concert was the talk of every street corner. News of where the Stones were and what they were doing became daily banter. The more talk there was, the more people believed it. The more people believed it, the more talk there was.

Come the night of the big concert, and who bestrode the stage but...well, Elton John. That was a surprise, all right, but not in the manner intended. People were so angry and disappointed that they left the concert in droves, thronging the exits before Elton had finished his first song.

It's probably true that Harley-Davidson management should have realized that a gay Brit pop crooner known for flamboyant eyeglasses didn't quite fit the corporate image (then again, my son thinks Harleys are "for really old, fat guys with gray beards"), but that can't have accounted for all the defections. What did it was confused expectations. Sometimes we want something to be true so badly that we feel let down when it turns out not to be the case. But who's to blame for that? Harley-Davidson never told anyone the Stones would perform. All they did was keep the performer's real identity a secret. It was a good illustration that wishful thinking—even en masse—doesn't make a belief true.

What got me started thinking about this is that I've actually stated in public that this site is a teaser campaign for the new Micro 4/3 Olympus. But I don't know that. All it says is that it's a celebration of the 50th Birthday of the Olympus Pen.

Maybe that's exactly what it is. Nothing more. It's possible I'm loading it with my own expectations, just because other people are. There appear to be three more spaces for "updates," but, as this page shows, there are actually five more Pen models.

Who's to blame for my disappointment if the last update is a hand drawing a camera from 1966?

Mike

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UPDATE: It was the 100th Anniversary celebration, in 2003, that featured Elton John. Thanks to Charles Veit for this information.

Why Circuit City Failed, and Why B&H Thrives

Many companies that have gone bust didn't die because of the recession. They failed for one reason: They treated customers poorly

By Joel Spolsky, Inc.

When Circuit City went kaput in January, I didn't waste my time on the chain's so-called going-out-of-business sale. First of all, Circuit City never had anything good in stock, even before it decided to go out of business. A year ago, I looked at the retailer's entire selection of laptops, and all I found were these huge, ugly, shiny things festooned with garish stickers announcing that they had "Intel Inside" and were "Vista Adequate" and "Y2K Ready." Also, I had read on the Consumer Reports website that Circuit City's liquidator had actually raised the price on many items for the going-out-of-business "sale."

Truth be told, I don't think I ever bought anything from Circuit City anyway. On weekends, I would occasionally wander into the local branch, attracted like a moth to the bright wall of plasma TVs. When I actually needed a new TV, however, I found the Circuit City salesperson to be so aggressively unknowledgeable and remarkably useless that I fled to Best Buy, where I was helped by a cheerful, 20-year-old twerp who knew everything. I later learned that in 2007, Circuit City had fired the chain's 3,400 most experienced salespeople and replaced them with generic, untrained, near-minimum-wage workers.

So it was no surprise to me that Circuit City failed...

READ ON at inc.com

Mike

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Disclosure: The Online Photographer is a B&H Photo affiliate.

Featured Comment by Bob McAnally: "I used to live in Northern NJ and shop B&H at their store, and now live in Tennessee and order online. They are great.

"But in the Circuit City closeout, I did make a find. I got a Sony keepsake. I bought the Plexiglas camera mockup used to display their vertical grip, for $10."

Featured Comment by Steve Rosenblum: "My favorite B&H story...I called a number of years ago to order some photo gear. The fellow who answered the phone had the clipped, somewhat brusque speech pattern that is common among New York's Hassidic Jews. When he asked me for my shipping information and I told him my name, he said, 'Rosenblum! Rosenblum! Are you related to the famous Rabbi Rosenblum?' I thought for a moment and said, 'If I am, do I get a discount?' After perhaps a 10-nanosecond pause he said, 'NO!' followed by a chuckle.

"I think we both got a chuckle out of that one."

Happy Birthday Hahnemuhle

You digiheads want tradition? I got yer tradition right here.

The maker of my favorite inkjet printing paper, Hahnemühle, in Germany (it's in Dassel, which is in North Germany, near Hanover), has been making paper continuously since William Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet. The company (which has only been called Hahnemühle since 1886, which was two years before George Eastman marketed "The Kodak" and coined the famous slogan, "You press the button—we do the rest") is celebrating its 425th birthday this year. Not many companies, let along photographic companies, let alone digital photography product manufacturers, can lay claim to such a longstanding heritage.

Photo: courtesy Hahnemühle

Happy Birthday, Hahnemühle. Here's to the next four hundred and twenty-five years. Never again should it be said that digital photography has no tradition.

Mike

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Danish PJ Accused of Excessive Photoshopping

Photos: Klavs Bo Christensen

The Danish Press Photography Union has excluded photojournalist Klavs Bo Christensen from the judging for this year's Press Photo Awards due to excessive Photoshopping. I don't read Danish, but the comparisons of the submitted pictures and the raw files in the online article are pretty eloquent all by themselves....

Mike
(Thanks to Axel Bauer)

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Featured Comment by Rana: "Man, that's bad—and the others in the article are worse. There are those for whom that overly 'juiced' aesthetic is appealing, but I'm not one of them. I see enough of it on amateur sites to be profoundly unimpressed by it.

"I'm not a hardcore no-Photoshop purist, but I do feel that the images that result ought to bear some resemblance to reality. While I do tweak levels, curves, and contrast in my images, I try to do so only to bring the digital images in line with what my eyes saw. This is so extensive it borders on photo-illustration, rather than photography.

"If the photographer wasn't a journalist, I wouldn't take as much issue with it, but there's a certain obligation to visual truth there—not 'truthiness.' Indeed, the composition of several of the images featured is strong, and the images would be powerful with only minor editing—there was no need to do this to them."

Mike adds: There's simply a different standard for photojournalism—you're expected to be honest and factual, and that pertains to pictures as well as to words. Of course there's no "absolute" standard that can be applied, but the photographer, like the journalist, needs to strive to establish him- or herself as a reliable witness. You simply don't do yourself any favors when you dress up an image to the point that it looks obviously unrealistic. 

I can sympathize with those who see nothing basically wrong with these examples, extreme though they may be. In part, photography is a visual language that we've had more than a century and a half to come to terms with; the distortions we're used to, and can interpret easily (black and white, wide-angle perspective, loss of detail in shadows, etc.) are unthreatening, whereas new forms of distortion are more contentious. Jim Hughes proved in an excellent article I published in Photo Techniques magazine that W. Eugene Smith, who is close to a patron saint for many photojournalists even now, often "stretched" the truth to a degree that would be unacceptable today—and that would certainly get him disqualified from journalism competitions. In some cases this even included adding elements that hadn't been in the scene.

And of course there's nothing wrong with Photoshop (or any other image editor), or with darkroom manipulation. But in photojournalism those tools are expected to be used to increase the accuracy and veracity of the photograph to the scene—not decrease it. That seems to be Mr. Christensen's failure here, not the tools he used. He's simply made himself a suspect witness by overdoing his manipulations to the point of obvious unreality, subverting realism for cheap effects instead of reporting it with an appropriate modicum of dispassion.

Featured Comment by Jerred Zegelis: "Thanks for bringing this to our attention! My high school students (photojournalists) often don't have the slightest problem drastically changing things in Photoshop, even after our conversations about ethics. These will be great to show them, and to discuss them as a class.

"I may be off base here—but the students, having basically grown up with photo editing tools (now on their phones even) think of Photoshop editing as basic as getting the right exposure...so these will be great to talk about!"

Featured Comment by Gordon Lewis: "The point I think a lot of people are missing here is that the version Christensen submitted aroused the judges' suspicions precisely because it look so 'unreal.' Keep in mind that he didn't submit both versions, so they had nothing on which to base a comparison other than a first impression. The apparent problem was that the version he submitted looked so different from the 'reality' that most of us have experienced that they came to the conclusion he had overcooked it.

"It may also be that he clearly violated the rules of the contest. Without knowing what the rules were, how can you say the judges were being unfair? I doubt you'd feel the same way if you were one of the entrants who had followed the rules to the letter.

"I also can't help but wonder how some of the defenders of generous Photoshop enhancement would feel if they were on the receiving end of the transaction. Would it bother anyone that nothing we saw first-hand ever looked as good as in photographs?

"In my opinion (and it's just my opinion), the closer photography gets to selling used cars, getting breast implants, using computers to correct the pitch of tone-deaf pop singers, and taking drugs to improve sports performance, the more it becomes a part of the 'do whatever it takes to get over' culture so prevalent in this country."