[Comments have been added]
I guess what strikes me the most about camera complexification is this: I've loved cameras my whole life. Enthusiasm to the point of obsessiveness. Well, okay, past the point, probably. I've spent money on them right along; I've bought way, way more of them that I ever needed to. I do like pictures and prints more, but I enjoy cameras for their own sake.
And yet somehow the current state of wretched excess has managed to take the joy out of many cameras for me. I think I first realized this with the original OM-D EM-5. That thing just blocked me—it felt like it actively prevented me from doing what I wanted to do, again and again. And it was the first time that, rather than thinking, "I'll master this," I thought, "I'll just get rid of this."
I think that if they've taken the joy out of cameras for me, then there's a problem. I'm the low-hanging fruit among the target audience, the easy sale, the constantly returning customer, the neverending market. The guy who will buy a new camera when he already has a new camera.
I'm reminded of what Gordon Lewis wrote about complex features in 2016: "Bear in mind that I’m a Harvard graduate with over 40 years of photographic experience. I do instructional design and technical training for a living. It’s therefore reasonable to suspect that if I find it a challenge to figure these things out, others will too. More to the point, just because someone can perform an unnecessarily difficult task doesn’t mean they like to."
The inescapable insight is that this has got to be one thing driving the acceptance of smartphone cameras and the migration away from big rigs (by which I mean ILC's). Smartphone cameras are radically simple and they get out of the way, enabling people to simply enjoy photography. As we've seen from the comments here, even some TOP readers feel that way! And we're the mavens, the enthusiasts, the deep end of the pool.
Don't oversimplify
Of course, oversimplification can also frustrate people by preventing them from doing what they want to do. But what that means is that an understanding of the balance between the two is required, so that an intelligent balance can be achieved. It's something Steve Jobs understood very well—it was part of his genius, really, and generally speaking I think the world is grateful for the way he changed the culture in the whole universe of computing devices. There's an optimum point between not enough flexibility and configurability on one hand, and feature overload and needless complexity on the other. It should be different for different cameras, but a deep understanding of that basic tradeoff has to be a given. And it isn't.
It's useless to hope that the mainstream camera manufacturers will suddenly change, because I don't think they even understand the goal. Or the reason for the goal.
It's characterological
It's partly a matter of aptitude among the people involved. People who have a strong aptitude for geeky features and endless complexity simply don't see why they should be denied every possible option. And people who don't like endless features and complexity are shamed, in a sense, into accepting what the geeks are happy with, the assumption being that if they don't learn all the ins-and-outs of their cameras then it's their own fault.
They, meanwhile, leave the D537D Mark XIII in the closet and just go shoot with their phones. And when the Mark XIV comes out, they take a pass.
By the way, there should be a name for the business strategy of blaming bad product design on the consumer, or adding complexity until the objective can't be reached. If you didn't read that you have to fill your tires with nitrogen then it's your fault when your pressure sensors don't work. Ever tried to apply for an insurance reimbursement from the Post Office? Doing so successfully will be your part-time job for three or four months. I tried to see it through and still failed. That's by design, I'm sure.
Have you ever watched Doug DeMuro's automotive channel? That guy is such a geek that he can understand virtually every feature on a car and every item in its manual within probably a few hours. He'll point out esoteric features on the car and small anomalies in the manual with delight. Meanwhile, there are features on my simple sedan which I will die without ever knowing about.
The Doug types are the ones designing cameras. There is no such thing as too much complexity; no such thing as too many features. These are the folks who love Word and Photoshop. "Did you see that in the latest version there are now 16 ways to do this one simple task rather than just 11? That's an improvement!"
Cult camera
I once wrote a detailed letter to the CEO of eBay suggesting the company should market a cheap camera specifically designed for taking eBay product pictures. I put a lot of thought into the description and still think I did a great job (he said modestly). I thought it would be a win-win; not only would they make money selling the camera, but they'd radically improve the quality of the average product photo for items posted for sale. Never heard a peep back, of course. I'm sure my letter found the round file. But I'll tell you what. Some camera company or other should let me design a People's Camera for its product lineup. The SS, for Super Simple. I'd do a hell of a job. I'd make a camera so radical that everyone from veteran street photographers to new parents to fine artists would love. You could pick it up and use it without a manual. It'd become a cult camera, with fanatical followings. This might sound immodest, but I've been on the front lines and in the trenches for 40 years; I know what the people want even though they don't know they want it.
Never happen in a million years, of course. But hey, we're just talking here.
Mike
MARILYN NANCE: "Thank you. I have felt somewhat guilty for years for not using very much and giving away my OM-D E-M5. It was a bit too small for my fingers and the menu system was chaotic and too different from the Nikons I also used. I have stuck with Nikons since then. "
Alan: "Quote from Albert Einstein: 'Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem–in my opinion–to characterize our age. I fear the day technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.'"
Mike the Ed. replies: In the formerly United States at least, spurious quotations are most commonly attributed to William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, or Albert Einstein. So whenever I see "Albert Einstein" as the source of a quote I get suspicious! Sometimes what those individuals said is twisted or augmented, sometimes a real quotation from someone else is attributed to them for the purpose of giving it more authority, and sometimes it's all just bull poop. In any event, whenever a quotation attributed to Einstein, Lincoln, Twain or the bard crops up, a citation becomes all the more important.
So I did a bit of digging. In this case, the first part of the quotation appears to be genuine and the second part spurious. Einstein did say "Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem–in my opinion–to characterize our age." Here's the quote in context, with citations, courtesy of a site called entersection:
Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem—in my opinion—to characterize our age. If we desire sincerely and passionately the safety, the welfare and the free development of the talents of all men, we shall not be in want of the means to approach such a state. Even if only a small part of mankind strives for such goals, their superiority will prove itself in the long run.
—Albert Einstein in his speech "The Common Language of Science," a broadcast-recording for the Science Conference in London on September 28th, 1941. First published in "The Advancement of Science," Volume 2, Number 5 (London: British Association for the Advancement of Science). Available in The Theory of Relativity, and Other Essays (Secaucus, New Jersey: Carol Publishing Group, 1996), p. 67. Audio recording available on "Albert Einstein: Historic Recordings, 1930-1947," (London: The British Library, Sound Archive, 2005), Track 6.
I haven't checked those citations—this isn't The New Yorker—but they appear pretty stout prima facie.
The second bit has been on the internet at least since 2012 and seems to be commonly used as a critique of cellphone culture, as explained here by Quote Investigator. A site called Full Fact notes: "Both PolitiFact and fellow fact checking service Snopes have pointed out that a quote bearing some resemblance to [this one] appears in the 1995 film Powder, with a character played by Jeff Goldblum saying: 'It’s become appallingly clear that our technology has surpassed our humanity.' Another character, played by Sean Patrick Flanery, responds, 'Albert Einstein.'"
My experience doing seat-of-the-pants research on the web for the past 16+ years is that quotes found on the internet are disreputable and should be considered dubious by default. Some are correct, of course, but many illustrate the caution "don't believe everything you read online." What happens is that an incorrect quotation gets copied from one source to another until anyone searching it will discover numerous hits for it.
Sorry to pick on you Alan! None of this diminishes the relevance of the legitimate Einstein quote, "Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem—in my opinion—to characterize our age," which is no doubt the part that led you to comment. It strikes me as similar in spirit to the familiar Ansel Adams quote, "There is nothing worse than a sharp image [perfection of means] of a fuzzy concept [confusion of goals]."
Patrick Perez adds: "Mike's response to Alan's post quoting the internet mis-quote of Albert Einstein brought up a couple thoughts. Mike describes the people most frequently mis-attributed in the U.S. I'd add that in the U.K. the honor probably goes mostly to Oscar Wilde and Winston Churchill. I do not have documentation for this assertion of mine.
"When I mis-attribute, I am always careful. Example: 'As I always say Mark Twain always said, "Man is the only animal that accessorizes...or needs to."'"
Alan adds: "Hi Mike. Alan here. Thanks for your response to my Einstein quote(s) comment. It would appear the second quote in my comment may not have direct provenance to Einstein after I researched more deeply as you did. I wonder who actually did come up with that quote. There must have been a genesis of the quote at some point in time.
"It would also appear that many actual books have been published with this quote. I just searched for google books with that quote. See here. Seems pretty widespread now. Interesting in that if you say it enough times it almost seems to become true...perfect example is in politics nowadays. :-) ."
Kenneth Tanaka (partial comment): "Re 'I think I first realized this with the original OM-D EM-5. That thing just blocked me....' Oy! Your reference induced a moment to PTSD! I owned an Olympus E-M[x] camera (don't recall the specific model) briefly one summer long ago. 'Blocked' is a perfect description for how I felt, too. It was unquestionably the worst user interface I have ever encountered. I wanted to throw the thing in the lake. (Interestingly, I have no such recollection about the first Oly Pen model. Just that it was clunky. But, yeah, for me that Oly was the poster child for malevolent user interface design!"
Mike Marcus: "You got that right about the Oly OM-D E-M5. Since I always liked the film Olys and still have an XA, I picked up a used E-M5. Then I spent much of its first weekend, considerable parts of the following week, plus much of the next weekend before I started to understand how to set it up the way I wanted for still photos. I did very much like the photos it was finally able to produce for me. But I later sold it, which I should have done that first weekend.
"Later, because I had spent so much time learning the Oly menu 'system' I bought their E-M1 that also produced nice photos. But the menu still sucked. Later, for reasons that I still shake my head over, I got a Sony A7 Mark II. The Sony menus are actually worse than Oly's. Then, I said to myself, I can't deal with two unknowable menu systems. That ended my time with another sold Oly and that Sony is now sold too. I have a Pany GX1, GX8, and G9, which have complex menus that I have had much less problem using.
"Here I should note that I am a retired Ph.D. science type with a minor in statistics who has had many different cameras since age 10. So one would think that complex menus should not be a problem for me. Not true. They are not fun. (While I still have an a7R Mark II it will be gone sometime this year and I will not buy another Sony or Oly.)"
Michael Bade: "I keep wondering how a camera would look and function if the fundamental properties of smartphone camera OS that make a smartphone transparent to use and which make photos easy to share were adapted to a rethought ILC format camera. I have to believe that if digital camera processors were as powerful as smartphone processors the controls on the camera could be radically simplified and rethought, dramatically simplifying the process of making photographs with no loss of output quality—not by making the camera dumber bt by making it smarter and more able to correctly adapt to conditions in the visual environment in real time.
"Smartphones are doing this—applying AI and sophisticated algorithms in real time, for better photos. I compare my Apple iPhone 11 and my Fuji X-H1 by using both together. I hate the number of controls I have to manage on the Fuji compared to the iPhone, but love the Fuji's sensor and glass. I love the way the iPhone automatically uploads my photos to the cloud.
"I know, this is Them Hogan's longtime rant, and I fully understand how Apple can amortize the development of such sophisticated software in the iPhone across vastly more units sold than are sold by ILC camera makers. But Thom's right! Instead of phones with cameras stuck on them, we could have had cameras that incorporated a phone!"
Gordon Lewis: "For what it's worth, I now shoot primarily with a Fuji X-T3. The main reason is because it still has the standard analog interface (shutter dial, aperture dial, ISO dial) I'm used to and comfortable with. It also has a handy 'lock' feature that prevents me from accidentally changing specific features and settings once I've locked them in. I really don't mind all the extra features being available, as long as I don't have to use them if I don't want to."
Dave Pawson: "Solid, logical points. You have my sympathy and support. I've a camera here that takes a pic every time I touch the rear screen. Darned if I can find where to switch it off. I think it's menu 23, submenu 48...but I'm not sure."
Joe. Kashi: "Da Vinci, I believe, posited that 'Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.'"
Mike replies: You sure about that attribution? :-)
