The Online Photographer

Is Apple Showing Overt Hostility to...Us?!?

Forgive the possible paranoia—it's election day in the U.S., and we have a clash of different cultures in this country at present. (The book American Nations by Colin Woodard is a readable and entertaining deconstruction of this that I recommend—if you read only one book about North America and the U.S., these days that should probably be it. But I digress.)

...So paranoia aside, as I was saying, maybe it has become time to keep in mind that Apple is now a direct competitor of the entire camera industry. I said directly. Indirectly, does that mean it's becoming antagonistic to established photographic culture as it's been practiced for the past 70 years or so?

The signs are small as yet. Exhibit one: it killed its own Aperture app—aimed at, and useful to, people like us. What, couldn't they afford to keep it going? Exhibit two: I don't remember where off the top of my head, but an Apple spokesman recently corrected an interviewer to claim that Apple is the number one camera manufacturer in the world. Exhibit three: there's no SD card slot on the new Mac Minis.

It's tempting—a little too tempting—to explain that last in conspiracy-theory fashion, by suspecting that Apple is relegating people who use "old style," unconnected, large-sensor, interchangeable-lens cameras (ILCs) to the purgatory of using a dongled card reader that takes up a port because...well, Apple no longer likes or approves of the likes of us, nor does it wish to support us.

We're the competition? We should be using our Apple cameras (AKA iPhones) like other good citizens?

I mean, I do. My iPhone is firmly ensconced in my camera kit and in my daily practice. But I also use my Fujis and Panasonics and my full-capability photo editing programs (like, um, Aperture was) and my Epson printer. But maybe Apple no longer supports me or my creative life.

If so, that's a long, loooong way from the original stated Jobsian mission of the Mac, which was to enable creative people to create. Ordinary everyday non-computer-geek creative people. And I know whereof I speak there too: the Apple Macintosh was what enabled me to become a writer in the first place, period, back when the Orwellian hero hurled the hammer at the huge screen image of Big Brother. In my little study on a locked corridor in the stacks of Baker Library at Dartmouth, I literally cut up paper manuscripts and taped the pieces to the wall to reorganize written works, and laboriously retyped short story manuscripts again and again to revise them. Then along came the Mac and let me do in minutes what used to take me hours. I honestly seriously doubt I would be a writer today if it weren't for the v.1 128k Mac I used in 1984 and the seventeen or so Macs I've owned or used since.

I'd hate to think that the now-mighty juggernaut wants the likes of us to wither up and go away. Who would be the Big Brother then, hmm?

Dyspeptic musings? Maybe. I'll probably feel better after the election's over. You might have to give me a week or three.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

C.R. Marshall: "The book recommendation reminds me of The Nine Nations of North America by Garreau."

Mike replies: Yes, you're right, it's a direct descendant of Joel Garreau's 1982 book, and builds on and updates it.

Matt Anderson: "It’s interesting how differently the same facts can be framed. That Apple wishes to be seen as a camera manufacturer and has invested so much in computational photography and democratizing the taking and sharing of pictures could be seen to indicate that it is the biggest ally we have. Big-name Apple executives (like Phil Schiller) are reported to be photography nuts like us, using DSLRs and digital medium format as avid hobby photographers.

"More evidence? The latest iPad Pro just announced may be the best photo-editing computer (and value on a cost per image computing cycle) ever, and its introductory keynote and ads featured Photoshop, Lightroom, and connection to DSLRs prominently.

"While I’d prefer to see the SD card slot continue (and it does in the iMacs), Apple’s focus on portability could be seen as a miscalculation about what Pros need and/or a bad forecaster about the direction of storage, and not an overt war on independent photography.

"The narratives we put around facts to give them meaning to us make up so much of how we see the world. Maybe that’s something useful to remember as we hear the election results tonight? (Whatever the results and whatever your leanings.)"

MikeK (partial comment): "I'm not sure Apple hates us, so much as it just doesn't care that much. Leaving off SD card slots and USB ports might be seen as an echo of the decision to leave a floppy drive out the original iMac (which might seem prescient now, but there weren't really any other options in removable storage back then).

"What really proves their ambivalence to me, though, is found on the bottom of my mouse. On my old work Mac (2011 vintage) when the batteries died, I needed only swap them out for another set of (rechargeable) AAs. On its replacement, the batteries are non-removable and it must be charged via the propietary USB cable, which plugs into the bottom of the mouse, thus rendering it completely unusable when being charged. They could have put it on the front, but no, that would compromise the aesthetics by about 0.01%. It wouldn't be so bad if the OS gave more than about five minutes warning of the mouse's paucity of power....

Mike replies: It's pretty indulgent, that form-over-function thing they do. But I also like a lot of things about it, for instance the insistence on simplicity.

Yonatan K: "From the very beginning, the Jobsian ethos was to let creative people create...as long as they did it in the way that Apple thought best. Just to be clear—I am now fully entrenched in the Apple gear-o-sphere, but I didn't cross over to the dark side until OS X made its debut precisely because the previous OS was an inflexible black box: it was the Apple way or nothing. This principle hasn't really changed; Apple has just gotten better at covering all the bases (except the ones that they don't want you to use anymore). Rant over."

Scott Symes: "I am unhappy about the SD card slot going away too but.... Maybe you should consider it from the other side. Let's say the traditional camera manufacturers are failing us. Why are they not doing more to build connected devices in this age of constant connectivity? Snapbridge, Fuji Cam Remote, etc...NOPE. This is not what is needed. This is the traditional camera manufacturers being hostile to us. Build us the cameras that connect with the rest of the digital image ecosystem. This is overdue."

Michael Perini: "I don't think Apple hates us. It's just that traditional enthusiast/professional photography is seen by them as an increasingly irrelevant niche.

"When they killed Aperture after recruiting professionals to build their business on it, it was still one of the most popular App store Downloads. Apple's model is iPhone pictures stored on Apple's servers. They view dedicated stills cameras as dinosaurs. Apple has been right about an awful lot of things, and they may be right about this too. But that doesn't make it any easier for those of us who prefer traditional photography and like to be able to upgrade their own computers. They look at traditional camera companies with their lack of connectivity as dead men walking. They may be right about that too.

"So while they don't hate us, they are not going even a tiny bit out of their way to accommodate us. Even their choice of the fairly obscure P3 Video Projector Gamut and color space was a message—the Adobe RGB and ProPhoto RGB folks can do it our way, or buy a PC.

"PC's had 10 bit color workflows four years before Apple.

"I have been using Macs since 1985; I doubt I'll change, but I remember a time when the creative community were their only customers. I think we deserve better even if our pursuits are not 'cutting edge.'"

Joe Holmes: "I won't offer any opinion whatsoever on your crazy, paranoid, delusionary psycho-rant, but I will note that I dearly loved Apple's Aperture and I miss it like crazy. The interface was vastly superior to Lightroom (which makes me feel claustrophobic); it let me scroll thumbnails at top speed unlike Capture One, and, with one exception, its interface was smooth. The counterexample: allowing unmodified letter keys to perform actions rather than standard command-keys. I don't know how many times I thought I was typing a keyword but accidentally ended up typing a whole string of commands which I then had to try to undo. I've been using Capture One for more than a year now—it's the closest thing out there to Aperture—and I still miss Aperture all the time."

Mike replies: Made me laugh.

Ed Hawco: "I am in a constant emotional loop with Apple innovations: Outrage > Ambivalence > Acceptance > Approval. Then the next innovation resets me back to outrage.

"A classic example is the move from the original iPhone connector to the Lightning connector. It just seemed so pointless and manipulative. Now I'm in awe at the Lightning connector and how universal and useful it is. I suspect I'll go the same route with the SD slot. From Apple's point of view, it probably seems silly to build an SD slot into the unit when probably only 5% of Mac Mini users need an SD slot. Those in the 5% can buy a dongle! Or they can use the SD slot that is built into many monitors. In my case, I rarely use my 2012 Mac Mini's SD slot because it's hard to reach (due to the unit's placement on my desk). My Dell monitor has one right there on the side, within easy reach, so that's where I go.

"Hey look, I don't even have a 2018 Mac Mini yet and I've already gone through the outrage loop!"

T. Edwards: "While it's true that paranoid people do, in fact, sometimes have enemies out to get them, I think there's another explanation here. Apple dropped the card slots from all (I think) of its laptops, too. Along with old-style USB ports, HDMI ports, etc. Now you have to get dongles and adapters. I think the purpose is to jettison everything possible to free up space inside and make products smaller overall.

"I use the SD card slot on my 2103 era MacBook Pro all the time, but I have had friends who own other Macs ask me—what's that little slot for? So they never use SD cards. I would guess that there are enough people out there who either a.) don't care at all about this or b.) will buy adapters. Apple isn't alone in this. I've been eyeing the new Lenova Yoga 930—a fantastic thin, light, laptop/tablet—and it, too, just has to USB-C (I think) ports.

"As for Aperture, my uneducated guess is that keeping that going and doing raw converters for new generations of cameras and dealing with the kvetching of photographers was just not worth the time. I mean, when you are selling $1,000 phones like hotcakes, why do you want to task employees to do low-return work on a photo editing program?"

Open Mike: What's All This Mean?

This might be a short post, because my answer to the above question is "beats me."

And it could be even shorter because thunderstorms are moving in, and if the atmosphere really gets to thrashing I might have to turn off the computer.

But...quite a day yesterday. I haven't even covered all the news yet. But if you admit the idea that "camera culture" is a thing, and a thing distinct from photo culture, then, clearly, Photokina '18 is a watershed moment. Here's the capsule review:

Sony, relatively new to the camera business and very ambitious, becomes a "throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks" kind of company, embracing everything from a tiny FF fixed-lens camera to the old pellicle mirror idea (before that, last seen dying a prolonged death with the Canon EOS RT, a camera I loved but the market decidedly did not). Eventually it alights on full-frame mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras, and the spaghetti sticks to the wall: people love 'em. Sales soar, and Sony, fickle as ever, dumps resources into full-frame mirrorless (FFM), plunging its old APS-C lines into benign neglect, discontinuing the SLTs and responding to criticisms about the FFM lens line with an ambitious flurry of pro-oriented paperweights.

Meanwhile, the flourishing used market, the sufficiency of older models, the rising cost of upgrading, and the slowing of technological development puts a lasting damper on the camera market. Suddenly it's not just point-and-shoots AKA digicams being pillaged by smartphones—it begins to erode the DSLR market as well. Prestigious Leica seems to be quietly copying many of Sony's ideas, but putting its own spin on its takes on those ideas. Even Complacent Canon starts getting shaken. By some metrics, Sony begins to look like it's...winning.

So at some point, Canon and Nikon (ever mindful more of each other than of other competition or even of the market, in classic Japanese corporate fashion) decide that Sony indeed has the magic formula and they'd better protect themselves. Giant Panasonic, evidently not reaping enough profit from sustainable energy and kitchen appliances and the lovingly reimagined SL-1200G, and feeling increasingly ghettoized in the Micro 4/3 box, wants a piece of the Sony-identified pie too, and gets a creative idea to expand its longstanding Leica partnership in an innovative new way, bringing Sigma into the picture too, and the L-Mount...what's it called? Not "consortium"...alliance, that's it, alliance—the L-Mount Alliance is born.

So now the camera industry is poised, one would think, to a.) move away from legacy SLRs and consign that antiquated 1950s configuration to the dustbin of history at long last and b.) to annoint FFM as the new serious format-and-camera-configuration standard.

The only trouble being, it would seem, that the market really hasn't decided that's what it wants, entirely.

I mean, what if Sony's FFM cameras are already saturating the segment? Can the potential energy of the unmet demand really sustain the move from one and an eighth players (Sony and Leica) to four big players, one of them a three-company consortium (er, alliance)?

Is everyone (and his brother, and his uncle) going to start buying FFM system cameras now? Is the camera market going to be smartphones at the base level and FFM for pros and camerafans, with Fuji as the set-aside company that gets to be truly independent and go its own way (like, say, Woody Allen among filmmakers) and Leica as the sole Veblen Good supplier to the carriage trade?

Or will this watershed moment—FFM—become an historical diversion, a backwater, a onetime next-big-thing that fizzled? After all, with sensors getting better and better, 1-inch, Micro 4/3, and APS-C get more capable all the time, not less. And more sensible as a realistic choice for photographers as time goes by, too. And along those lines, one last question: did Olympus just get lucky, seeing its biggest competition turn to a new project and a new direction, which means that in the future Panasonic will effectively leave Olympus alone to increasingly own Micro 4/3? Or if it, too, doesn't turn to FFM, will Olympus be odd man out again, as it was in the second half of the '80s when it made the decision not to go to AF right away?

I'm doubtful that there's enough gas (pun intended) in the full-frame mirrorless market to sustain four big players in the kind of prosperity they all want—the kind of prosperity Sony's earned after working it for five years. Because, don't forget, Sony's been working hard at it, diversifying the A7 product line and reiterating each tier several times.

But maybe there is. Maybe FFM, like pickup trucks and SUVs on American roads, is what everyone actually really wants.

And then of course there's always the specter of real disruption lurking—some magic formula that no one has quite divined yet but that the buying public will take a shine to. These days, you can never rule such a thing out.

Mike

"Open Mike" is the editorial page of TOP. It appears with rigid regularity on Wednesdays.

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

John McMillin: "FFM leaves me cold. When I bought my FF DSLR, it wasn't for greater detail capture or bigger pixels. My K5IIs gave me everything I needed in the IQ department. I just wanted a bigger optical VF, like I enjoyed in the film era, the better to study and respond to the framed image before I clicked the shutter. Once mirrorless tech came along to decouple sensor size from viewfinder optics, I see far less need for FF. Whatever full frame gives in acuity, it takes back in DOF problems. And the difference between image detail from my two-pound K-1 (plus lens) and my featherweight Ricoh GRII is surprisingly small.

"That said, there's no denying the market's zest for bigness and overcapacity. Like those jumbo, dual-tired pickups in the school dropoff lane, we like to look like we're packed for action, and better equipped than the next guy, because, who's really secure anymore? In that sense, all FF cameras are Veblen goods."

Kenneth Tanaka: "What does it 'mean'? It means 'Summer’s here an' the time is right for dancin’ in the streets!' It means that nearly all of the big camera companies are taking advantage of a now-or-maybe-never moment, albeit a year or two late, as is characteristic of cautious industrialists. Consumer confidence and spending in most developed nations has risen sharply. Money is still relatively cheap and the prospects for good return on investment figures are good. The big (mirror) box boys are sick of being called big fatties. The small-sensor boys are tired of being...small-sensor boys. It means that Leica has found new friends in their desperation to save their over-weight/over-priced/under-featured SL system. It means that Panasonic thinks it might have a path out of the languishing Micro-4/3 bog. It means that Fujifilm is enjoying a well-earned moment in the warm sun.

"What does it 'mean' for photography? Nothing, really. None of the Photokina announcements I've seen so far have any apparent relationship to the recognition of where photography as a medium is going. It's just consumer electronics."

David Raboin: "I've never seen so much exciting camera tech released in such a short period of time. Is the photography economy approaching peak GAS, or can we go higher?

"The camera manufacturers and many of us photographers are obsessed with camera specs but nobody outside of the smartphone world and Silicon Valley pays attention to the other half of photography: sharing and displaying photos. How do you consume and share most photos? In my on-the-go life (which I'm guessing is similar to your 2018 life) I do 90% of my photo sharing and communing through a phone. As an image resolution fanatic this leaves me disappointed. I wish my photos were viewed bigger and I would like to see other's work displayed bigger, but we live in a smartphone world. Every now and then I get a chance to show somebody my work on a high-res laptop screen and it always has more impact than a picture sent over the phone.

"If photographers and camera manufacturers want to save cameras from the encroachment of smart phones we need to figure out a way to more easily display our photos larger. Canikon should be dumping research dollars into making printing easier and less expensive. They should also be inventing new ways to display photos. Someone please come up with a wall-mount LCD display that's affordable and that my wife approves of. Also, us photographers need to do a better job sharing our high resolution work. We should publicly show off our photos as much as possible. It's our job to inspire the masses to want better cameras."

Jim Richardson: "I think it means that the pull of 'Full Frame' has proven to be irresistible and that all other formats (however logical or practical) are doomed."

More About Variety in the Marketplace

A couple of further points to add to the "Wealth of Choices" arguments.

First, check out this article at The Verge, the upshot of which is that Sony has surpassed Canon and Nikon in U.S. sales of full-frame cameras, reportedly in both dollars and units sold. A linked article notes that "Nikon will try to position its [Z-series] cameras head-to-head with Sony’s. (Even the names are kind of similar)," and "from the sound of it, Nikon is going to kick things off by going straight after Sony’s most important mirrorless line."

Corporations aren't omniscient
I don't buy the arguments that more variety isn't possible in the camera marketplace because the companies only develop and build what sells. Bullcrêpe! Companies don't know what will sell; they only know what has sold in the past. That's why most of them keep building the same thing...or building what seems to sell for other companies*. Publishing was my business for a while, and publishers don't know where the next bestseller is coming from. That's why they "spray and pray" by publishing ten new books for every one that makes money. Magazine publishers love to tell you how much "market research" they pay for so they'll "know" what covers will attract attention and trigger newsstand sales, but the fact is that they don't know which cover will sell and which cover won't, or why. (I once actually demonstrated this with a deliberate experiment with the magazine I edited, to refute an outside consultant who had been hired to harass me. Well, maybe that's not why he was hired—it was just what he did.) Do the movie studios know what's going to be popular? If they did there would never be a flop. They game the system and manipulate public opinion down to the gritty nubbins and they still can't accurately predict the hits and misses.

The BMW 3-series has a long history of success**, so Lexus builds a nice 3-series clone called the RC-F. High-performance car, gorgeous interior; doesn't sell. Why? No one knows. All this hoohockey about companies only building what sells is nonsense. What, Toyota can't afford market research? And can't independent individuals sometimes guess what might be popular? Don't forget, I wrote an article essentially describing the Fuji X100 five years before it came along. Predicted the focal length of the fixed lens to within one millimeter. The fact is, companies try things and see what works. If companies knew what was going to sell, everything would. They try their absolute best to predict trends, tastes, and sales and they still can't get it completely right. Sometimes they even get it completely wrong***.

Who needs it?
Next, I never said I cared about whether the manufacturers make money or not. That's not my business—I'm not on their side. I'm on your side. That is, I care about photographers and whether they have what they need to do good work. That's whose side I'm on; that's whose interests I think about. If I worked for a camera company, then I would spend my days thinking about what would sell. But I don't.

Take for an example a thought experiment about a postulated imaginary digital "view camera." Imagine a medium-format-sensor camera intended to be used on a tripod in the field that had an integrated viewing screen the size of the Retina screen on a 12.9-inch iPad. Imagine the camera had controls that allowed the application of basic movements in software, but in real time so a photographer in the field could see the effects as he or she worked.

In response to that idea, a certain number of commenters would say "I don't need that," or "you could do the same thing with a tethered laptop" (or with some other workaround) or "just use film," or "you could do the same corrections later in post." In another "bin" would be comments such as "it would never sell enough" or "there isn't enough demand" or "the company that developed such a camera would lose money." Still another group would dismiss the idea with what amount to veiled insults like "you're just attached to the past," etc.

But to me, you see, all three types of comment miss the point I happen to care about. The question for me is, are there photographers out there for whom the small viewing screens of existing cameras aren't big enough, whose work would benefit from being able to see their subjects more clearly with a much larger viewing screen? Are there photographers out there who would be enabled to do better work if they could see perspective corrections in real time, as they were photographing?

If there aren't, then I don't care about such an option. If there are, then I would wish such an option existed. Even if it can't.

The variety I would want to see in the camera market is directed at these sorts of issues. Whether it's a viable product for a company to make or not is perfectly rational to consider, because it possibly describes why such a product could exist or doesn't exist. But either way, it's not the salient point to me. I want photographers to be served with what would enable them to do good work more effectively. That's where I'm coming from. 

Back to the Z-series
Here's what I think is going on with Thursday's announcement. Nikon is responding to Sony's rising market share in FF cameras by poaching the successful A7[x] lineup with two copycat products. Since there will be few native lenses at first (and possibly forever), much attention will be paid to offering top-level support to the use of Nikon DSLR lenses with adapters. Meanwhile, since the Z-series introduces a new lensmount from Nikon (this is huge news in and of itself, actually, given the history of the F-mount), the lensmount, as one of our commenters noted, might support a medium-format sensor size and lenses, presaging a future Fuji GFX killer from Nikon as well. (That's the end of the market these companies are most interested in these days, because smartphones have eaten their lunch at the other end.) [UPDATE: Stephen schooled us on this...not gonna happen. Okay. —MJ]

And yep, there's always the possibility that Z[x] will out-do A7[x], and be better cameras.****.

All that is guesswork. But now I feel I have a framework for evaluating this development as it develops! Grab popcorn, sit back....

Mike

*Remember how Nikon built the Coolpix A in 2013, going after the success of the Ricoh GR? How'd me-tooism work out for them that time?

**I said that instead of using the word "iconic," and you're welcome!

***cf. Kodak PhotoCD.

****Heck, I liked the Coolpix A.

TOP will be off tomorrow, as Yr. Hmbl. Ed. attempts to rejuvenate by going 24 hours without thinking about photography.

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Jim Arthur: "I see what you mean. I often consider too many variables when faced with an issue and don’t focus on the crux of the matter. This can lead to inaction on my part. In this case, if the market does not have a wish list, the market research is of no use and things remain the same. You have to make your heart’s desire known."

JH (partial comment): "Aha, now you are getting into topics I'm covering in my book on management you inspired me to get back to work on!

"Corporations are stupid. Ever hear of the 'Peter Principle'—people in corporations rise to their level of incompetence. Based on 50 years in business, I can assure you that is the case. The people running companies are generally incompetent and the absolute worst people to be running them. A survey of corporate executives in America a few years ago showed the majority would rather be playing golf. Most work to protect their bonuses and some, like Elon Musk, work and tweet on acid (true according to today's New York Times.) Most companies have an idea they start with and few ever have a second good one. After a while they rely on chasing their competition and products become 'me too' copies. They either stagnate or die.

"I'll skip the stories about cars and focus on cameras. Maybe. Look at Kodak. They invent the digital camera but let it kill them. They had stagnated and had no idea how to apply the same creativity to marketing that they had in R&D. (Hell, I was helping them develop integrated circuits in 1969, I know how good their R&D was.) Nikon and Canon focus so tightly on each other, they can't innovate much at all. I've seen this in tech companies before. Management refuses to allow innovation because 1.) it's risky and I don't want to risk my job and 2.) that's not what the competition is doing. Olympus was a backmarker so developing a new type of camera (Micro 4/3) was easier, even easier for Panasonic who was not a serious player at all, since the alternative was to continue to fade away. Innovation worked for them. Sony was a tech leader and had no baggage to stop new ideas—ever see the Mavica? Early success showed the idea had merit and justified continuing the process.

"Ninety-nine percent of all the innovation going on in photography and camera development today is in the cellphone business. That's where the innovative companies are and more importantly, that's where the money is. That they understand how most users want to use cameras leads to their success.
If your interest is along the lines of traditional photographers, you have to live with what the Canikon companies give you—better traditional cameras (what they know) but poor interface to today's digital world. In another decade, they will probably decline similarly to the film photography industry as their market shrinks, revenue and profit declines, and innovation becomes less justifiable."

Michael Perini (partial comment): "As for the predictive value of 'Corporate Marketing' I'm not sure you are looking at that in a realistic way. Pick any business that makes consumer goods then narrow that down to a group that has had long term success—say 25 years or more—then narrow that down further to a group that has been so successful that they are now a multi-billion dollar corporation. The most successful enterprises. They could have only gotten there by making lots of correct decisions about what they can sell. For better or worse they all have a process that they use to decide what to make. They know it is highly fallible, but the also know it got them where they are. But if you look closely you will see that they have all had lots of failures. Failures that look really dumb with the benefit of hindsight. It is very easy to cherry pick those and point them out. They all know that it is not an exact science, and if they can be right more than they are wrong they grow. If the balance shifts negative they shrink. If they can't turn it around they disappear."

Stephen Scharf (partial comment): "Some points I'd like to throw in for discussion: Its pretty clear to me that you have no experience in formal product development for engineering-based products, or your views would likely be very different. With all due respect, publishing a magazine is the not the same process nor poses the same challenges as researching, developing, verifying, validating and manufacturing a camera, or a DNA sequencer, for that matter. Movies don't qualify, either. Movies and magazines don't have deliver on a set of critical functional responses (aka CFR) and be able to manufacture them in statistical control. Here's some facts for you: any product development company that has and implements a formal and disciplined Voice of the Customer (VOC) process, and then executes and the fulfills on the customer requirements that are the deliverables of that VOC process, then executes on those customer requirements with a high level of engineering specification and quality (by using an approach e.g. DFSS) can, and does, make products that will sell and sell well, all the time. I personally have 10 years of experience and data in the biotech sector to prove it."

Mike replies: With all due respect back at you, I do realize that the people charged with developing new products do so responsibly and intelligently. But the limitation of VOC is contained in your phrase "customer requirements." The better the customer can define their requirements, the better companies can fulfill them. Sometimes that's straightforward. But not where real innovation is concerned. It's the focus-group problem: focus groups can only tell you what they think of what they already know about. They can't evaluate what they will like or dislike about products they can't yet imagine. Imagining new ways of doing things is what real innovation is about—it gives customers things they're going to love but that they don't yet know they want. 

Steve Jacob: "Corporations identify target markets with very wide definitions, but once those markets are defined it is almost impossible to de-silo the entire customer requirements > R&D > production > marketing > sales pipeline from the organisation that is created to service it. R&D are clever folks, but they are given a bucket list and a price point. Whether the list and price point are correct is not within their remit to decide. And so begins a long steady process of refinement of a model range to the point where it is very good, but no longer what the market wants. Their blind spot is that they gather requirements from existing customers and channels. They should be analysing the customers that didn't buy them instead."

Wealth of Choice? Really?

If you're in my business, you get used to certain things. For example, that whenever a post about gear gets a lot of comments, someone will bemoan the fact that posts about pictures never get that many comments. (The post before this one has gotten 121 comments so far.)

...Even though most gear posts don't get that many comments, and a few posts about pictures do get a lot of comments.

I'm not calling anyone out, please understand—I'm not criticizing. It's just a thing that happens. I get fish-slapped with the patterns.

So. Another comment that rises above the waves regularly is that "we've never had so many cameras to choose from," "it's a great time to be a photographer because we have so many choices," etc., etc.

I do not think so.

Or rather, I do, because we do have a lot of choices, and a lot of those choices are nice. (And maybe I should write a post celebrating the options we have.) At the same time, I wish people would stop saying that. Here are a few things we could have but don't:

1. A TLR-inspired "street" camera with a side-mounted handle and an upward-facing viewing screen that has a pop-up hood;
2. An affordable B&W-only camera;
3. Cameras that are radically simple and de-complexified;
4. Cameras that dispense with JPEG modes and options to reduce menu and processing complexity;
5. Cameras with built-in memory;
6. An affordable rangefinder camera that takes M-mount lenses;
7. Cameras with modern sensors that have web-only resolution, i.e., two, four, six or eight megapixels;
8. A camera or two with a square sensor....

And the list could go on.

Granted, some of these things we've had in the past (the affordable M-mount rangefinder, 6-MP cameras), some of them we do have in extremely expensive or otherwise impractical versions (the B&W-only camera); several of them have workarounds; a few of them might not be marketable. (But don't think I couldn't name choices specifically conceived to be marketable.)

The wacky but delightful (and star-crossed) 2010 Ricoh GXR, with its
interchangeable lens-sensor modules. Image via Amateur Photographer.

I don't even fault the manufacturers, who, collectively, have been pretty adventurous in trying different things over the years, e.g. the clever "Optical-Porro Finder" on the 2005 Olympus E-300 EVOLT, or the pellicle-mirror "SLT" models from Sony, or Ricoh's terminally quirky GXR that never quite made minimum sense as a product offering but definitely offered creative design thinking that was way outside the box, or Sigma's Foveon-sensor cameras. I might also add that if you removed Sony and Leica from the current camera market, a lot of the choices we do have go away.

I'm not even saying that we should have all of the things listed above. All I'm saying is that we don't. They're not choices we have.

Just because there are nine different me-too DSLRs that mimic each other and seven different models of mirrorless cameras that are all cautiously, conservatively similar to each other doesn't mean that those things are "choices." I mean they are, obviously, in that you have to choose whether you want one or the other. But if you hate pickup trucks, having more pickup trucks to choose from doesn't help.

Really, there is lots of room for more choice.

Mike

P.S. And in response to the comments about a digital view camera, why not a capable digital ILC camera designed to be used on a tripod with a viewing screen the size of an iPad? The technology is all right there. The movements could even be effected in software; that would be cool.

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Sharon: "Like I said in the previous thread, I recently purchased a Fujifilm GFX 50s. If I were my cat, you could hear the purring from there. This is the most satisfying experience I have ever had with a camera. I'm not much of a gearhead and have no patience for charts and graphs and data. I'm not a fan girl either. Using this camera makes me want to belt out a song like our beloved Aretha. I wish everyone could find a camera that makes them feel this way. So I hope if that list of camera wishes would ring your bell the way this camera has rung mine that some camera company hears you and makes it.  :-)  "

Yonatan K.: "One of your favorite cameras has built-in memory and is (or can be, in its default mode) very simple.... Just sayin'.

"You caught me in a congenially argumentative mood, i.e., awake. This is a genetic condition, as we found out when our kids learned to talk."

Mike replies: The mind-picture you painted of argumentative toddlers made me laugh. Thanks for the pick-me-up.

Kirk W.: "To your point #2, I am surprised that Fujifilm hasn't released an XPro-2M. Seems like an easy way to squeeze some sales out of a model already imitating the M series. And by a firm that can roll out some semi-legitimate marketing lines about 'deep knowledge of what artists prefer in B&W film-like simulations.' I'd be tempted and I don't even have a particular affinity for B&W."

c.d.embrey: "A Dixie® Cup economy. The original Dixie® idea, from 1907, was a use it once and throw it away paper cup. This spawned the commodity paper-plate industry. Now-a-days ubiquitous paper cups/plates and their cousin the plastic eating utensil, are clogging-up landfills in first-world countries. The consumer goods marketplace is being changed by commodified products. Is there any quality difference when using an Android or iOS device? When looking at a photo on social media, can even the most dedicated pixel-peeper tell what camera was used? At this point in history, does anyone really care anymore? Sony has been in the commodity business for a long time. They build Dixie®-Cup-like products at a price-point that allows the consumer to replace them with a newer and better item, rather than make expensive repairs on obsolete gear. What's not to like? In this modern, and changing, world does it make any sense to agonize over the imperceptible differences between commodity items? I think not.

Jonathan: "I personally would love to see 3, 6 and 8. I think you are right that we essentially have a lot of great cameras to choose from, just like we have a lot of great crossover SUVs to choose from. A little more variety would be nice."

SteveW (partial comment): "I am in agreement with this take on the camera market. There's a reason Apple and Google have not jumped in the camera ILC market: they already own the camera market with smartphones. Same reason Samsung bailed. In my opinion, the camera companies are great with camera hardware, but the software is mediocre at best, and the connectivity to modern technology such as our computers and the internet (i.e. cloud) is poor. Cameras have no built-in memory. The menu systems are archaic and cumbersome, and sometimes seem to have no logic to them. Using the camera has levels of complexity over other modern devices that seems totally unnecessary, or at least mostly unnecessary. Why not built-in memory, an android or iOS system, LTE/Wireless connectivity, ability to download apps, and so on and so forth. Having a data plan for the camera like we can get for iPads would be nice as well. Memory cards? At most memory cards should be for back up or overflow, not as primary storage...."

[Ed. Note: You can see the remainder of SteveW's comment, and the full version of all other comments marked "partial," in the Comments section. —Ed.]

Robert Roaldi: "I wish I spent as much time taking and looking at pictures as I do thinking about equipment."

alex-virt: "There was a 'TLR-inspired "street" camera with a side-mounted handle and an upward-facing viewing screen'—the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-R1. No pop-up hood though."

Mike replies: I loved that camera and would love to see it resurrected, but I fear the size of the viewing screen expected today would make it impractical to design. It, like the Nikon CoolPix 950-style designs, was enabled by the small viewing screens of the day.

Should the New Nikons Succeed?

SL killer? Screen grab from Nikon's latest teaser.

Just a brief question—do you want the coming Canikon mirrorless cameras to succeed?

I have a mild case of the traditional American attitude of "rooting for the underdog," and I also have a little problem with bully capitalism, meaning, corporations using their wealth and strength to take over competing businesses when those competing businesses get too uppity. I'm not sure either of those prejudices even pertain in this case. But what we're about to witness here is probably not innovation. (Except perhaps down in the details.) It's just larger corporations looking at the existing landscape and calculating how they might use their strength and power to appropriate pieces of the pie the other guys have, using me-too products based on those other guys' successful products.

And I find myself nagged by this sense that Canikon already have enough pie. And that it might not be in my interest for them to hog more.

Nothing against Canikon.

Of course, the market decides...but then, that's not what I'm asking. I'm asking, what do you hope happens—not what will happen, or what should happen based on Econ 101 ideas.

But, speaking of that, even if you are a diehard, survival-of-the-biggest, law-of-the-jungle, nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw free marketeer, would you be copacetic if, let's say, Canikon ends up driving Panasonic and Olympus out of the camera business? How about if they succeed to the point of dealing the death stroke to Sony and Leica? Would you be happy that happened?

I'm a little resentful, too, that there's so little real innovation in the camera sector these days (at least from Canikon), and that this probably ain't that. They're not addressing the smartphone juggernaut, the complexity problem, sharing (well, they're addressing sharing a little), or computational photography, among other things. This move might turn out to be just an exercise in Machiavellian, business-school, by-the-numbers market share manipulation. Probably. Maybe.

But then, I should shut up. Maybe I'm being bigoted, and anyway I'm asking you what you think, not what you think of what I think.

Mike

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Tom Currier: "Nikon has innovated its way to the best DSLR on the planet in the D850. I’m hoping they will apply their know-how to making the best mirrorless camera too. From what I’ve read, they will be introducing a couple of terrific cameras on the 23rd."

c.d.embrey: "Nothing would make me happier than for the über-arrogant Nikon to go out of business. When it comes to satisfying consumers' wants and needs Nikon sez eff-u, it's our way or the highway!!! From my POV Leica will be the last still camera company standing. The rest will pull the plug when profits drop beyond a certain point."

Kaemu: "We ought to consider the possibility that Canon and Nikon are making a move into FF mirrorless because other companies (especially Sony, which is not small) are aggressively going after their business.

"I submit that this is more the (usual) case of established players being forced to evolve by aggressive new entrants. After all, it's very possible that the large investment Nikon has to make to develop this new type of camera (and new mount, I believe) won't lead to a lot of new sales but rather stop or slow the loss of existing customers. In other words, they have to spend more to stay even.... Not something that excites investors.

"Also, I don't think there is anything wrong with companies that face declining sales volumes trying to adapt in order to remain relevant. Failing to adapt is the worse sin I would say.

"What we see in the camera industry happens in a many others. Over time a couple of dominant players emerge. They often reach market positions they are happy with, and even though they don't collude directly (it's illegal), they find ways to avoid costly price or feature wars. They become a bit complacent and innovation slows down. Customers are the one who lose the most.

"But this opens up opportunities for new entrants or innovative smaller players to shake things up (they have less to lose). Only when one of the small fry becomes successful and large enough to change the balance of power do the main players bestir themselves. I think that is what we are seeing happen (although in this case, the disruptors are themselves large corporations).

"Even if I never buy Sony product, I'm glad they decided to make a real push in this market and are forcing Canikon to think differently."

Barry Reid: "Fundamentally I don’t care as long as I can get what I need from some supplier at a sensible price. Which is why it’s good the one of the big boys is going to be muscling in on Sony’s overpriced little FF mirrorless patch."

Eric Rose (partial comment): "It boils down to value as I define it since I'm the one cutting the cheque."

Scott R.: "I am a longtime Nikon user and their cameras have always had a place in my camera bag—or, at least in the camera cabinet. The D800 was the camera responsible for getting me off film. Up until that camera, I still did all my 'serious' work with medium and larger film formats. I did fall in love with the image files out of the D800 and later D810, but never really fell in love with using the cameras. They always left me wanting. I wanted to not only love the image file quality, but the experience of using and handling the camera too.

"I started to look at Fujifilm and wish that they had a sensor geared toward landscape photographers. Their company was innovating, designing 'cool' cameras, and listening to their photographers. What a concept! I was sold on them a year before the Fuji GFX came out. So when it finally did come to market, I was at the front of the line and won’t look back. I have to say—the GFX is my all-time favorite camera over 20 years of using many different cameras. All the Nikon gear is currently collecting dust and will eventually get sold.

"With that all said as a lead up to my opinion on the matter—I really don’t want to see Nikon succeed with their new mirrorless offering. They’ve been dragging their heels for way too long. Not innovating. Not listening. Not caring. They should be losing some of the pie to Fujifilm and others. Personally, I can’t see anything they could do at this point to win me back to using their products going forward. And I suspect I’m not alone—it seems many photographers have switched off to Sony and Fuji and others over the past few years. It’s no longer enough to simply stay in the middle of the road serving the status quo. As a consumer with more options available than ever, I want to use products by companies that I align with. Companies offering innovative products that are a joy to use and at fair prices, who care about their customer and about maintaining that relationship.

"Nikon—it’s too little too late."

Jim Wolf: "I have little interest in this camera or any other mirrorless. I use digital for work, including shooting high school sports, so the DSLR works for me. When it comes to personal work, I shoot film and am moving backwards from semi-auto Nikons to thread-mount Leicas. Keep in mind that Canon and Nikon both got their starts in the photo field by imitating Leica and Contax. So having them imitate Sony, Panasonic, et al., is nothing new for them."

Roger Overall: "You're right about a lack of innovation. I mean, just look at the marketing. Gradually revealing the silhouette of a new camera. [Sarcasm dial up to 11] That's never been done before. [Sarcasm dial back down to 0]. I don't think this camera deserves to succeed. If it does succeed, I'll feel like money will be diverted away from companies that are interested in innovation. Instead it'll go to lazy companies. Less money going to the innovators means smaller R&D budgets and less innovation for us. That's how I'll feel, anyway. If it is a remarkable and revolutionary product, then it deserves to take over the world. (I have doubts it will be, though.)"

Matt: "Personally, I'm much more interested in seeing Nikon succeed than Canon (though I use neither). For one, I think it would be sad to see a company so interwoven with the history of photography as Nikon fail, especially after to so many other old brands have fallen away in the last few decades. But secondly, even though both companies have been slow to get aboard the mirrorless train, I think Canon in general has been far more guilty of complacency about innovation and their market position in recent years, and could use a good kick in the pants for once."

hugh crawford (partial comment): " I hope that Nikon and the other traditional camera companies at least make some sort of a splash in mirrorless if for no other reason than giving Sony some competition."

David Brown: "I'm a retired mechanical engineer and I've been using SLR cameras since 1966, so I've used a lot of them. I'd been expecting mirrorless FF cameras since the first digital SLRs appeared. Why? They're simpler and have fewer moving parts, and so should be cheaper to make and more reliable in use. And quieter, too."

Mike replies: I think I predicted about 10 years ago that SLRs would be gone in ten years. For just the reasons you state. Good thing people never check up on old predictions!  :-)

Eamon Hickey: "Just to be a noodge: Measured by overall sales (i.e. not limited to their camera businesses), Sony and Panasonic are significantly bigger companies than Canon and much, much bigger than Nikon. Ricoh (parent of Pentax) and Fujifilm are also much bigger than Nikon, although not bigger than Canon. Among current prominent mainstream camera manufacturers, Nikon and Olympus are, in relative terms, the spunky little guys (again, viewing overall, not just in cameras.) (Leica, as always, is a beast apart.)

"But I guess that is neither here nor there; I understand your point. One of the things I've really lamented since the early days of the digital era is how limited our choices are. I miss the wildly varied ecosystem of the film era, especially the 1950s–1970s; so many fundamentally different kinds of cameras from so many interesting, if ill-starred, manufacturers."

Sharon: "I recently bought a Fuji GFX and love it. I hope everybody buys Fujis so they keep making them. 😀 "

Andrew Molitor: "I have no particular enmity toward Nikon or Canon, and so no particular opinion on whether or not they deserve to succeed. I do think they're well positioned to earn your respect back, though.

"In rough terms, Sony has proved out the market in the so-called Early Adopter space, with a classic strategy for Early Adopters. They have a bunch of products, they're always tinkering, and to be blunt their products appear to be buggy and weird. Nobody loves their menus, and they keep running in little annoying bugs that get their target market up in arms (star eater! Arg! no uncompressed RAW files! arg!).

'"Nikon and Canon have clearly decided at the same time that this is the moment the Mainstream market jumps in. All they have to do is build solid dependable cameras that employ this new technology (yes, I know, mirrorless isn't 'new' but to the mainstream market the idea of a DSLT class camera with an EVF is still 'new') and deliver whatever the Nikon/Canon experience is.

"I don't think Sony is dying at the 'whole product' concept, but it still feels far more like they make widgets, not products. Nikon and Canon know how to deliver 'whole products,' they have a clear idea of whatever it is that the Nikon experience is, and what the Canon experience is, and they ought to be able to deliver it, if they have the will behind these products.

"And that's what I mean by an opportunity to earn your respect. They might well fumble it, but they're definitely positioned to make the leap, to do it right, and to step up to the next generation of photographic tech. They won't do it with innovation, they'll do it by building a good plan and executing it.

"This is literally straight out of Crossing the Chasm and it's the moment of truth for Sony. If Canon and Nikon execute well, it's lights out for Sony.

"Remember, Kodak built the first DSLRs."

Eric Brody: "Maybe Apple or Google will come up with a 'real' camera. That will be the end of all of these companies who are rehashing old ideas. It's pathetic that we have to buy cards to put into cameras, they should all have built in memory and lots of it. Perhaps a card as overflow. It's pathetic that we have to go through complex menus to get these things to do what we want and it's really pathetic that doing something as simple as transferring images to a computer (Airdrop anyone?) is such a big deal. Bring on the competition; let's see some real innovation. What I mentioned above should have been available 10 years ago!"

Thom Hogan: "Who cares who's baking the pie? All a photographer should care about is that the pie is better. Having more cooks experimenting with pies is good news, period."

Mike replies: I understand your hands are tied because you no doubt know all about the new products but can't discuss them yet, while I know nothing about them and can wander around babbling like a brook.  :-]

But...not necessarily. The backgrounder here is that I was shocked at how easily Canon overtook Sony and Olympus for the number one rank in mirrorless cameras in the Japan home market in 2017, with the introduction of a couple of not bad but hardly market-beating cameras and a few lenses. That's enough to take the top spot?! Solely because it's Canon. A few years earlier, Samsung had a much better camera than Canon's M5 or M6, and Samsung got chased off into the tall grass. I don't know how anyone can take Canon's 2016 and 2017 mirrorless ILC offerings and put them on one side of the balance scale, and then put all of Sony's on the other side, and then consider it rational when the scales tilt in Canon's favor. Photographers won't be better off if energetic companies with full (albeit somewhat haphazard) product lines can be poached so effectively with that much ease and that little effort.

Que sera, sera, of course....

Al DaValle: "Yes...I certainly hope both Nikon and Canon succeed and thrive. Sony, Panasonic and Fuji are great companies making great cameras. But I definitely don't feel these guys need protection or sympathy. These are huge international corporations doing what they do best...innovating and serving the market with great products. The more suppliers the better for everyone...especially us photographers.

"I am a longtime Nikon customer and feel they have served me very well over the years. I have no animosity for them given the fact they do not have a meaningful mirrorless offering yet. My mirrorless kit is Fuji which I love and will likely stick with.

"Nikon has consistently delivered top quality, professional and dependable gear that I have loved using. I'm not caught up on who is best at any given moment. That's a moving target. Chasing that with our purchasing decisions is a fools errand. I simply know Nikon has served me well for many years. From a pragmatic point of view I have thousand of dollars invested in Nikon and Nikon-compatible lenses. I plan and hope to continue to use those lenses for a very long time. I suppose I need Nikon to do well if I can be assured this will be possible. And I have many friends who feel the same way about Canon.

"I applaud Sony, Fuji, Panasonic and Olympus for their innovation and creativity. They have helped establish a new market segment defined by real needs. They have done this knowing full well the DLSR market leaders would eventually enter this new segment when they felt the time is right. These innovators are strong enough and large enough to maintain a meaningful piece of this market as long as they continue to innovate and provide great customer service."

Jim Richardson: "Rooting for Nikon here. For all of the five decades of my career Nikon has been building cameras for professionals—and supporting professionals, responding to their needs, making new pictures possible. No other single company has the history and longevity of commitment. Foibles? Perhaps. Heart? Plenty."

Good Company

I assume most people around here are visual, and like visual representations of information. I know I do. You might be interested in a recent infographic at NYT—it creates a bucket for Apple's trillion-dollar net worth and then drops in various combinations of various companies until it's full. It's very interesting to see visually the relative sizes of all sorts of companies, well-known and little-known. I searched in vain for camera companies, although that doesn't mean they're not in there. Maybe they weren't big enough to be useful. I am definitely not schooled in business or qualified to write about it, but as near as I can tell, I believe the total global digital camera market revenue is about US$20 billion, or roughly 1/50th the size of Apple. [UPDATE: But see Bill's Featured Comment below. My bad! And thanks to several other readers who also corrected me in the Comments. —Ed.]

It takes this many multi-billion-dollar companies to (almost) equal Apple. Some of the better-known ones in this graphic include Xerox, Western Union, Advance Auto Parts, News Corp., H&R Block, Whirlpool, Gap, Kohls, Macy's, Snapple, Viacom, and Harley-Davidson. Screen-grab from NYT.

That 50X behemoth is squatting pretty heavily on the camera industry. As one analysis puts it, mildly, "The global digital camera market is negatively influenced by the availability of superior camera functions on smartphones." (And then adds, rather startlingly: "apart from this, minimal customer engagement by the camera manufacturers and complex specifications have diminished the growth prospects of the market." But that's another discussion for another post.) I've always been curious about what's going to kill TOP, and it appears it might be something simple: I can't sell iPhones. If that's it, well, that's the way the cookie crumbles.

Access: If you never visit the NYT, you get ten articles a month for free. Recall, of course, that TOP officially recommends a subscription to the NYT for its photographic content, which is excellent (I also contribute to the Guardian for photo content). Finally, if you cannot see it, my apologies. It's just fun, not crucial.

The infographic is titled "Apple’s Value Hit $1 Trillion. Add Disney to Bank of America and...You’re Halfway There."

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Stephen Scharf: "The seminal work on this of course, is Prof. Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Rated by Amazon as one of the 100 most important books of the 20th Century, if I recall correctly."

Mike replies: My brother once said that this book should be on everyone's coffee table, because it's so elegant and shows good taste better than more ostentatious titles.

Bill: "You are confusing market cap (how much all of the stock of the company is worth) with sales. Apple sales this year will be something like $250 billion, about 12X what camera sales are if you don’t include phones in camera sales."

David Boyce: "Plus one for The Guardian. Some great photo essays and photojournalism."

Canon and Nikon To Go Mirrorless: Rumors

According to the sites Canon Rumors and Nikon Rumors, either Canon or Nikon or both will introduce either one or two serious new mirrorless system cameras either before or after Photokina in September.

In other words, the two industry leaders will now validate the business strategies and technical innovations of their more enterprising but less powerful competitors by horning in on those guys' markets. Sorry, is that too cynical a slant on the news? I guess so.

Anyway, the expectation has created a certain amount of furor as various interested parties hither and yon speculate on what, exactly, is coming.

Predictions. Great fun for some. Thom H. is one of the few who does it well, although he mainly succeeds because his discussions are interesting and enlightening whether the prediction is correct or not. Anyway, as they say about academe, the arguments are cutthroat because the stakes for the participants are so low.

I've personally never had much enthusiasm for the prediction pastime, although I know it's popular. One thing that drives me bonkers about American pool matches on YouTube is that the commentators are forever going on about what the player is just about to do. Why not just wait quietly until they do it? And then make whatever sensible comments it might be germane to make. It's such a mannerism that it comes off as slightly nutty, to this viewer at least. I never mention the sport of pool here, though.

But I don't see the point of nattering too much over rumors of future photo products, either. I do like to ruminate about what should be, but that's my "idealist" personality type coming to the fore—it's Utopianism rather than the gypsy fortune-teller urge. As to what people will do, well, I don't see much point in that crystal ball stuff. Just wait till it happens and then we'll talk about it.

All that aside, let's get back on track. If people like predictions, here are mine:

First, Canon and Nikon will follow each other, not necessarily Sony or Fuji or Leica or the Micro 4/3 consortium in all particulars. My theory about Leica in recent years is that it's been following the lead of Sony (it already has its A7[x] product in the form of the SL), but, culturally, Japanese companies tend to take their cues from their major Japanese competition. So whatever Canikon do, they'll both do it, and they won't do it just because Leica or Pentax etc. are doing it.

On the other hand, I think one of the new products from each company (if not right away, then following on) will be at a deluxe, high priced, carriage-trade price tier. As you know, the postwar fashion of Western countries aiming to be mostly middle class is over, and world economies are splitting into dual markets—not so much the haves and have-nots but the have-way-too-muches and the hoi-polloi, AKA the rest of us. Because we apparently all want to be like, say, Egypt. Accordingly, companies need to chase the discretionary dollars of the have-too-muches in order to maximize profits. So for example there were ten SUVs that cost over $100,000 in 2017, led by the 6-liter, 12-cylinder Bentley Bentayga for $230,000—that's a "have-too-muches" product right there. Whether Canon and Nikon choose to do this at the $6k level like Fuji or the $20k level like Leica remains to be seen, but one of their mirrorless products will probably leave ordinary working-stiff enthusiasts shaking their heads about excessive, out-of-reach cost.

And whatever they do at that level will mainly follow Chinese tastes. Which I don't really know anything about. Over the years it's been interesting to watch the reception in products made for specific places in the world and/or specific markets, and note how people outside of the target markets tend to evaluate those products as if they were made to appeal to them. For example, sometimes Japanese companies target mainly their home market, or women, or Japanese teens, and beardy grumpy white-male American and British enthusiasts argue over these products just like the development teams for those products gave a flip about their opinions. No no, Grampa.

Anyway given that both Leica and Fuji (and even Pentax) are making it rain from China with oversize-sensor cameras, it's possible we'll see medium-format mirrorless options from Canikon. My weakness as a prognosticator is that I don't know the size of those markets, or their profits, and Canikon will ignore any market it thinks is too small to bother with even if it's profitable.

Oh, and the new cameras will be ugly, because it's been a long, long time since we've seen a handsomely designed new Canon or Nikon.

That's, let's see, four predictions: Canikon will mirror each others' strategies, they'll be after the slice of the market that aren't price sensitive at least with some of their options, Chinese tastes will play a big part, and the cameras won't be pretty.

Techy questions remain. What formats? Dual formats? (In which case I predict the Fuji strategy, APS-C and medium format.) Or just one? (In which case I predict the Sony strategy, full frame.) Which lensmount? My guess there is that there will be new lensmounts from both makers with shorter flange distances than SLRs but with AF-enabled adapters allowing the use of the company's SLR lenses. They're unlikely to hobble themselves technically by sticking with currently lensmount specs—takes away too much of the edge.

I'm outta here now for my regular weekly date playing pool at the Moose Lodge with my buddies. (Sorry, did I just mention pool again?) After that I have a meeting. But when I get back I look forward to being soundly schooled by those of you who are much more up on the state of the rumors than I've bothered to be. Maybe some of the things I'm wondering about are already known. (All I know is that whenever we're talking about things nobody actually knows about, a lot of people always know much more than me. Then again, I predicted on the Miata Forum that they're wouldn't be a fourth-gen MX-5, so I'm clearly no good at predictions.)

I still say the best idea is wait and see. But insofar as gypsy predictions are fun, let us have at it, my friends.  :-)

Mike

UPDATE Monday evening: My buddy Loyle Egger, age 89, about to attempt a four-ball combination this morning at the Moose Lodge. He made this shot, but unfortunately scratched in the side pocket. (He was not the oldest guy playing with us this morning.)

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San Warzoné: Seems like everyone is raving about the Sony mirrorless cameras and the great image quality, fast focusing, 4K Video and the EVF (electronic viewfinder). What is missing for me are the intangibles: ergonomics, ease of use, buttons and controls, the way the menus work, and the actual touch/feel handling. Nikon cameras have always had that hands on feeling of the way a camera should work. I have tried to 'like' my Sony A6300, but the tiny buttons, awkward menus and especially the EVF make me go back to my Nikon DSLRs. To my view the EVF is artificial looking and even harder to enjoy because of the non-circular eyepiece. I get that you can 'see' the image that will be captured in real time, but even after trying to modify and adjust the EVF settings to match my reality, it is not the same as a 'mirror image' on my Nikon DSLRs. Yes, it is smaller, lighter and produces quality raw files...but it's still not my cup of tea."

John Camp (partial comment): "A ~50-MP FF sensor in a small body with smaller lenses (but perhaps also taking F-mount lenses with an adapter) would be really interesting. Even more interesting would be a 4/3 aspect-ratio FF sensor with multiple aspect ratio options, but that ain't gonna happen. What I really fear (think) is going to happen is we'll get routine, boxy ~24mp cameras that'll be functionally no better than my Micro 4/3 Panasonics and that will be more or less blown off by the picture-taking world.

"I gotta say, though, this is the first time in perhaps six or eight years that I've really been curious about upcoming cameras."

PaulW: "This was a well thought out and fun read. I'm much less interested in what Canikon will announce than I am in how it will affect the rest of the camera industry. With two 800-pound gorillas jumping into the ring, things are gonna change. Interesting times ahead I think."

Thom Hogan: "In terms of 'mimicking strategies,' it sort of depends upon definitions. But I'd say that Nikon is likely to mimic Sony's strategy, while Canon will continue on the strategy path they are on. Canon appears to be doubling down on EOS M (APS-C), while about to offer a 5D Mark IV type of camera in mirrorless. Nikon appears to be about to duplicate the Sony A7/A7R strategy, with APS-C (DX) now relegated to a later date and a lesser role. But it's been difficult to pick out the details as both Canon and Nikon have prototyped/muled so many variations. We'll see soon enough. Both Canon and Nikon have Photokina press conferences scheduled (back to back), so you'd have to guess that the mirrors will be off come October."

Rumors of DxO's Demise Exaggerated?

The latest news from DxO, the French software maker, is that the company is merely reorganizing under Chapter 11 protection and will not abandon its customers. So what does that mean?

Well, there's probably no way of knowing. "Bankruptcy" seems to mean a variety of things for different companies in different circumstances. I've been trying to follow the bankruptcy proceedings of our local supermarket chain (it's the only store in our town, and would drastically affect quality of life here if it closed), and the more I read about it the less I can tell you about whether our store is safe or endangered.

However, DxO made the following announcement today:

We are very confident that this procedure, which should not last for more than a few more weeks, will not affect our customers in any way. In fact, we are pleased to announce the following upcoming product releases:

• In June, we will release a free update (version 1.2) of our flagship software, DxO PhotoLab. Recently awarded the TIPA 2018 Award for Best Image Processing Software, this latest version of DxO PhotoLab will include improved local correction features, and will add support for 7 cameras, including the Canon EOS 2000D and the Sony A7 III. This release will also be an opportunity for us to reiterate our commitment to the “perpetual license” model (as opposed to a subscription model) that allows our customers to update their products according to their needs, rather than in a constrained manner.

• In June, we will release the new version of the Nik Software Collection, which DxO acquired from Google at the end of 2017. Much awaited by the Nik software community, this first “by DxO” version focuses on fixing bugs that up until now could disrupt the user experience, as well as on ensuring full compatibility with the latest Mac OS and PC platforms.

Encouraging as these statements are, it's worth noting that news about corporate restructuring from the corporations themselves could be strategic and might not necessarily be reliable. But at the moment, at least, things certainly look less than dire.

Also worth noting is that according to Wikipedia, DxOMark is a separate company.

If anyone knows more about this, feel free to jump in. Also, if there are any users of DxO PhotoLab out there, let us know what you think of it.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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adamct: "For what it's worth, in a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, the assets of the debtor are sold to satisfy the debts. That would effectively mean the end of DxO as an independent entity. In a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the debtor strikes a deal with its creditors to try and restructure the debt. This is why the debtor in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy is often referred to as the 'debtor in possession'—the debtor gets to hold onto their business and assets while they try to repay the restructured debt.

"But as Mike says, this can mean wildly different things in practice. Sometimes debtors are able to reorganize, pay off the negotiated debt amount, and move on with a successful and stable business. Other times, the reorganization is a failure and the debtor ultimately winds up in Chapter 7. The third option is that the debtor just manages to hold on, repeatedly restructuring its debt, never getting rid of it, not fully failing, but really not all that successful, either.

"Fingers crossed that this is just the first step toward making DxO more stable and setting the framework for future growth and success."

Ilkka: "I am not a lawyer and I am not French, but I believe there is no 'Chapter 11' in France. But when an American newspaper or other news organization reports about it, they may well use the common US term. It just means tbat the company is reorganising under some sort of protection from banks and other creditors."

ScotInDortmund: "French law has a similar provision to Chapter 11, protecting the company while negotiations with creditors proceed. —Ron Preedy."

[See Ben Marks' comment in the Comments Section for more background about bankruptcy and reorganization. —Ed.]

Bahi: "I use both Lightroom and Capture One heavily (and provide support and training for users of both). Despite that, I still have a soft spot for DxO's PhotoLab and its predecessor, DxO Optics Pro) and continue to happily pay for PhotoLab. (Sadly, only one person has ever asked me for training on DxO products in about a decade.)

"DxO's converters have an interesting and overlooked feature that makes me hope for the survival of DxO—and it's not the much lauded Prime noise reduction, which can be useful but gives results that look impressive in some ways but often seem a little unnatural to me.

"The feature I like is the method used by DxO to correct heavy barrel distortion in mirrorless lenses. I use it for the 17mm Olympus ƒ/1.8 but it applies to many mirrorless zooms and wide-angle primes.

"Even quite expensive lenses rely on software corrections, perhaps to help keep lenses smaller and lighter. For Micro 4/3 cameras, these lenses carry their lens-correction profiles internally. The camera embeds the profiles in the raw files. The distortion is usually corrected automatically by the camera for JPEGs.

"Lightroom (and Adobe Camera Raw [ACR], of course), Capture One (C1), and the in-camera corrections will all give you automatically corrected images when they read the raw files. However, the results will have substantially narrower fields of view than the results from DxO PhotoLab. That can be a big deal.

"The DxO correction algorithm presumably uses some kind of image stretching to achieve its corrections—I don't know. It's perfectly good, with no visible artifacts to my eye; straight lines do indeed come out straight and the results are sharp and detailed. The great thing it is that the odd hand or foot at the edge of the frame will be included in DxO's output but cropped out by Lightroom and C1. This has saved otherwise good pictures that were taken at events or on the street, where you have little control of your position.

"Photolab's interface feels a little clunky and slow but it's also clear that the output quality can be very impressive and that the software has been built by people who care about image quality. For me, though, the killer feature is its clever lens correction.

"I was pleased to read the article, Mike–I'm hoping for DxO's survival and am also hoping that diehard fans of Nik Silver Efex 2 (I'm not among them) will pay the upgrade cost to keep the company in business."

huw Morgan: "I think it's a little ironic that a bankrupt company is touting its software licensing model while Adobe records record profits after adopting a subscriber model. I'll put up with the minor annoyances of a subscription model if it's the price that has to be paid to keep my vendor solvent."

Richard Barbour: "DxO PhotoLab is my primary raw converter these days since jumping off the Adobe subscription bandwagon. It's good for what it does but of course isn't Photoshop, so I find myself often invoking the 'export to application (Photoshop CS6)' function to finish processing a photo. PhotoLab is hard to beat if you want to keep up with the latest camera updates, want a very good default rendering of your raw files (with numerous presets to give one-click satisfaction) and excellent global editing capability. The imported Nik functionality is also useful for local edits, although not quite as well implemented and integrated as one would like. I'm hoping they will fix that in the upcoming release. I also hope DxO is able to solve the current crisis and continue to be a good processing alternative."

The Problem of Aging-Out

The bike pictured on Harley-Davidson's home page might be aspirational for riders, but the rider pictured is aspirational for the company. He's not a member of the major demographic for the company's products.

Harley-Davidson, the American motorcycle maker based in my old hometown of Milwaukee, might be going downhill. Registrations of on-road bikes fell 6% last year, and it's been several years since H-D made its shipping targets. Sales of Harleys have mirrored, in advance, the decline in the number of non-Hispanic white males aged 45–49 who make decent incomes.

Two more trends have spelled trouble for H-D: people under age 30 have shown less interest in large motorcycles in general, and Harleys in particular, than predecessor generations; and there is reportedly a glut of used Harleys flooding the market as older riders transition to the gentler activities of advanced age. Harley's CEO, says Barron's, "knows that Harley can’t just make bikes—it has to create demand."

When I was (briefly) at Model Railroader magazine, it faced a similar problem. Model railroading is a huge, if quiet, hobby (most of it literally happens underground—or at least below ground level, in basements). In 2000 there were believed to be roughly 500,000 active model railroaders in the United States and Canada. The trouble has been that the peak of the demographic are middle-class males who were ten years old in 1950, when an electric train set was the number one most popular Christmas gift for boys. Individuals in that peak group are now 77 years old. Creating interest in the hobby among younger generations has been problematic, with only sporadic success. It's a time-, money-, and labor-intensive pastime. And it's generally only available to people who have enough extra room in their house or living quarters to set up at least a 4x8' sheet of plywood and leave it there.

(Many layouts are much more elaborate than that. At a workshop with model railroading gurus Bob Hayden and David Frary, we visited an avid model railroader in Houston. With his wife he had raised four daughters, each of whom had her own bedroom upstairs. When the eldest daughter went away to college, Dad requisitioned her room for his model railroad. When daughter no. 2 left, Dad knocked down the wall between the two bedrooms and enlarged the layout. The pattern held with the third daughter, and shortly after the last daughter left home the entire second floor of the house, by then one huge room with no walls, was entirely devoted to one enormous HO-scale layout.

...And then some: at one end of the house the exterior wall didn't allow enough room for a desired radius of track, so the fellow cut a big hole in the side of the house and built a bump-out, a sort of box attached to the outside wall of the home. He said when a train derailed in the bump-out, he had to get up on a ladder on the outside of the house and access it through a trapdoor. He claimed this was only inconvenient when it was raining! 

I don't recall the guy's name; someone out there might know. He was a rangy older guy with white hair who looked a lot like the late actor Jack Palance in the latter's later years.)

I'm not sure there are any identifiable demographic worries for the photographic industry quite yet; the digital transition involved such wholesale changes in habits and buying patterns that statistical trends have gotten swamped by the tsunami. Further complicating the picture is that the "digital era" is not steady-state; we haven't seen the last of the changes in the market, and it's even possible that we haven't even seen the major changes yet. But I'm sure cameramakers have been closely watching demographic patterns—at least since 2012 when the camera market peaked. What will happen when those of us who grew up shooting film start to drift out of the pool of buyers? Is the popularity of big DSLRs generational? What kind of cameras will smartphone snappers want if they get serious, as some percentage of them will?

My great-aunt Dickie, who died at age 101 and ten months, took her first ride on a Harley at age 95—she donned a helmet, climbed aboard a much younger friend's hog, and off they went. She reported it was "fun." One thing is probably true—while I'm guessing there are precious few 95-year-old Harley-Davidson riders out there, there's not yet any known upper age limit to the enjoyment of photography.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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scott kirkpatrick: "General aviation (small planes) also has an aging problem. But few pilots last as long as Captain John Miller, who flew until the age of 100. He kept his twin-engined Baron at Dutchess County Airport in Poughkeepsie, where I would hear about him. He barnstormed, flew early airmail routes, lived through the whole era.

"His sister, Lee Miller, was a photojournalist, friend of Man Ray, and one of the first to come back with photos of the Holocaust at WWII's end. John Miller is not the fictional character who saved Private Ryan."

David Comdico: "There is something a bit hypochondriacal about the incessant anxiety concerning the impeding death of the DSLR. Is it a side-effect of our ubiquitous neophilia? Amongst other cameras I own an F100 and a D810. Those two cameras have 18 years between them, shoot to different media, but are still remarkably similar to one another (the F100 viewfinder is nicer, but I digress). For sure, the F series is much older with the current modern shape arriving, as I understand it, in 1996 with the F5. That's over a 20-year iteration of a single industrial design in a product category that has seen massive disruption. That's pretty amazing. To me, the story should be instead about the improbable longevity of the DSLR."

Tim Bradshaw: "I think that big DSLRs are indeed generational, because I think they have become absurd. I use film almost entirely (because I like making prints in the darkroom). I have three Pentax MXs, and a few lenses. Every once in a while I think I really should start taking the whole digital thing seriously and I look at DSLRs. Well, Ricoh/Pentax make a DSLR I could use my lenses on now...and it weighs a kilogram. That is twice the weight (and probably more than twice the size) of the MX: it's two thirds the weight of my view camera (OK, discounting mandatory tripod, spot meter etc., so this is unfair). That's absurd. I can carry the MX with a 50mm lens in one hand all day and have done so many times. With a lens hood to keep rain off the lens it is small enough to be covered by the sleeve of my coat so I can do this in heavy rain, all day. I can do the same with the Ricoh GXR. I can't do that with the K-1, not even nearly: it's too big, and too heavy. If I bought one it would take lovely pictures but I would never use it."

Mike replies: The Pentax MX with a 50mm ƒ/1.4 M lens was very close to perfection, no? Funny how we move on, even from the near-perfect. But if you enjoy the darkroom work (I'm probably one of the few people who appreciates that, as I always loved working in the darkroom), what's not to like?

Winwalloe: "Your mention of this Harly Davidson ad campaign cracks me up: a casting for the campaign occured at a bar in L.A. I was in with friends (I was offered to take a shot at it but didn't). Who knows, it could have been a picture of me on this post haha. Elsewise, here's what this casting for Harley looked like:

Ade: "Apropos toy trains, I spent years trying to cultivate an interest in model railways, and gave it a 'proper' go once I achieved a decent disposable income and, due to living alone, a rental with sufficient space and nothing better to do with my spare time—only to discover that watching 'electric mice' still held little appeal for me. I found what was missing once I did what everyone was always telling me to do—went outside. I sold all my miniature engines and started again with slightly bigger trains in the garden. True, you need a garden with some space but the kits are reasonably priced and you can do as much or as little scenic modelling as you like (nature takes care of the rest). For a modest investment, you can even propel your trains with real steam. I guess this was the 'large format' equivalent of the modelling world - seems like more work with bigger kit but actually simplifies a lot of things and brings you closer to the original spirit of the hobby."

Mike replies: You know this, certainly, but for others who didn't know this was a niche, Kalmbach Publishing, which publishes Model Railroader, also publishes a magazine called Garden Railways for outdoor train layouts.

mike plews: "I suspect the demographic HD is looking to recruit is more likely to favor something like this. It is also worth noting that I am seeing more scooters and mopeds out on the street lately. Not the majority by any means but they seem to fold nicely into the hipster lifestyle."

Mike replies: That is the coolest thing ever.

Ernie Van Veen: "I took up motorcycle riding at the tender age of 10, and I haven't been willing to get onto another motorbike in the last 30 years (since my youngest was born). On the other hand, I took up photography in 2011 at the tender age of 54, and I just can't see a time where I would lose interest in photography or cameras (of whatever configuration). I can't image the arrival of grandchildren changing that."

Cliff R.: "Well you have wide appeal, Mike. I started reading TOP when I was in my 20s (33 now) and my 70-year-old dad also loves your blog. I was a young subscriber to Model Railroader in the early to mid '90s. Never could afford any sort of decent layout as a kid, of course, and as an adult I've been bitten by an even worse bug than model railroading or photography—flying!"

Robert Roaldi: "If people just bought motorcycles and rode them, the way people do in the rest of the world, as convenient and efficient transportation, I'd have no problem with them. But every neighbour I've ever had who owned a large bike seemed to think that it was their duty to put on aftermarket loud exhaust systems and make as much noise as possible. As far as I am concerned, their demise cannot come soon enough, and I'm an ex motor-head. For some reason, in North America, motorcycles seem to be a fetish, not a reasonable method of transportation."

Mike replies: This is a sore spot with me, as I'm sensitive to noise. I don't mean to be, I just can't help it. Not only are there laws on the books governing vehicle noise that are simply ignored in the case of big street motorcycles, but the mantra "loud pipes save lives" drives the logical part of my brain slightly to distraction. The idea is that being noisy alerts car and truck drivers more effectively to the motorcycle's presence on the road. The contradiction is that most of the same people who say "loud pipes save lives" are also against laws mandating the use of helmets.

I'll be quiet now.

Joe Massey: "Mike, I read your blog most days and very much enjoy doing so. Today, especially so. I just got back this afternoon to my computer after spending a couple of pleasurable hours running large scale trains on the outdoor layout of my friend John Carl. These are 1:20.3 'G scale' trains that are more than 2x the scale of the Lionel "O gauge" trains of my youth and much larger than the HO trains that have come to dominate the pages of Model Railroader (which I've been reading since 1952) so 77 year olds like John and I can see what we are working on when something goes wrong or a locomotive needs being put back on the track.

"John and I fit your description to a T: both born in 1940. We're like most men I know and like: we grew old but we did not grow up; we still play with trains. And I still play with cameras, another thing I've been doing since I had a Brownie that I valued almost as much as my Lionel 2-6-2 way back in the early '50s. And like cameras the digital age has come to trains which nowadays have digital controls and sound systems that provide digital downloads of the actual sounds of the prototype engines. Which just adds to the fun of being a 77 year old kid."

JohnMFlores: "If I had a nickle for every time someone talked about the graying motorcycle industry, I'd have approximately $88.35. Seriously, it is a topic of conversation at nearly every moto industry gathering that I've been a part of for the last five years. It's true and it's not just Harley Davidson. I see it at rallies and events all the time. Barring some miracle, motorcycles seem doomed to the margins as a hobby that the old people used to do, like scuba diving and rollerblading. And you know what? That's OK. As long as I can continue to ride and share my stories with whoever wants to read them, I'm OK.

"And what about photography? I don't know about you, but I see an awful lot of grey hair at photo events these days, and any time three photographers get together, the fourth couldn't make it because of sciatica or some other ailment that young folks (damn them) don't have. The iPhone is the gateway drug, of course, but are the young talents stepping up to DSLRs or mirrorless or drones or 4k video cameras or 360/VR rigs? I don't know. Just like motorcycles, as long as I can continue to learn and grow and share as a photographer, I'm OK."

Ed. Note: Motorcycling journalist John Flores is a regular contributor to RoadRunner magazine. He visited TOP World HQ last Summer—riding a motorcycle that was blissfully completely silent!

Mark Sampson: "Around 1977–82 or so I had a friend who was the director of a small and under-funded transportation (trolleys mostly) museum. His statement was 'Why should I play with toy trains when I can play with real ones?' Which we did."

Mike replies: I really don't know the story, but I believe Rod Stewart, the singer, who is a rail fanatic, has both a model railroad and a real steam locomotive which he plays with, down to the engineer's hat. He was the ultimate "get" for MR at the time I was there, but he wouldn't cooperate for an article. I gather he eventually relented and an article about him appeared, but I've never seen it.

Jeremy E: "DSLRs, mirrorless, and their ilk depend upon computers to process, and purchase of computers of all kinds is also in decline—people have computers for work, but not necessarily for personal use. If you look at active development of photography software at places like Adobe, it's going to heavy lifting/processing of images in a datacenter (the cloud) with enough UX in an app or a browser to present a face to the processing service and move pictures over the wire.

"There is always a place for professional work and equipment—I understand a lot of Instagram posts are big-time marketing and those 'amateur' pics are not from a smartphone."

Eric Brody: "Never forget that emergency room docs refer to motorcycles, all of them, as 'donorcycles.' In my day, working in a small southern Alabama hospital, I saw some impressive wrecks—people wrecks—whose lives, if they survived, would be forever altered."

A. Dias: "Harley-Davidson is trying to buy Ducati."

John McMillin: "The same aging-out peril is being discussed regarding electric guitars, which were declared dying in a recent Washington Post feature story. Besides the obvious issues of arthritis, hearing loss and a lack of contemporary guitar heroes in popular music, there's this, which relates to the Harley situation: the big guitar makes are so wedded to the past. Walk into any big guitar store—you know, the big nationwide chains under rumors of financial failure—and you'll see rows and rows of Stratocasters, Telecasters, and Les Pauls, and not much else. New designs must not sell as well as recreations of the 1950s innovations that rocked the world so long ago. By aping the past, manufacturers increase the mystique of old models, furthering their own problem."

Hotspur Closser: "Had I been a middle-aged white guy 20 years ago, I would have bought a Harley in a heartbeat. But being a middle-aged white guy in 2017, living in a busy college town in the age of smartphones and distracted driving, they couldn't pay me to ride one of their bikes. It doesn't matter how skilled or defensive a rider you are—it's only a matter of time before some eejit messing around on their phone takes you out."

Brief Speculations on Nikon and Mirrorless

Written by Eamon Hickey

There's been a bit of buzz in the past week over Nikon's future plans for mirrorless cameras. The good folks at Digital Photography Review even managed to wrangle an official statement from Nikon that the company is "currently developing new mirrorless products," although no details were provided, of course. Three random points on this general topic have been circulating in my mind recently, and I feel like getting them off my chest…er, mind…whatever!

1.) In the general Internet commentary, there seem to be two factions regarding the lens mount. Some want a Nikon mirrorless lineup that uses the current F-mount, ensuring the continued usability of the 100 million or so Nikon F-mount lenses still focusing light in the world. Others insist that Nikon should not cling to "old" technology and instead go with a new mount that specifies a shorter distance from lens flange to focal plane (a.k.a. flange back distance), which will allow somewhat smaller (mostly thinner) cameras for those, like me, who wish photography was less burdensome. Literally.

I honestly think this one is pretty easy to predict: Nikon will do both. (Same for Canon, by the way.) It's the only believable business decision. So my prediction is that by some point in the not-too-distant future there will be Nikon mirrorless camera models, including full frame 35mm models, that natively use the F-mount and other Nikon mirrorless models that use a new mount with a shorter flange back that can work with both APS-C and FF sensors. Of course, there will also be an adapter (or adapters) to stick F-mount lenses on the new mount bodies. (Nikon already has a fully modern short-flange-back mirrorless lens mount for the Nikon 1 series cameras, but that lineup is clearly not, nor was it ever intended to be, the platform for future success in the higher-end interchangeable-lens camera segment, a segment that Nikon must aggressively pursue.)

The fully waterproof AW1, usable underwater, is part of Nikon's
mirrorless 1-series of consumer 1" cameras

It should go without saying that Nikon will also continue to develop and sell DSLRs as long as there is a healthy market for them. (DSLR sales are, for the time being, still much bigger than mirrorless ILC sales.) This approach has some definite drawbacks—market confusion and effort fragmentation being the biggest—but all the alternatives will be judged by Nikon to have even greater drawbacks. I'm pretty convinced of that.

Canon will do this, too. They are already halfway there with the EF-M mount. There will be native EF-mount mirrorless cameras alongside the current EF-M mount mirrorless cameras and almost certainly even FF EF-M mirrorless cameras, eventually.

In a way, Sony already does this—the short-flange-back mirrorless E-mount supports both APS-C and FF cameras, and Sony also continues to support the old (Minolta) SLR A-mount with cameras that, while they still have a vestigial mirror, are, in fact, electronic viewing cameras and operate like mirrorless models in every important way except their autofocus system.

2.) Now, some people at this point will posit that Nikon can't afford a development effort like the one I'm describing. But that's just not true, which is easy to see if you take the time to read Nikon's financial statements and know a little about how to understand them. Nikon has a lot of cash and a healthy balance of assets and equity versus debt—in plain language, they are worth a lot more than they owe. Nikon could spend $1 billion (with a "b"!) on R&D tomorrow and still have a very solid solvency profile. (Their equity ratio, one common indicator of solvency, which is now about 50%, would still be about 35–40%, much better than either Sony or Panasonic, for example. Speaking loosely, anything above 20% is considered solid.) And a billion dollars is way more than enough to develop several mirrorless camera systems, plus, oh, I don't know, a talking toaster. Nikon does have important long-term growth and profitability worries, but that's not the same thing as current financial troubles, and it's also not the topic of this ramble of mine.

3.) Finally, a lot of people are convinced it's too late. Game over. Ship sailed. Other people, including Thom Hogan in a comment at Nikon Rumors, have explained why that's not necessarily true at all. I'll just add my two cents that I think that many people overestimate the value of being a first-mover in a market. There are literally thousands of examples of latecomers succeeding, and even overtaking, the early birds. There's a huge example just in the recent digital camera era: Canon was very late to embrace digital cameras seriously and badly trailed the market behind Sony and Olympus (the big first-movers), and even Nikon (the third mover). I well remember the "dinosaur Canon is doomed!" wailings on the Internet in 1999/2000. Then the dinosaur bestirred itself and started moving, and it crushed everyone under its big dinosaur feet, dominating all levels of the standalone digital camera business for almost 15 years now. I could cite many other examples (for many companies, not just Canon) over the course of camera business history.

Now, it's obviously true that you can't catch up if you execute badly. For those anxious to comment thusly, I'll say it again: yes, catching up is a challenge, and bad execution will doom the effort. I'm not overlooking that little wrinkle. So that's the crux of the matter. If Nikon (and Canon) want to do really well in mirrorless cameras, it's not too late, but they do need to execute well. (Canon is actually already doing decently well with its EF-M cameras, especially in Asia.) Maybe they won't execute well. Nikon in particular has had a few bad strikeouts lately, to be sure. But they have a perfectly good chance, if—note the "if"—they do the job right.

On the question of whether they will in fact do it right, my prediction machine is broken.

Eamon

Longtime camera industry analyst Eamon Hickey is a Contributing Editor of TOP.

©2017 by Eamon Hickey, all rights reserved

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Dennis: "I think you (and Thom) make sense saying it's not too late, but Nikon's running out of time to make any mistakes. (I think Nikon 1 was poorly conceived as a half high-end, half dumbed-down hybrid that was too expensive for its sensor size. I also think Sony, Olympus and Panasonic all did mirrorless poorly with their initial systems aimed at 'point-and-shoot upgraders' but had time to pivot).

"I'm not so convinced on what we'll see in the way of a mount. I would expect to see either F mount or something that works seamlessly with F mount (a really well done adapter solution) but have a little bit of a hard time seeing them do a new mount with new lenses. Recent new F mount lenses look like they're geared towards mirrorless use.

"Any take on the likelihood of seeing IBIS incorporated in future mirrorless models (now that other brands' 'dual IS' is getting rave reviews)? In the past, IBIS might have seemed like an admission by Nikon or Canon that lens-based IS might not be superior. But now the IBIS manufacturers also offer lens IS (and make the two work together)...and IBIS makes more sense with live view where it stabilizes the viewfinder image (where only lens IS does that in a DSLR). It seems like if they had any thought of doing IBIS, a new mirrorless system might be the right time/place for it. The problem I see is that they have excellent lens-based VR already and might have to pay to license IBIS patents from Sony and/or Olympus."

rosuna: "Hello Eamon: Early birds have to invest a lot in R&D and assume a lot of risks. Late comers show up when all technologies are mature, the costs are low and the risks are negligible. Any company can develop a mirrorless system now with a low investment effort and an assured level of quality, just using standard components.

"For Canon and Nikon mirrorlesses are only a part of the cake. They will go for it, minimizing risks and investment. At this moment there is not much income in the camera business. The most innovative companies are forced to do that, or disappear. The big ones' strategy is to preserve. The mirrorless systems by Canon and Nikon will be deployed slowly, in a conservative way, without innovations, looking at particular market niches. Well made products, but unexciting."

Ilkka: "Re 'Canon was very late to embrace digital cameras seriously.' Really? I thought their D30. (Or was it 30D?) was among the first 'serious' consumer DSLRs on the market? And the 1Ds among the first full frame pro bodies? They did lag badly in mirrorless but I think in DSLRs they have always been quite advanced."

Eamon replies: Yep, really. It's a tangent to the point I was making, but many people nowadays are understandably surprised by it. So just for the record, here's what the Chairman and CEO of Canon said about it in an article in Electronic Engineering Times in May, 2000: "Canon introduced a digital still camera in the early '80s, but it was too early and was not successful," said Fujio Mitarai, president of Canon. "Since then, we have been concentrating on analog cameras and have let our competitors get ahead in the digital still camera market. But while we were behind, we used the time to develop key components, and now our digital still camera strategy is in good shape," he said.

The digital camera business really started getting serious in 1997, with Sony and Olympus way out in front of everybody else; Canon didn't get into the top four until 2001. So strange as it may seem, Canon napped through the first few years of the biggest market shift in at least the last 100 years in the camera business. But Mitarai was 100% right about their ability to come roaring back. They took the lead in 2002 and have never lost it.

IBIS Coming to Fujifilm Cameras?

Speaking about shutting up, as I was in the last post, this is the second-to-last post I have planned about Fuji for a while. I see I have lingered on them too lovingly lately. One more post after this and then we'll move on.

But I thought this was worth a separate mention—Patrick at Fujirumors says he is "100% certain" that adding in-body image stabilization (IBIS) to its cameras is part of "Fujifilm's (current) plans." Yes, despite the fact that the company has said in the past that it will not do so. Check out his article at the link.

IBIS is one of those things that either is or is not important to people. Some (incl. yours truly) like and appreciate it; some (more, perhaps?) don't care. But it does seem to be becoming standard in the mirrorless universe. Everything from the Sony A7RII ($2,700) to the Olympus E-M5 Mark II ($900) has it. Fuji is quickly becoming an island in that regard.

One thing seems likely: we probably won't have to wait three years to find out. Fujifilm moves fast.

Mike
(Thanks to several commenters in the previous post)

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Stephen Scharf: "My guess is we'll see it. Primarily for the same reason that Fuji was an island when it came to video, let alone 4K video. Then they saw the writing on the wall, and not only upped their game with the X-T2's video, but did an excellent 4K implementation, so much so that serious videographers are now using this system.

"One of the things I've learned about Fuji is they tend to really think things through. Like any company, Fuji doesn't always get it right the first time, or get it perfect, but they really do actively think about things, even what appear to be the little things.

"This thoughtful approach was apparent to me the first time I shot the new GFX at a camera store. it was very clear they did a lot of engineering to ensure the shutter mechanism was well very damped so as not to induce any shutter shock (sidebar: damping is what engineers do to minimize or attenuate vibration or oscillation; dampening is to moisten something). The other thing they did (and actually wrote a 'white paper' about, which virtually no one talks about or discusses in reviews), was the considerable engineering that went into making the GFX lens mount stiff enough and rigid enough to maximize optical quality from larger and longer medium-format lenses.

"There are sound engineering reasons why Canikon implemented optical image stabilization (OIS) rather than in-body image stabilization (IBIS), reasons that Fuji agrees with. One of the reasons is that it is considerably more difficult to control lens vibration on long, heavy, telephotos (like a 300mm ƒ/2.8 or 500mmƒ/4 or 600mm ƒ/5.6) with IBIS than with OIS. Think about it. A 500mm ƒ/4 is a pretty damn long lens with a pretty damn narrow field of view. Very small movements at the body result in a much larger movement at the front of the lens. This why OIS is a more effective engineering solution for controlling vibration at the front of a big, long, heavy lens than IBIS. One of the reasons Olympus had been so successful with IBIS is because the majority of their first series of Micro 4/3 lens were, by comparison, short (in absolute length), small, and light.

"However, now that Olympus getting serious about penetrating the pro/sports PJ ranks with the E-M1 Mark II, they are also using OIS for their big, fast, telephoto primes (like the wonderful Olympus 300mm ƒ/4). Hmm....

"Olympus is utilizing OIS in their big long telephoto lenses for the very same reasons that Canikon and Fuji did: because it's best engineering solution for long lenses. What Olympus did that was innovative was to design the E-M1 Mark II to use OIS and IBIS synergistically. Pretty cool.

"If Fuji does decide to implement IBIS, my expectation is they will do so for the reasons Mike P. points out above and why they implemented 4K video: to remain competitive, and to not be an island of 'no video and no IBIS' in a sea of competitive offerings that offer these features. But my guess is that they will be thoughtful, in their typical Fuji fashion, and engineer IBIS to mitigate any instrinsic 'downsides' they thinks it causes, and work hard to synergistically integrate IBIS with the stabilization of their existing OIS lenses."

Henning Wulff: "In the mid '90s I had been using Nikons for my SLR work and play for a couple of decades, but Nikon seemed to be lacking innovation and Canon was on the rise. I had been waiting a while for Nikon to introduce a 24mm or wider shift lens, but although the Nikon rep said one was coming, it never did. And then, Canon came out with the 28–135mm optically stabilized lens and shortly thereafter with the lens I really wanted, the 100–400mm. Between the 100–400 IS and the 24mm TS-E I decided to switch systems. I stayed with Canon until a year ago.

"When Micro 4/3 came out, I got a Panasonic with three lenses, two of which were stabilized. Then, when Olympus introduced the E-M5, I started to get Olympus cameras at any renewal cycle. IBIS is great because it works with all lenses, and Olympus' system is outstanding, in part because the sensor is small and IBIS is easier to implement at a high level of performance with smaller sensors. I don't use Canon bodies anymore, but a number of my Canon lenses, including the TS-E lenses, continue to live on a Sony A7RII which convinced me in good part because of IBIS.

"Recently I took a series of pictures of fireworks, handheld and freestanding on a beach, at speeds between two and five seconds using an E-M1 Mark II and 17mm lens. All 60 shots were what I would term 'sharp.'

"After I got my first stabilized lens, I told people that in my opinion stabilization was one of the greatest advances in general photography, equivalent or maybe greater than autofocus or through-the-lens metering. It allows you to get shots you otherwise couldn't."

Scary Future

I'm not much for predictions—I'd rather analyze the past—but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that in three years, there will be three fewer digital camera companies than there are now.

The way I count there are 12 of them, not including smartphone makers. Canon, Nikon, and Sony are the top three, respectively. The others in no particular order are Olympus, Ricoh-Pentax, Mamiya Leaf, Panasonic, Phase One, Hasselblad, Fujifilm, Sigma, and Leica.

We won't count Casio, which has introduced one new model in the past three years; YI, which has introduced one camera, period; Lytro, which markets a revolutionary proprietary technology and as far as anyone can tell is still living on venture capital; or DxO, which makes two nifty modules for smartphones. The most recent company to throw in the towel was Samsung, a multinational conglomerate whose camera division failed to gain gain sufficient headway in a crowded market despite some nifty products.

Have I forgotten anybody?

[UPDATE: Oren tells me that Mamiya-Leaf was folded into Phase One a while back. Sorry for the error. —Ed.]

The little-lamented but still alive last F

The camera that haunts me somewhat is the Nikon F6. It was an awesome device, the culmination of a vast amount of engineering and manufacturing expertise, market research, ergonomic and design refinement, and technological know-how, and the inheritor of a proud mantle that stretched back decades to the first Nikon F of April 1959. It was the last professional film SLR from Nikon, which itself was the leading professional-level camera company for much of the era that the F and F6 bracketed.

In my mind, it's a poster child for what happens when a market tanks. The last balls-out effort to keep up the breed is left hanging, twisting in the wind; the constricted remaining market turns to the suddenly-flooded used marketplace; and development of the products in question screeches to a halt. It's pretty amazing that the F6 and several film Leicas can still be purchased from NOS (new old stock, meaning items manufactured years ago but still warehoused to be sold as new. You can buy a new Nikon F6 or a brand new Leica M7 today). But no one would argue that mainstream development of 35mm film cameras has proceeded much since the 2004 debut of the F6, if it has at all.

Because we're even more dependent on the manufacturers for digital cameras, there's a fair chance it's not going to be pretty if and when the same thing happens to digital system cameras. It's fairly likely that there will come a time when the market will no longer support much in the way of further development, and—especially because digital devices are computers and computer electronics don't tend to last forever—where will we be then? Joel Meyerowitz uses a Deardorff that was made the year he was born, 1938. I don't know about you, but I don't see a newborn babe of June 2017 using a Fuji X-T2 in 2096.

Here's a rundown on the handwriting on the wall:

• Much softer support from the mass market: It used to be a truism that the mass market supported the always-small-by-comparison dedicated enthusiast, professional, and art-photographer market—the people who bought the nicest cameras. Well, the recent downturn in the camera market lets us see what happens when that's no longer true. Smartphones have cut the legs out from under the digicam mass-market that used to keep the cameramakers swimming in money. No more rising sea to lift our beloved boat.

• Smartphones are getting better and better: I've already opined that the day will come when the very best cameras—of any kind—will be contained in smartphones, tablets or similar devices, thanks to multi-module computational photography. If, I should add, it even develops that far. I bought a two-module iPhone 7+ (replacing a still perfectly good 6+ that I actually think is a slightly better device apart from the camera) partly because it's the beginning of what I believe will become that trend.

I went on a very nice date on Saturday—we sat by the shores of Canandaigua Lake in the balmy zephyrs amid the falling pine-cones, chatting with each other and, occasionally, the passers-by—especially the ones walking puppies. This is an iPhone 7+ "record shot" of the view from the bench where we sat all afternoon. Works for me.

• "Smallening and lightening": as we talked about in a previous post. TOP reader dwig said on Friday, "I sold camera gear and managed camera stores for nearly a quarter century. Over the years, I noticed a distinct trend: as photographers got past early middle age they began gravitating toward smaller sets of equipment. It was an almost universal trend." Eventually, as products continually improve and devotees of camera-like system cameras gradually age out, the "point of sufficiency" will be reached for more and more people with smaller, more modest, mid-level equipment, blunting the payoff for continued pushing of the proverbial envelope with ever-improving system cameras and lenses.

• Similar quality is moving down in sensor size: this anonymous blogger says that for him, Micro 4/3 is as good as his Pentax 645D medium-format digital camera. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but I did conclude a while back that today's Micro 4/3 sensors equal the best full-frame sensors from 2008. That trend is ongoing. That means that as sensors continue to improve, smaller and smaller sensors are becoming good enough. The late Michael Reichmann made his biggest single splash on the Web with an article asserting that the results of the affordable digital Canon D30 (not 30D!) were as good as the results from 35mm film, a position that was hotly debated at the time. Film isn't even the standard any more, but it's possible that 1" sensors equal it in most ways and surpasses it in a few.

• Not enough of a payoff for spending more: We're in a period right now when manufacturers are striving to make the leading products superlative, and then charging a lot of money for them. But for that to continue to work there has to be an obvious payoff for the buyer who is spending the big money. Already, though, it's a little frustrating that there isn't a more obvious difference between modest sensors and modest lenses on the one hand, and big sensors and fancy lenses on the other. Yes, we can still detect that difference—pixel-peeping is a real thing—but even now it's not always obvious or readily apparent just from the results in the way that an 8x10 contact print always looked obviously different from a 35mm enlargement. For applied technology to continue to progress, there has to be a reason for people to spend their money on the better products.

These are a few of the basic things that threaten the continued growth of traditional camera-like system cameras.

Note that this is only one out of many possible futures, of course, as any futurist will tell you. The idea that the market for dedicated camera-like system cameras could tank, and suffer all the effects associated with market contraction, is a scary one for us—we just need the tools we need to do the work we want to do. The handwriting on the wall is a little scary at this point too.

We'll see about those three cameramakers. I'm sure somebody will point back to this post to see if my prognosticating was 20/20, come June 12th, 202o!

Mike
(Thanks to s.wolters)

P.S. The above post was written in a big hurry. I hope you'll please try to hear what I'm trying to say, if the way I said it isn't the best.

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Chuck Albertson: "Remember what Yogi said: 'It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.'"

Lynn Olson: "I'm afraid there's only room for two manufacturers of professional and semi-professional cameras 20 years from now. The development and capital costs will drive everyone else away, which points to deep-pocketed Canon and Sony. Not by coincidence, these also dominate professional video and digital-cinema, and don't rely solely on still photography for steady cash flow. Nikon has no presence in cinematography or 4K video, and I think this will catch up with them. The dark horse is Panasonic, who are also big in professional video and cinematography. Their Micro 4/3 still/video camera line bridges the gap between pro and enthusiast video, which is a good place to be."

psu: "Your last three (maybe four) items are really just different angles on the same problem. The marginal added value that one obtains from the extra effort and cost of dedicated cameras has been, and will continue to be, eroded for a variety of economic and technical reasons. The established/traditional camera companies really don't understand cameras in a way that is much different from 'a lightproof box you put with a lens on the front and film in the back.' They have almost completely missed the boat on the idea that digital cameras are computers that happen to be able to capture images. In the end if they don't catch on to this fact it will mean the end of them.

"So yeah it's a scary future. On the other hand, photography has always been an activity where you need to put your trust in giant third-party companies to look after your interests. So it's scary, but not all that different from the past."

Ken Tanaka: "Hard to say where the camera business is going, given it's susceptibility to unpredictable disruptive forces in the consumer electronics world. It's more interesting to ponder where the world of photographic arts may be heading. The most historically celebrated work is long in collectors' hands. The most celebrated and collectible photographers are mostly dead or very near their life's end, and few are shooting anything worthwhile any more. This is not a subject well suited for TOP or for this thread but it is a much more ponderous matter in photography."

Manuel: "Even scarier (does this word exist?) is the future of photography as an art form, which unfortunately failed to deserve your attention. Some day all photos will be selfies, food snapshots and photos with someone's feet lying on a beach. When these photos take over, worrying about the future of cameras will make little sense."

Mike replies to Ken and Manuel: I would really like to do some posts on this subject—where the intellectual culture of photography is going—but it's going to take a lot of energy and probably some research and reporting. That's code for "don't hold your breath waiting." But it certainly deserves our attention.

Herman: "About ten years ago, the photo editor of a local newspaper suggested that I may soon be replacing my Leica M7 with a digital Leica. I jokingly suggested that perhaps the photojournalists on the paper will soon be trading their digital cameras for cell phones that will enable them to take photos and transmit them immediately to their editor."

Christopher May: "A friend of mine, John Crane, runs www.nikonf6.net. It's a wonderful resource, not only on the F6 but also ancillary Nikon and film topics. Well worth the time to take a look around. John does an amazing job of photographing Colorado and the west as well. More than once I've thought about John's contentment with his F6 whenever a new digital is released. Consider this quote from the 'Should I?' section of the page: 'Every time the big two camera manufacturers announce a "new flagship camera," I look at my F6 and smile. There’s a reason Nikon was still producing them in 2014 (rumor has it, about 50 per month, by two dedicated people in the Nikon-Sendai plant). Never will it be eclipsed by a newer, better model. It is and always will be the best of the best. The same can’t be said about a single digital camera—and I enjoy that. Imagine how much money you’ll save over the years by ignoring whatever digital camera temporarily grabs the spotlight—and just getting the F6.' I have to say that I've been tempted to follow his path more than once after reading comments like that!"

hugh crawford (partial comment): " The real story is that advances in optics, computation, and sensors are such that some company that doesn't exist now may dominate photography in ten years. Lenses as we know them are the last bit of photographic legacy technology to go to away, and lensless optics are the next big thing. When optics are manufactured like electronic chips and Moore's law takes over, all the camera companies as we know them will be as commercially relevant as film companies are today."

Bruce McL (partial comment): "Cameras as status goods (Veblen goods) will be around for quite a while. See the mechanical watch industry for an example. So Leica should be safe."

[For the complete text of "partial comments" please see the Comments section. —Ed.]

SteveW: "Seems to me that more photographs are being taken and more people own cameras (i.e. smartphones) than at any point in history. Therefore, if even a small percentage of these smartphone photographers catch the bug for photography (not inconceivable!), that should be sufficient to keep the ball rolling for whichever camera companies are still in business three years from now. With so many people taking photographs these days, there would seem to be a not-insignificant opportunity for camera companies.

"I'd say the market in the sense of numbers of photographs being taken is growing like never before, and we can't help but wonder what the camera companies will do in this environment to grab a slice of that market."

Peter Komar: "I would much rather bet my money on film negatives vs. digital files for longevity. Does anyone think your digital files you saved today will be around in 25 or 50 years? Scares me for sure."

Ian Leake: "A few weeks ago I realised that probably I'll never again buy a camera unless it's part of my phone. I have an 8x10 and an 11x14 that satisfy my need to create. My iPhone is just about good enough for everything else I make, and a lot more convenient."

Michael Mejia (partial comment): "After 6–8 weeks I ask my Intro to Pro Photo students if they want their phone cameras back. They chuckle and guffaw; professor, you crack me up."

Open Mike: Who Can Do the Biggest Favor for Nikon?

I'm not an industry watcher like Eamon Hickey or Thom of ByThom.com, but I do have my ear to the ground, always straining to detect the distant hoofbeats.

If I can offer my impression from here, it does seem to me that a) Nikon has been too conservative and unimaginative in recent years and b) its leadership too cautious. The best of the pundits and prognosticators have divined Nikon's financial position to be quite sound and strong; but the rumors that "Nikon is in trouble" are swirling in the photo community—the people who buy Nikons, that would be, whose perceptions are not inconsequential to the company's health despite what management might believe. And, when repeated, those types of mis-impressions can have a cumulative negative effect.

Ironically, the one source that could do the biggest favor to Nikon right now is Nikon. What its leadership should do right now is put out a strong, positive statement, coming from the highest levels of the company, of its actual financial position, and staking a claim to its actual strength, to quash these rumors boldly and decisively. Otherwise, it's going to get buyers hanging back just that little bit from investing further in Nikon or from deciding in favor of Nikon in comparison-shopping situations.

There's nothing wrong with conservatism and caution, but boldness is also necessary when it's the right move for the good of an organization.

Just my little-man's opinion, worth what you paid for it.

Mike

"Open Mike" is the editorial page of TOP, in which Yr. Hmbl. Ed. offers the more unruly of his many thoughts. It appears on Fridays when anybody remembers.

P.S. "Your Shot of the Day" is not a feature of TOP, because how could it be? This is a photography blog. But here's something to see. As you pick up the action in Derby City, four-time U.S. Open 9-ball champion Shane Van Boening plays a neat little safety shot on 62-year-old Filipino legend Efren Reyes, tucking the white cue ball in behind the black eight ball. Efren is then tasked with striking the red 3-ball first, which he must do by "kicking" at it off the short rail. Watch what Efren does. By the way, you might think this is a fluke, but Efren has made astonishing shots like this over and over again in his career—not for nothing is he called "The Magician."

American champion Shane Van Boening in the chair waiting
his turn. (Screen grab from a match video.)

And by the way, this might look like two subdued, modest-mouse type of guys playing a quiet game of pool, but this is like Michael Jordan playing one-on-one against Larry Bird.

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Michael Perini: "You are exactly right, Nikon is Nikon's biggest problem, or rather Nikon's management is. Wave after wave of cost-cutting has resulted in a spate of problems with new cameras, which Nikon ignored for too long and tried to 'fix' by releasing the [x]10 models. They guessed wildly wrong with the Nikon 1 and Action cameras. They have steadfastly refused to make DX Primes and waited far too long between the D300 and D500.

"Nikon has a long and frankly brilliant history of great cameras and lenses, and their current lineup of high end cameras is great. In successful businesses with a long history it is too easy to say we have always done it this way and ignore for too long the fundamental changes in the industry. I believe Nikon knows it now but it is hard to say if they have lost too much ground. They need mirrorless versions of their top cameras and then they need to allow the market to decide. If they were to make a DX and FX mirrorless to compete head to head with the DSLR version I think they would see waves of business. I wish them well, too."

Dave Levingston: "I know nothing of the goings on in the camera industry in Japan or anywhere else. But I've been using Nikons since 1968. And, though I've been drawn into the mirrorless world with my Panasonic GX8, I still have a Nikon and a lot of lenses ready to use when they are needed.

"Over all those years Nikon as a company has been very consistent in its behavior. The company doesn't tell us anything. They don't make announcements like the one you propose. They don't tell us what's coming until it's pretty much here. And they are always conservative with new technology. Other companies almost always have produced cameras with each new technological advance before Nikon. But, in almost all cases when Nikon delivered their camera with the newest new feature, that feature actually worked, unlike some other companies that rushed to the market. Nikon seems to be in good financial condition. I'm sure they are doing some amazing things in their R&D. And when we see the results of what they are working on, I'm sure we will find the new features to work as they should, probably better than any of their competitors' cameras, and the cameras they produce in the future will be excellent tools that do what photographers need them to do. All that said, I'm still wishing they would get on with it and produce something with an EVF that I can use with all those old lenses in my equipment cabinet."

Nikon and Fuji

Written by Eamon Hickey

[Ed. Note: This post responds to the story, published by Sentaku magazine in Japan and repeated by FujiRumors, that the Japanese government had asked Fuji to step in and help rescue ailing Nikon. I had commented on that in the "Around the Web on a Wednesday" roundup. —Ed.]

I wish I had seen Mike's post on this story yesterday, so I could have chimed in earlier.

First of all, there is an earlier Sentaku article about Nikon, from the April issue, available in English.

It's a weird article in several ways. I didn't know about Sentaku magazine before this story popped up, but I'm getting the sense that it has a kind of gossipy, sharp-tongued, slyly in-the-know point of view, akin to the old Spy or the early years of the New Yorker. It's intentionally not bylined in order to facilitate that breezy, punchy style. The Japan Times syndicates Sentaku, but it does so under the "Opinion" section, not the news section, of its website. Here's the link.

Wending down a lazy rumor
So here's my guess about what's really going on here: Sentaku may well be picking up on some real behind-the-scenes activity, but have misunderstood it, or perhaps explained it sloppily. My suspicion is that whatever may be going on is about Nikon's semiconductor lithography business unit, not about Nikon as a whole. That unit makes the machines that manufacture computer chips—they're very much like enlargers in reverse, except that they cost millions of dollars and use lenses that weigh several tons.

Last November, Nikon publicly stated that they have "looked at" selling that unit off, or finding some other solution to its ongoing problems. Instead, as of November, they had decided to drastically scale it back. This is the source of the "extraordinary loss" that Nikon declared earlier this year.

Sentaku's April article talks about South Korean, Taiwanese, and Chinese semiconductor companies being interested in Nikon. That is not plausible at all for Nikon's camera business—no chip maker would want that business (which is profitable, by the way). But it makes perfect sense for Nikon's semiconductor lithography group. And Nikon has already said they'd like to sell it. See this article for the semiconductor lithography story.

It's also completely plausible that the Japanese Ministry of Trade et. al. might try to prevent Nikon's lithography business from passing into non-Japanese hands. This is the new part of the story that Sentaku is apparently publishing in its June issue (not online yet). The Ministry of Trade actually directed Nikon to start the lithography business back in 1977–78, and it has long been considered a key strategic technology. The U.S. government spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the 1990s trying (and failing) to create an American company that could build the machines (called steppers).

Finally, Sentaku's April issue badly mis-characterizes Nikon's current overall financial situation, I think mostly out of a boring-details-don't-matter writing style. Nikon is not in any financial distress. See the Reuters article I cited above for comments from Nikon and from independent analysts on that topic.

Nikon declared a small overall loss this year due entirely to the lithography restructuring costs. It does have a big future growth problem, as well as a big exposure to future camera market risk. But Nikon does not have a current financial problem. Anybody who can read a balance sheet can verify that.

Final thought on the Nikon-Fuji rumor: to the extent that there is a real story here, whatever it is, the mainline business publications will chase it down, for sure. So we can all keep our eye on Nikkei, Bloomberg, Reuters, Japan Times et. al. for more exacting business journalism on this.

A picture I love
As an aside, and speaking of steppers, here's a picture I love. Steppers were invented in the 1970s, at the tail end of the Massachusetts / upstate New York precision technology era that included the invention of the transistor and involved companies like Xerox, IBM, Kodak, et. al. In many ways we owe the modern world to the work that began there.

The Massachusetts company that invented the stepper was called GCA Mann (formally the David W. Mann division of GCA). The 1960s ancestor of the stepper was a machine called the Photo Repeater, which required unbelievably sharp lenses. GCA Mann found those lenses in Japan—they were called Ultra Micro-Nikkors, and came from a company called Nippon Kogaku, K.K. They were designed by the legendary Zenji Wakimoto, one of the great lens designers of the 20th century, who, probably because he is not German, is relatively unknown in the West.

Anyway, here is David Mann with the last and greatest of the Photo Repeaters. This picture, from a product brochure (via chiphistory.org), is so redolent of a kind of swashbuckling, macho engineering gestalt of the 1960s and '70s that it makes me smile every single time I look at it. (The lens in that contraption is almost certainly an Ultra Micro-Nikkor.)

Eamon

Business analyst, former photo-writer, and long-ago Nikon employee Eamon Hickey is a Contributing Editor of TOP.

©2017 by Eamon Hickey, all rights reserved

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Matt: "This is exactly the type of 'not gear' post that keeps me coming back here day after day. Very educational, and yes, a great photo from the 'swashbuckling' era of engineering. Thanks Eamon."

Bill Tyler: "Actually, although lots of good stuff came from the Massachusetts/upstate New York area, the transistor came from Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. The contributions of the pre-AT&T breakup Bell Labs to the modern era were enormous."

Eamon replies: Yes, in my sloppy way I was thinking of Bell Labs as part of that whole corridor, even though it's in New Jersey. I'm a California boy; the northeast is still all kind of one big lump in my mind.

Carl Blesch adds: "I worked in PR at Bell Labs for many years, and was privileged to lead the media relations campaign on our '50th anniversary of the transistor' commemoration in 1997. I saw detailed and thoughtful coverage of the anniversary, much of it in media based outside the USA. But I saw little coverage in Silicon Valley. I remember one thoughtful piece by Keay Davidson of the San Francisco Examiner, who suggested that Silicon Valley people nod toward the East in remembrance of the development that started their industries. I have a feeling his suggestion fell on deaf ears. Silicon Valley is about looking forward and moving forward. What happened in the past has, well, passed. No need to reflect on it."

KeithB: "Given that Canon is still a stepper powerhouse, would the Japanese care about the Avis?" [Keith means the second-place competitor—a famous and long-lived ad campaign for Avis car rental admitted it was in second place (at the time) but claimed "We try harder." —Ed.]

Eamon replies: Actually, Canon is very much not still a semiconductor stepper powerhouse. It withdrew from the leading-edge stepper market several years ago, the first victims of the ASML onslaught. There is now only one chip stepper powerhouse: ASML. With Nikon leaving the market, ASML has swept the field. Flat-panel display (FPD) steppers are a different story, and Nikon is not leaving that business, which it dominates now (but will not dominate as clearly in the coming two years, according to its own forecasts). Along with cameras, FPD steppers are Nikon's only solidly profitable businesses. (It makes many, many other optical devices, from industrial inspection equipment to microscopes to custom telescopes, but has had a hard time making money on most of them in recent years.)

The LensVid Summary for 2016 Is Out

Four the fourth year in a row, LensVid has published its excellent summary of the camera market, upon which we have all come to rely.

Iddo Genuth of LensVid

For today, just a link to the video. All the information is in the video, and it's not too long. News this year, although no surprise, is as bad as any of us feared. Note, however, the kernal of admittedly selfish hope: more of the action in the camera industry is going to be in higher-end and professional products...in other words, just the sorts of things that most interest a lot of us.

Here's LensVid's outstanding chart for this year, if you don't have time for the video.

I'll have more thoughts about this in the days to come, no doubt, but all in good time. Oh, and @LensVid...thanks for this.

Mike
(Thanks to Tom Burke)

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Nikon Lets the Bleeding Show

Nikon has released three worrying notices in quick succession, most notably a "Notice of Recognition of Extraordinary Loss" that announces losses totaling more than a quarter of a billion dollars over the last three quarters of 2016.

More than half of that comes from the "Result of Solicitation for Early Retirement," meaning buyouts for 1,143 employees, most aged 40 and older.

Announced but not to be: the Nikons that never were

This follows the unusual announcement that the company will not be producing the three Sony-cloney "DL" cameras that were announced about a year ago. They've been cancelled and won't be coming to market. Development of the three cameras had been troubled with technical problems, and apparently Nikon no longer thinks that particular direction will generate revenue, so it's cuttings its losses. The high-profile product cancellation underlines the other bad news.

Possibly most worrying is the document "Revision of the Financial Forecast for the Fiscal Year Ending March 31, 2017," which indicates worse performance in 2016 than the already pessimistic predictions.

Around the Web
There's a good summary of the news at Slashgear. For the financially literate, here's a quick take of the financial situation from Nasdaq.

In his article at DSLRBodies, Nikon gadfly Thom Hogan says "there’s no 'core philosophy' to what Nikon is doing. It’s all about cost management, for the most part. Yes, you have to manage costs, but that’s a lot easier to do if you produce the right products." Regarding the financial news, he notes that "there’s nothing in anything Nikon has announced that will tell us the pain is over," adding the prediction that "Nikon is about to become a smaller company. Possibly far smaller."

Mike
(Thanks to Kevin Purcell)

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John Krumm: "People were wringing hands over Olympus just a couple years ago during their financial scandal, and further back when they canceled the Four-Thirds system and switched to Micro 4/3. Now I hear some people say that Nikon needs to be more like Olympus.

"My guess is they will work it out. As a Pentax owner, I worry more about Pentax!"

Jim: "This is sad news. One of the few lessons I have learned from a life in business is that you can't starve yourself to prosperity."

Mark Walker: "I sell cameras. Nikon have lost hugely in the market from where I sit. They haven't respected their customer base. There has been a shameful rapid succession of 'upgrades' as well as the virtual public beta testing of production models: I believe there are still contested class actions pending. Canon seem to be faring better, and my perception is that the pro market has made a substantial shift in their favour.

"I don't have any bias against Nikon, I've used enough of their products and have too much respect for what they have achieved. But, they seem to be like a lumbering dinosaur getting shredded by the mirrorless raptors and they haven't responded with any form of dynamism, swatting away with 'upgrades.' Maybe they will contract to the mid and high range, but, they will need to be nimble and unless 2017/18 sees something radical in the lineup that will actually sell, well...who knows? It is difficult to understand where they are going and that has to be worrying."

Eamon Hickey (partial comment): "Nikon is now forecasting a 9,000m yen (that's 'nine-thousand million yen') net loss for fiscal 2017, or about 81 million dollars on 750,000m yen (6.8 billion dollars) in sales. That's about a 1.2% net loss. Not good, for sure, but Nikon's very strong balance sheet can easily handle a small loss like that. Nikon has been nicely profitable for the past six years (in both cameras and, to a lesser extent, lithography equipment), thus the strong balance sheet.

"Nikon does have long-term challenges in a shrinking camera market, no doubt. And the whole DL fiasco is, well, a fiasco. Just terrible business performance. And not the only bad show from Nikon recently. But it's important to keep things in perspective. Nikon is financially strong; it is coming off many years of making lots and lots of money (unlike nearly all other camera companies besides Canon); and there is time to adjust."

Paulo Bizarro: "In my opinion, Nikon just joined the 1-inch sensor compact camera market too late. Sony started it, followed by Canon and Panasonic. How many more such compacts can the market sustain? Sure, the DL 18–50 seemed nice on paper, given the focal length range. But, again, too late. Better take the loss now, than a couple of years down the road. Similar story to the Nikon 1 MILC system: has the best AF in the segment (or had at the time), but not enough to make a dent in a market dominated by the big electronic companies (Panasonic, Sony). Fuji was able to make a difference by basically betting in a coherent MILC ecosystem, rather than spreading their resources. Nikon's prestige comes from SLR and DSLR systems, and they have some great recent products there (D5, D500, 105mm ƒ/1.4 lens). Venturing outside of the comfort zone seems risky for them, because they are being reactive, rather than proactive."

In Mirrorless, Canon Leaps to No. 2 in Japan

With only a few offerings and a negligible number of lenses, maybe you didn't think much of Canon as a player in the mirrorless game.

But think again—according to Thom Hogan's analysis of BCN data, Canon is coming on like gangbusters in the cameramakers' home market of Japan, capturing 18.5% of the entire mirrorless market in 2016, easily surpassing onetime leader Panasonic and even squeaking past mighty Sony despite Sony's plentiful offerings in a variety of formats.

Note that Thom's chart is only for the Top Three and their combined market share, which is why figures for Panasonic don't appear in 2016 and 2015, and why Fuji, Nikon, Leica etc. don't appear on the chart at all.

Thom also notes that Japanese camera buyers are "price and size sensitive," greatly preferring small cameras and bargain prices.

Canon is now outselling Nikon two to one in Japan
Thom's other article of great interest is the one reflecting on BCN's recently released data on DSLR market share. It shows Nikon slowly slipping in the home market, and Canon going from strong to stronger.

Thom now has many sites covering many aspects of camera gear, but his core or legacy identity is as a Nikon site (the tagline on dslrbodies.com is "Supporting the Nikon F-mount on the Internet since 1994..."), so naturally his article concentrates on the ramifications of the data for Nikon. The article also charts the steady deterioration of Nikon's rank in lens sales, from 23.2% of the interchangeable lens market in 2009 to 12.5% last year.

Sigma has now taken over the No. 2 position in interchangeable lens sales in Japan, behind Canon.

Mike
(Thanks to Michael J. Perini)

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Not in the top three either.
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Jim Bullard: "I'm not surprised. The 'M' cameras have taken a bum rap in the U.S. but I like the M3 in particular. I wish it had a fully articulated screen on the back but, on the whole, I love it. Good size, reasonable price, and great optics."

Geoff Wittig: "This is ironically bad news for us Canon users. Nikon's technical prowess over the years has provided the competitive challenge keeping Canon from becoming completely complacent. No doubt it's Nikon's brilliant D800/810 series (and their Sony sensors) that forced Canon to finally start addressing its lag in high ISO noise and dynamic range capabilities. If Nikon slips further and goes under (a distinct possibility, since Nikon is basically a camera/lens company, while Canon and Sony have far wider product lines), Canon may get even fatter and happier with what they already have. This would make me very sad; I greatly prefer the larger form factor of 'standard' DSLRs over mirrorless cameras, which just feel too small and fiddly to me."

Service and Support Coming at Ya?

Written by Eamon Hickey

Pardon this brief indulgence in camera-business navel-gazing, but an unusual event caught my eye last week. What happened is this: Canon USA issued a press release highlighting the results of a U.S. customer satisfaction survey, which compared Canon USA service with Nikon USA service. Canon was the clear winner, according to Canon, and the press release goes on to claim several other advantages for Canon USA’s service and support network (all of which may well be true).

Several blogger/commentators picked this up, including Thom Hogan, who pointed out that it’s very rare for a camera company to make direct comparisons with a competitor by name like this. He’s right—it’s unusual and it will ruffle some Nikon feathers.

The thing that caught my eye, however, was one almost throwaway sentence in Canon’s press release: “…Canon has also launched a new digital advertising campaign that highlights the Company’s knowledgeable tech support staff and efficient service times….”

Why did that jump out at me? I’ve been either working in, or writing about, the camera business in the U.S. for 30 years, and I don’t remember ever seeing a camera company actively promote service and support as part of its sales pitch to regular customers. (Canon and Nikon do promote, very narrowly, their support programs for working pros, CPS and NPS.) Ever since I went to work in a camera store in 1987, service and support from camera manufacturers has been pretty much abysmal across the board in the U.S. Uniformly embarrassing. The secret shame of the industry. But nobody has hitherto made much effort to improve it because the companies believe that regular customers don’t give service much weight in their purchasing decisions. Indeed, the companies believe it has almost no impact on sales. (And, by the way, camera company executives have reams of market research data at their disposal—how customers make their buying decisions is obviously a very well-studied phenomenon in every business.)

Now comes Canon USA touting its investment in superior service and support—i.e. “making customer service an integral part of our business model,” as the press release says. Providing said service ain’t cheap or easy, and advertising it won’t be cheap either, but Canon evidently intends to see if it can get a return on its investment, contrary to decades of accepted wisdom in the business. If Canon USA can, in fact, sell more cameras by promoting better service, it may drag Nikon, Sony, Olympus, Fujifilm et al. along with it. Call it a good service arms race. Well, let’s not get crazy — it’ll probably be a not-quite-as-dismal service arms race, if it happens. But, hey, if things aren’t quite as dismal, then they’re looking up.

So if we're lucky, maybe we'll see some improvements in camera company service in the near future.

Eamon

Eamon Hickey is a Contributing Editor of TOP and...well, he already told you, he's been either working in or writing about the camera industry for more than 30 years. He has written for Imaging-Resource, CNET, Rob Galbraith's blog (officially Rob Galbraith Digital Photography Insights), and a handful of magazines including DigitalFoto, Computer Shopper, Macaddict, and Laptop.

©2016 by Eamon Hickey, all rights reserved

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Tom: "I primarily use Nikon so I'm an NPS member. Aside from a nice magazine and a diary sometime in March I see very little value by the way of support. I don't trust them to service my equipment.

"Only one camera manufacturer has ever made me feel that they value me as a customer and additionally that they are committed to photography as opposed to camera sales, and that's Leica. A company I have bought exactly three items from in 20 years. I recall once approaching a Leica rep at a trade show and asking when Leica might produce a digital camera. Instead of brushing me off with some nonsense I could have read someplace on the Internet, he took the care to explain exactly what unusual technical difficulties Leica was facing at that time with their short flange distance and said that although they were a small company, they were working on the problem. I went away with renewed confidence."

Maggie Osterberg: "And who has the worst customer service? Leica USA. For instance, the M9 series of cameras has a sensor that will corrode, but that Leica will replace free of charge. Sounds pretty good, right? Nope. You send your camera (you pay shipping there and back, by the way) to Leica USA in New Jersey, where it will sit for anywhere between six and twelve months. Then the sensor gets replaced along with the vulcanite, which has to be removed to do the repair. I've read that that can take up to a couple of weeks. Then, finally, the camera is shipped back to you. Leica is like owning an old Mercedes-Benz—yes, it can run forever, but repairs and parts are insanely expensive and take forever to obtain.

"On the other hand, my husband's Nikon DSLR, which also had a warranty Sensor replacement, went off to Nikon and came back a little over a week later, all at zero cost to him."

Ed. note: I'm sure you noticed how closely those two comments mirrored each other, but with conclusions reversed. Here are two more which came in one right after the other:

Anthony Shaughnessy (partial comment): "When I was little the television repair man and the washing machine repair man were regular visitors to our house. Nowadays things don't usually break and when they do they're usually impractical to fix and trying to get good sales service for most devices is difficult. So I've grown to expect no after-sales service and simply hope that nothing goes wrong and generally it doesn't. Hence, after sales service isn't part of how I choose products."

Stephen Scharf (partial comment): "I don't know about other customers, but service and support is something that is foremost in my mind when making purchasing decisions. When you invest in expensive purchases, like cars, high-end audio, or camera/photography systems, you are entering into a relationship with the vendor. You're going to be living with the product in fair seas and foul, so while most customers don't think about this at all, timely and robust service and support capability are 'critical-to-quality' requirements for me when making purchasing decisions."

kosch: "Lately, I feel like I have moved back to a time before I was born, when a purchase was not replaceable; all because of the ability to reference YouTube. For the past five years, when any appliance, gizmo, or electronic thing has broken I diagnose it as far as I can, Google it and then watch a YouTube video (sometimes, many of them) on how to fix it.

"I have fixed my washing machine, refrigerator, two cars, a Sekonic light meter, dishwasher, installed wood flooring, and even poured a huge stamped concrete patio, all because experts online have showed me what to do. I don't rely on nuanced warrantees, I do not call repair places anymore, I do not have to consider the service available after I buy the product. I research major purchases based on the amount of repair videos on the Internet.

"I have an Olympus 50mm ƒ/2 Ziuko that will not autofocus anymore. I have a couple of days off coming up. I have been watching videos online already, ordered $17.50 worth of electronic parts, and will have a fully repaired lens by next Tuesday (fingers crossed).
I am already awaiting the videos that will teach me how to build the things that I need...."

Ned Bunnell: "Smart move by Canon. In a declining market, they want to make sure they still capture the lion's share of sales. They've now made service a conversation, and for the first time, a factor in our purchase decision process. Knowing how Canon runs a conservative and financially well-thought-out business, I don't think this is a short-term campaign. It'll be interesting to see how Nikon responds."

Camera Industry Peaked in 2011

According to a chart at Statista sourced from CIPA, CIPA members shipped 121.5 million cameras in 2011, and the interchangeable-lens portion of that was even greater in 2012, 2013, and 2014. But now both categories are down drastically.

(The chart is deceptive as regards 2016, because it reports the first half of the year, whereas the big shopping months are mostly in the second half. So the 13 million sales in the first seven months of 2016 might not be predictive of the final number for this year.)

Statista blames the downturn on smartphones. While I'm sure that smartphone cameras have had a large effect, mostly at the lower end of the market, I don't think it's the whole story at all. There are other things happening that I've observed firsthand among photography enthusiasts.

1. Single-chip digital cameras are reaching a point of sufficiency. The frenzy of excitement and desire for the latest improvements that we witnessed in the decade from 2003–2013 can't reasonably continue forever (at least not without another technological shift). More and more photographers are realizing they're perfectly happy with their older cameras. They're still upgrading regularly, but the intervals between upgrades are growing longer and more leisurely.

2. It's expensive to keep up with the very latest thing, and many of us have gotten burned...by ourselves. We overbought and got left with that faintly sick feeling of money flushed down the loo with no one but ourselves to blame. That breeds greater caution when making purchases...even when the latest toys still inspire strong acquisitive lust.

3. New digital cameras have to compete more than ever with secondhand digital cameras...more like the way film cameras once did. Call it the "Model T Effect": Henry Ford was strongly motivated to make the Model T into an Everyman's car, and he succeeded wildly in bringing the price down—way down—over the years. But one thing he didn't take into account was that, once three out of every four cars on American roads were Fords (true in the early 1920s), new Model T Fords would be competing with used Model T Fords...and even Henry couldn't make new ones cheap enough to compete with his own cars bought secondhand. Especially as cameramakers have learned that they can charge a price premium for the latest and greatest gear, more and more price-sensitive buyers are finding they can save money, lots of money, by buying cameras at the end-of-model-run closeouts or by buying little-used cameras that are one or even two generations old. These customers are upgrading regularly too, but it's not being reflected in the numbers for new camera sales. (This particular buying solution was much less satisfying when the pace of improvements was still rapid; it works better now.)

I think these three factors are having more effect on the sales of the kinds of cameras we tend to care about. (A possible fourth influence is that whenever some recreational activity becomes "all the rage," a certain percentage of those participating are just people who jumped on the bandwagon or who got carried along by the wave. As the period of excitement and popularity settles down, those people drift away. But I don't have reliable inputs about that effect.)

I came of age in photography in an era when the market for cameras was one of "measured growth," and the market for darkroom equipment—my niche, back then—was sleepy and all but saturated. It was the opposite in 2003–2013. Part of what we're witnessing is not a paradigm shift (although part of it probably is—I plan to upgrade my phone as soon as I can, entirely for the camera), but rather the inevitable ending of a period of unprecedented growth and activity.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Gato (partial comment): "A big factor, I think, is saturation. Almost everyone who wants a digital camera and can afford one already has one."

Bruce McL: "Desktop and Laptop computer sales have slowed down for some of the same reasons. Computers are 'good enough' to last six or seven years. Fifteen or 20 years ago, three years was a long time to keep a computer. By then the new ones were substantially better in ways that people could appreciate in day-to-day use."

Paul De Zan: "Spot on. Last DSLR purchase here was a Canon 6D three and a half years ago (still a current model today); last camera of any type was a Fuji X100T going on two years ago. Two certifiably ancient Nikon D40's still get 30% of my shooting time. Right now I barely look at new cameras. We have reached a certain equilibrium that really has nothing to do with phone cameras, although if sales keep falling they will inevitably get the credit for 'killing the DSLR,' because that's how feature writing (not journalism) works."

matthew: "It's really hard for me to pay $1,000+ for a new camera. Yes, the new camera will be better than what I have, but is it $1,000 better? Right now, the answer is no. And so every time I take my camera out, a small part of me secretly hopes that I break it so I can justify the upgrade."

John Krumm: "Everyone is trying to inflate a smaller bubble within one larger shrinking bubble. It's interesting that camera sales proved pretty recession resistant, unlike homes, cars and other big items. I found this chart on motorcycle sales, which is quite different. Unlike cameras, they are making a slow recovery. But also unlike cameras, they don't have a smartphone equivalent to compete with."

Wayne: "It kind of reminds me of my younger years when I purchased a new car every two or three years; now I purchase a new car only when I absolutely need one. It is not that I do not like new cars any less, it is just that I have finally figured out that new cars, once purchased, do nothing meaningful to improve my life...at least not beyond the two or three weeks of initial ownership. While my spate of new camera purchases did not last as many years as the episode with automobiles, I have finally learned the same lesson. Stupidity? Yes. Eternal stupidity? No."

Mike replies: I don't know...after spending 9–10 years each with a series of cars, I was prosperous enough for a few years to buy a new car every 2–3 years, and I'd do that forever if I could afford it. (Although I think I remember reading recently that the average American family can no longer afford the price of the average new car.) And I'd be very happy to have a cabinet full of the latest cameras without having to worry about the expense. I do see your point, though, and it's a good one—that the shine wears off quickly and the sense of reward fades.

John Robison: "Seeing this made me think, 'have I ever bought a new camera?' Looking back over nearly 50 years of messing with cameras I have bought dozens of used cameras paying anywhere from $1 to $900 (yeah, it was that Leica M that I had always dreamed about). Thinking about it the only new-in-box cameras I have ever purchased were discontinued and discounted models: a Minolta HiMatic 9, Rollei 35B, and Olympus E-410. I think the camera companies view customers like me as useless."

Salar: "I think the biggest factor is economic uncertainty. We're in a deflationary cycle and people tend to save instead of spend."

Steve Jacob: "2010. That was the year Sony's 16MP 4T IMX071 Exmor sensor hit the market and more or less maxed out the capabilities of Silicon mosaic sensors. It appeared in the D7000 and D5100, Sony NEX5, Pentax K5 and Fuji Xpro1 among others. It also got enlarged to create the 36MP sensor in the D800, which has identical pixel architecture. Why was this significant? Because nothing has radically improved on the QE and read noise performance of this sensor since. Nor is it ever likely to until we start using some different kind of light detector than a photodiode. You can only store so many photoelectrons in a certain volume of doped silicon. There have been small improvements—copper wiring, 5T dual gain, better processing—but nothing radical. Sixteen megapixels is enough to make 24x16-inch prints with exceptional quality; all these cameras have good DR and noise performance; and other than going full-frame there is little you can do to improve on them.

"There are other factors too—general weariness with hype and expectation, the crash of 2008 from which the world has barely recovered, stagnation of western living standards....

"But perhaps the most significant is that all these cameras appeal to traditionalists. They are just digital versions of film cameras, to which we all migrated with all our skills and expectations. A whole new generation that never owned a film camera find them cumbersome, complicated and plain hard work. They still resonate with a core enthusiast set, but outside that set they have limited appeal. Most people want something that has all the automated features of their phone camera (including 'intelligent' scene-sensing tone curves) but the IQ of an SLR. It will come, as phone cameras adopt the multi-module approach.

"Camera companies are trying to sell stick-shift muscle cars to a generation raised on the equivalent of self-driving Google cars.

"The mass camera market was always about lifestyle snaps, not art, wildlife or sport. Many of these people bought into SLRs simply because there was no alternative, but seldom took them off auto. Smaller film formats just weren't very good. Now, the same folks simply don't need to. Phone cameras are getting good enough and don't force you to use a PC, or complicated software. They just need to cross the quality divide, which means something that works like an iPhone camera, is no bigger than an iPhone, and does all the processing internally using its own scene analytics.

"It's quite possible to make a 'flat' camera using multiple phone camera modules which can even simulate variable focal lengths, arm it with a dedicated quad core Snapdragon processor and plenty of flash memory, and hey presto."

Barry Reid: "I live in a very trendy part of East London (by default as we arrived before the Hipsters). What I think may be happening is that as we enter the always-streamed digital world, the transitional technologies (CD, DSLR, BluRay etc) are being ditched. But the appetite for 'authentic' (read analogue) approaches to creativity remains and is increasing. These kids love their Vinyl records, OM-10s, Trips and Polaroids. I probably see more film cameras than DSLRs on a Saturday at our local market!"

Ilkka: "I am continuously surprised how good the digital cameras from a few years ago are. I have bought two 'new' cameras in the past two years but both were old stock of discontinued items. I just took my five-or-so-year-old Olympus digicam (XZ-1) out for use. Needed a small compact with decently fast zoom. Even that was bought secondhand at the time. Served its purpose very well. Couldn't have hoped for anything better. Very little reason to buy new cameras anymore."

Mike replies: We recently had a similar experience when I dusted off a Panasonic LX7 for my brother, who was visiting but had inadvertently left his own camera at home. He loved using it, and was very pleased with the results he was getting. And now that he's gone again I can't find it around here anywhere...seems to have disappeared...hmm....

Popularity Contest

Two interesting vectors this morning. ExploreCams, a site that allows you to look up images based on the camera or lens used, has updated its massive data crunch analyzing eleven and a half million pictures uploaded to enthusiast photo sites. They graphed the most popular cameras used, and then, for each camera, the five most popular lenses. Coming in at no. 1 is the Canon EOS 5D Mark III (now newly updated) with the EF 24–105mm ƒ/4 lens (in fact it's the most popular lens with all three of the top Canons...apropos Harold Merklinger's comments here the other day about the desirability of ƒ/4 lenses. Just sayin').

Of course this is a popularity contest. Being something of a natural contrarian, my immediate knee-jerk reaction to finding out the results of any popularity contest is to want to do the opposite. And of course results always depend on what data was used and how it was collected; doubtless there's a bit of anti-recency effect in this de facto poll...most photographers are using cameras they bought on average several years ago, and uploading pictures they took at some point in the past. The recent past, but the past. So it might be considered most accurate as a snapshot of enthusiast camera use at some point several years ago.

Graphic and data courtesy CIPA

Speaking of which, here's a recent graph sourced from CIPA (Camera & Imaging Products Association) charting camera sales. The horizontal lines are millions of units shipped, with zero at the bottom and 5 million at the top; and each line is a successive year month-by-month: 2014 is the dotted purple line, 2015 the solid black line in the middle, and this year, 2016, is the solid orange line at the bottom, up to July.

This comes from an article at a site (no, the site is not about Sony despite its name!) for investors and money managers. The article is titled "Nikon Has Little Growth Potential Because of Rapidly Declining Camera Sales." Which pretty much gives you the gist of the article. Note, however, that the author is disputing another evaluation that came to the opposite conclusion. Note also that at the ExploreCams chart, Canon grabs the top three cameras and seven of the top 10. Although Nikon dominates the 11–20 bracket. Together, the Canikon duopoly's dominance shows very clearly. 

I don't know what to conclude from all this, except that it's apparent that most photographers are still using DSLRs even if they're largely happy with the ones they already have and aren't in as big a hurry to upgrade. The most-used mirrorless camera is the Sony A6000 (that thing really has been selling) at no. 22. The next one is the Fuji X-T1 (my current camera, also recently replaced) at the 28th slot.

I'm considering changing cameras again (more about that eventually) and I'm curious how my own consumer behavior intersects with the trends these links show. I'm already curious to see what the ExploreCams' chart will look like three years from now. Will DSLRs still dominate so thoroughly then? Will mirrorless start showing greater infiltration on the list? Time will tell.

Mike
(Thanks to Kevin Purcell and John Camp)

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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