Expressing enthusiasm for photography by way of brand fanaticism seems to be something that's receding in the rearview mirror now. I wasn't really aware of it existing—well, except among Leica fans—much before the 1990s. There were certainly aficionados of brands, mainly I think because you had to accumulate equipment and mostly people did it within one brand, or at least one brand per format—but most people weren't partisans. I blamed the onset of "fanboyism" (I always disliked the term, because it was a putdown) in part on the decision by CompuServe to divide its photoforums by brand—initially they weren't organized that way. (I wish I knew when that happened. Sometime in the mid-1990s maybe?) DPReview continued the same structure, and for a while it got kinda ridiculous—one way of attracting attention became the "switching announcement." Some guy would announce with great portent and much bloviation that X brand had finally disappointed him too grievously and he was decamping for brand Y, and everyone would happily fret and natter over it for a while, at their keyboards.
I never cared what other people shot with. A very early post on this blog read something like, "Should you shoot with Nikon or Canon?" And the answer was "Yes." That is, buy one or the other and go shoot. I still don't care what people shoot with. Make yourself happy; there are good and bad shooters within every brand, and for most cameras there are people who love it and people who don't. However, over the years I noticed that this blog would attract more people who were partisans of whatever brand I was shooting with at the time, especially if I stuck with it for a while and wrote about it frequently. I'd hop from Sony to Konica-Minolta to Panasonic to Sony to Micro 4/3 to Fuji, and people would somehow think that that mattered. It didn't, of course. I was just one guy with my gearhead hat on happily wasting money as we are all wont to do, with all the cool and pretty toys.
J'accuse!
It went further than that: I started writing about photography in 1988, and wrote about all sorts of brands over the years. And at some point I detected that if I wasn't identifiably partisan about any given brand, people would spread the rumor that I had some sort of animosity toward it. So, if I wasn't an out-and-out Leicaphile, then I had to be a Leica hater. And so on. Over the years I came across random accusations that I supposedly "hated" almost every brand there was. At one point, I even got accused by multiple personages of loving and hating the same brand at the same time.
Is all that "fanboy" nonsense actually dying down now? It could be. It might also be that I'm personally just stepping away from it more and more, meaning I'm not as keyed into it as I used to be. But I learned a long, long time ago to keep my ear to the ground, the better to hear far-off hoofbeats, and that's long been second nature. And I sense recently that brand partisanship seems to be settling down quite a bit. It could also be that the all the disputation has simply shifted to some other venue that I don't keep up with. I have to confess I haven't watched a YouTube camera review in months now, and I couldn't even name the big channels. It's possible I'm just losing touch, is what I'm saying.
Another possibility is that nowadays we just want all the cameramakers to survive. To do well and thrive. I feel that myself.
Survivors and thrivers
I went down the list of DPReview's "Cameras" tab and tallied the names that still seem to be around. There are 26 company names listed, and I disqualify Holga, a toy plastic film camera which for some mystifying reason DPReview includes. So there are 25 names. First, here are the names that haven't listed a new product since 2018 or earlier, along with the date of the last listed product:
- Agfa (2009)
- Casio (2016)
- Contax (2002)
- DxO Labs (2016)
- Kodak (2016)
- Lytro (2014)
- Minolta (1998)
- Rylo (2017)
- Samsung (2015)
- SeaLife (2016)
- Xiaomi (2017)
- YI (2017)
- Zeiss (2018)
There are several missing from that list, for instance Konica-Minolta and Epson, and a number of small former digicam makers such as BenQ, Sanyo, and HP Photosmart. But anyway, that's 13, which gets us down to 12. Of the ones that remain, "Olympus / OM System" is certainly much diminished, although it's disputed as to how it should be considered now. Ricoh and Pentax, listed separately by DPR because they used to be separate, are the same company now. GoPro (last introduction 2020) is looking a bit like it might be a fad that's fading. DJI makes drones and the Ronin Cinema camera. So for the purposes of the list let's give OM System the benefit of the doubt, merge Ricoh and Pentax into one, and set the others aside. That leaves ten eleven remaining active companies on DPR's list:
- Canon
- Fujifilm
- Hasselblad
- Leica
- Nikon
- OM System
- Panasonic
- [UPDATE] Phase One
- Ricoh (Pentax)
- Sigma
- Sony
That's just going from DPReview's "Cameras" tab. Are you aware of any that deserve to be listed as major going concerns that aren't included among those ten? I wouldn't be surprised if there's a obvious omission staring me right in the face. [UPDATE: Many readers suggested that Phase One is missing, so I've included them now. Although for some unknown reason DPReview doesn't seem to cover them.]
In the peak years (ILC and dedicated camera sales peaked in 2012), it might have been fun to pretend all the brands were fighting and that we had to help. Now, though, rather than fighting, it seems more like circle-the-wagons time. I don't want to see any of these ten eleven disappear. Do I want Olympus shooters to lose support? I do not. Do I want Ricoh to lose interest in making cameras? I sure don't; that would be a big loss. Do I want Fuji or Hasselblad to destroy the other as competition in medium format? Absolutely not. May they both prosper and live long.
Actually, rather than single brand partisanship, maybe now is the time for shooting more than one brand!
If so, maybe instead of "fanboy," we can call it being a "panboy." Pan being the prefix from the Greek πᾶν, pan, meaning "all." Okay, I've already admitted than my coinages are dopey and seldom catch on, bokeh being the only exception, so don't throw food at me, please!
That's all for today. Maybe it's already a little too much. :-)
Mike
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Featured Comments from:
Mike Ferron: "I appreciate all brands and never liked the infighting that prevailed, especially between the Nikon/Canon sides. Then there was the format wars. So ridiculous really. If you are a pro, use what you need to use. If not, use whatever makes you feel good. Humans will divide over the silliest of things."
Albert Smith: "I'll admit to being a brand snob back in the day. I had little money, but I only bought top brands based on the technical data that use to be captioned under images in photography magazines and books in the '60s, '70s and '80s.
"I was a fan of certain photographers and bought gear based on what they used. For me, it was Nikon and Leica, and only lenses from those brands. I wouldn't be caught dead with a Vivitar or Tokina lens on my Nikon, and Leica M cameras had no third party lenses until Cosina under the Voigtländer moniker started in the early '00s, but not for me.
"It took a big leap for me to start shooting with Fujifilm cameras and to go to APS-C after only accepting full frame. My brand loyalty was challenged, and I now have dozens of Nikons and Leicas sitting unused with an arsenal of expensive lenses, collecting dust.
"You are right about the fanboy thing being less relevant based on the various sites I visit. Many people buy a four-figure body and are happy to put a sub-hundred-dollar Chinese lens on it. The lens was always the thing I'd never compromise on, but today no one seems bothered as long as you can appreciate the 'character' that the cheap lenses render.
"Today I ordered a TT Artisans 25mm ƒ/2 manual focus lens for my Fuji, $64. I guess I'm out of the fanboy club."
Michael Fewster: "You missed Phase One. This high end medium format company is very much alive. Arguably the best medium format cameras available. If you can afford them that is."
Aaron: "Clearly, you’re an OM System hater. :-) "
Juan Buhler: "Yeah, but you never really liked Pentax that much, huh Mike?"
Mike replies: Sigh. :-)
s.wolters: "Amazon is the owner of DPReview. You cannot buy PhaseOne via Amazon but all the brands on DPReview you can."
Tex Andrews: "Oh, and one more thing: 'fanboy' is a banned word at DPR!"
Mike replies: I didn't know that. I'm pleased to hear it.
JH: "Blame advertising and marketing. They are dedicated to creating demand for new or existing products and loyal buyers. The beginning of modern advertising is probably David Ogilvy in the '60s—the 'Mad Men' era, which focused on image, e.g. the happy housewife with her new space-age gadgets or 'the man who reads Playboy.' A major shift occurred in the early '70s when Al Ries and Jack Trout published Positioning, the original guide to building brands. In a later book, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Law 4 says 'reality is nothing, perception is everything.' Advertising and positioning created a 'us vs. them' atmosphere: Nikon vs. Canon, MAC vs. PC, Ford vs. Chevy, McDonalds vs. Burger King, Coke vs. Pepsi, etc., etc., etc. Positioning created the idea of brands and the conflict between brands created the 'fanboys.' As long as we have advertising (especially with the 'influencers' on the Internet) and choices, I bet we will have fanboys."
Rob de Loe: "The whole concept of being fanatically loyal to the products of large corporations of any type is ludicrous to me. I have no loyalty to brands at all.
"They're tools. Make a good tool that does what I need well and I'm your customer."
Michael Fewster: "Wearing brands is another aspect of this. If you want me to advertise your brand with a large logo on my T-shirt or anything else, then pay me. Same goes for camera straps with huge Canon, Nikon, or Sony written all over them. I will never wear such things. If my memory serves me correctly, it was Camel that started this. Somewhere in the late '50s/early '60s they came out with a T-shirt with a large logo on it. Camel and the rest of the commercial world were staggered when it became a fashion thing. People bought them in huge numbers. The advertising world was incredulous. The public would actually pay to wear advertising. The rush was on."