The Online Photographer

An Ideal Format

[TOP publishes on Mon./Wed./Fri. Comments are posted the following day.]

-

It's difficult to say when the "birth moment" of the 4/3 format happened. An Olympus engineer named Katsuhiro Takada chose the size and shape of the format in 1999; Kodak and Olympus announced their intention to cooperate in 2001; and the 4/3 website (it was more often written "Four Thirds" then) launched in 2003. That was the year of the first SLR designed from the ground up for digital, the Olympus E-1. As of PMA 2006, the Four Thirds Consortium consisted of Olympus, Panasonic, Leica, Kodak, Sigma, Sanyo, and Fujifilm(!)—although, notably, membership in the consortium did not constitute a commitment on the part of each of those companies to produce commercial products in the format. Fujifilm never did. Micro 4/3, the world's first system of interchangeable-lens cameras in what eventually became known as "mirrorless," launched in 2008.

The 4/3 format was almost identical in size to the 110 film format introduced by Kodak in 1972: an imaging area of 13 x 17.3mm compared to 13 x 17mm for 110.

Of course, in the early days there was a pitched battle between the 4/3 format and what became known as APS-C, a slightly larger format size chosen by both Nikon and Canon. (Canon's exact standard was slightly smaller than Nikon's.) APS-C, which stands for "Advanced Photo System—Classic," was one of the three sizes of the ill-fated APS film format. The Advanced Photo System had been launched as a consortium spearheaded by Kodak in 1996. Kind of interesting that the first major format battle in digital was between two contenders that were so close in size to two film format sizes, both developed by Eastman Kodak.

Same as it ever was
I was an early booster and supporter of the 4/3 format. It seemed about right to me. It offered the best balance of all factors—greater d.o.f. than 35mm film and the larger formats; more efficient usage of the image circle of lenses; greater effective telephoto "reach," which had been greatly prized by 35mm photographers*; and the possibility of convenient compactness in both cameras and lenses. All with enough area and "room for pixels" to ensure good image quality.

Of course, the vagaries of the format's journey through the world was up and down, and 4/3 encountered a number of obstacles along the way, some real, some perceived. I won't go into all of those issues here, as it would constitute a long history lesson, much of which is known to this site's core readership anyway. Mostly, of course, 4/3's big problem was that it was always opposing more powerful interests and market forces.

Surisingly, given all the water that has flowed under the bridge since then, I still consider 4/3—now Micro 4/3—as probably the ideal digital format when considered objectively and logically. Considered, that is, from a sort of "ivory tower" perspective, divorced from status-and-prestige and marketing issues and market perception—but not exactly as it is, only as it might have been. Imagine if a.) sensor development had been logical and b.) Micro 4/3 was the main focus of sensor development for still photography. (Right now there's a new Micro 4/3 sensor in development, but it's almost completely aimed at hybrid cameras and really won't have much effect on still photography at all, at least as far as I can tell.) If things had proceeded logically, no phone camera would have more than six or eight megapixels at the most and we'd mostly be using cameras with 4/3 Foveon sensors right now! Well, that's a future that never was. Being sensible and logical isn't the most important factor in sensor and camera design and development—it might rank fifth or sixth on the list.

But enough of my opinion. What's the ideal format to you?

Mike

P.S. Related reading: "The Remarkable Persistence of 24x36"

*I was fooled there, however—many 35mm film photographers prized long teles not so much because they needed them (which was what I always assumed) but because they were big and cool and expensive and hence, displayed status.

Book o' the Week

Our National Monuments: America's Hidden Gems by Q.T. Luong. Just out! Brand new. Publishing isn't easy. Our friend QT (Tuan) Luong tells me that his new book will have to sell 6,200 copies out of a print run of 7,500 just to break even! And that's not including the labor and time it took to make the photographs. Fortunately, the predecessor book, Treasured Lands, has done exceedingly well. It has won 12 international awards and is now in its 6th printing.

The above is a link to Amazon from TOP. Once you're at Amazon, anything you search and buy will be credited to TOP. The following logo is also a link:

Original contents copyright 2020 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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

One Serious Sentence

[Comments have been added.]

-

Man, I wish I had a dime for every minute I've spent trying to keep up with Olympus's perambulations, permutations, and perfidies over the years. I wish I were better at it, but the more I read, the more confusicated I get.

Boiled way down: big accounting scandal in 2011, when its own CEO became a whistleblower; smaller, but still big, bribery scandal in 2016; and then, after 84 years, Olympus Corp. exited the camera business in 2020 after losing boatloads of money for, like, a decade. Olympus Corporation prospers but no longer makes cameras. The camera and lens division, under new ownership, became OM Digital Solutions (OMDS)...but continued branding the cameras and lenses "Olympus." Now, if I read everything right (every document seems larded with branding blather—example below—which further confusicates me), the company is still called OM Digital Solutions but, because nobody can remember that name—I can't, anyway—it is branding its "lines of interchangeable lens cameras and lenses, compact digital cameras, audio products, binoculars, and other services" (what else does it do? Isn't that everything?) with the name "OM System."

Better. I can remember that. I think. "OM System" used to mean the lineup of compact film SLRs (OM-1, OM-2, OM-3, and OM-4, plus variants) and its matching manual-focus lenses (it was a beautiful, and beautifully complete, system, but autofocus, which it didn't have, doomed it prematurely). But I can adjust. I think I still have enough brain cells left.

Small problem: when I Googled the new brand name, I got an Argentinian company called OM Systems (note plural s), or Om Systems (it's not clear) that "provides broadcast equipment to the audiovisual industry." Hmm, isn't that frowned upon, to pick a name that's already taken? It seems close enough to the same business space. You can't re-use names for thoroughbred racehorses; I thought companies were more or less the same way. They must have thought of this, though.

In a way, we have Leica, or, more precisely, Leitz, to thank for the new brand name. What? Well, Olympus wanted to call its first compact SLR the "M-1" back in 1971, but Leitz, which made Leicas, or more precisely Leitz's lawyers, said, hold on there, hoss, our cameras are called M's. So Olympus added the "O" and the cameras and lenses became OM. (But then Leica GmbH did not object when Canon more recently used the name M6. I cannot pretend to understand.)

And here we are. From the OM System press release about the name OM System:

“Break Free”

Time does not stand still.

It does not take excuses or do repeats. The sun won’t ask for your permission to set, a smile comes and goes, and a Falcon [sic] won’t wait for your go-ahead to take flight. When a moment comes, one that makes you feel, you should be ready to capture it.

Since the bird is a falcon, Falcon-capital-F made me think of the Star Wars spaceship, although that's probably not what they meant. And how is it breaking free when you're doing your best to remind people that you are still who you, or rather someone else, used to be? In the video, "Olympus and "Maitani" come together to make the OM. Isn't Maitani...you know, dead?

Anyway I think part of their probation should be that they only tell us the plain facts in plain language and leave all the other stuff out, but I'm just being selfish.

Mike in the role of critic

Of course, the bottom line is, we still love the OM System (the OMDS brand that makes Olympus-branded cameras that aren't made by Olympus, not the old line of manual-focus film cameras...oh, never mind). Because a lot of us either use the cameras and lenses, or used to (I used to), and they have always made great stuff, and still do.

That last sentence is serious.

Mike

Book o' the Week

Photography, The Definitive Visual History by Tom Ang. This is a book, like several others I know of (I'm looking at you, Q.T. Luong) that can't exist—it's too much work to put it together. Which makes it all the more amazing that it does. A brightly-lit shop window for the attractions of photography, a whirlwind tour of people, cameras, and pictures. The author still has time to be an accomplished travel photographer.

The above is a link to Amazon from TOP. Once you're at Amazon, anything you search and buy will be credited to TOP. The following logo is also a link:

Original contents copyright 2020 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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

Dillan: "Thanks for making me feel better about my lens collection!"

Grizzlymarmot: "The capital F in falcon is directed towards bird enthusiasts. Capitalization of bird names is as much of a passion as optics for them. It was as subtle as the iridescence of the Common Grackle.

Mike replies: Oh, okay. I didn't know that. Thanks.

Alicia King: "Mike, my husband is an avid reader of yours. He recently called my attention to the discussion of bird names related to whether to capitalize falcon or not. I have worked in the field of bird education and conservation most of my career. The rule is that when addressing a family bird name, such as falcon, it is not capitalized. If you name the specific falcon as in Peregrine Falcon then yes it would be Falcon (if you include Peregrine). Another example—eagle. If you say Golden Eagle or Bald Eagle the e is capitalized. If you say eagle or eagles it is not capitalized. Re grackle: Common Grackle is correct, but grackle used alone is not capitalized. The American Ornithology Society and many birding organizations and others are clear on the capitalization of bird names and falcon is not capitalized until it is a specific type of falcon. So I agree with you that the Falcon is a specific name—but not of a specific bird, so maybe it is the Star Wars spaceship.  :-)  "

Mike replies: Thanks Alicia! Interesting that you're coming from a position of deep expertise and I'm coming from a position of near total ignorance, yet I managed to hit the answer that agrees with you. In pool we call that a "fluke," i.e., a great shot that was pure luck.  :-)

David Smith: "I'm appalled by how flimsy many lenses (and other gear, bodies included for that matter) of 'recent' manufacture are. Everthing's made of plastic (excuse me, 'polycarbonate'), irreparable, disposable. I can remember when you could give a lens a bit of a knock, and it would keep on ticking, albeit with dented filter thread, probably fixable. I gave up on 'modern' gear when my plastic fantastic Rebel Ti coughed up a metal screw that blew away the door latch."

Mike replies: I remember a Leica rep who was discussing why Leica lenses cost more. He took a 50mm Summicron off an M camera and flung it like a bowling ball across the floor, where it skittered along until it whacked into the baseboard. He walked over, calmly picked it up, clicked it back on to the camera, and said, "you go on taking pictures."

s.wolters: "OM System. It was only after a couple of days before the penny dropped. The name and logo were already used in this publication. It’s from 1984 (not 1985) and you can get it elsewhere for as little as ten euros. I used Canon FD at that time and later Nikon (D)SLRs but somehow this book, the photos and the whole ‘Olympus culture’ it was breathing always appealed to me. Open this book at random and any page will want you to go out with your camera. With the choice of the name OM System I hope the new company also wants to bring back a similar kind of exclusivity. Or at least they should if they want to survive.

"Leica is a good example. You can recognize them in every small detail in their branding communication. The smaller you are, the more coherent your presentation must be. Otherwise you’ll stay unnoticed. The clumsy video with Japanese managers speaking blah blah in bad English is not a good start. But the first OM System branded product seems as good as ever."

Bill Tyler: "If the gauzy rebranding video means that the product line will continue, that's all I care about. I love the system under any name."

Fujifilm GFX System: We Hear From Tokyo

A while ago I sent several questions about the GFX 100S to Fujifilm, and yesterday afternoon received answers from the company in Tokyo.

I should mention that I have to be a little careful with my wording here, so as not to imply that the company said anything it didn't...no playin' around here, Mikey! 'Kay.

If I refer to larger-than-FF with fly-by-night names, for instance, that's me, not Fujifilm. I'm just not liking the status quo on that, is all. The middle format already has its settled name, which is "full-frame." Then, the conventional term for larger-than-FF is medium format, which makes sense exclusively in legacy terms. It was in the middle between small, 35mm cassettes, and large—sheet film—hence medium. The term applied to digital makes sense no other way.

As George Lakoff eloquently and simply explained, how you frame an issue (frame in the sense of formulating the concept and defining the terms) is a large part of the debate. Full-frame currently wins the framing sweepstakes, hands down.

To my way of thinking, legacy terms are irrelevant now. The past is past. Medium format was a niche even back in the old days. Now, calling the smaller middle format "full" and the largest-sized formats "medium" is actively misleading. It makes no sense at all.

I'm digressing already here, but if it were me I'd call anything larger than full-frame some name like "maximum format." Max format? "Large-format digital" serves the purpose pretty well I guess. In any case, I'd be stomping out the brushfire of "medium-format digital" like a mad dervish. I think Fujifilm is trying.

But enough of that—on to GFX!

How it's going
First, the GFX system as a whole is doing great—selling much better than Fujifilm initially expected it would. The latest body in the system, the GFX 100S, is the best-selling body in the system, and it experienced much larger initial demand than Fujifilm anticipated. In fact, the GFX 100S is supercharging (my word, there) the sales of the entire system: for example, the average number of lens sales per body is still three, but lens sales are up across the board because of the high numbers of sales of the GFX 100S body.

Second, the success of the GFX system is not regional or driven by any particular market. It's selling well everywhere across the globe, including major markets such as China, the U.S., the Euro Zone, and the home market of Japan. (No ranking implied in that list.) This matters because sometimes cameras will do better in specific markets than in others. I've heard of many examples over the years—for example, rumors that a certain high-end product was particularly in demand in China or that a certain product was much more popular in Japan than elsewhere. Not the case with the GFX stuff, Fuji tells us.

Fujifilm thinks the GFX 100S ($6,000 at B&H) might be be getting part of its boost from its dramatically (my adjective) lower price-point than the GFX 100 ($10,000).

Big nugget
But the big nugget, so to speak, the key takeaway, seems to be this: sixty percent of GFX 100S buyers are either new to the GFX system or new to Fuji as a whole. That indicates that many photographers are shopping the GFX system against the proliferating full-frame alternatives and are taking the plunge into Max format in appreciable numbers.

(You see what I did there.)

In other words, the GFX 100S is making converts.

In a big way. (Ooh, did it again.)

Rational
This all pleases me, by the way, because I just love the thoroughgoing rationality of Fuji's choices. To me, being fully committed to a large and complete system in the practical size of APS-C yet balancing it with large-format digital is a sensible and thoughtful—and above all a practical—solution. It just makes no sense to me for any company to be in APS-C and yet not be committed to it and not offer complete systems. Smaller formats make so much sense for so many tasks—as pocketable walk-around or backpacking cameras, for macro, for supertelephoto. Yet when ultimate image quality and ultra-large print size are wanted, you want to be able to go after that too—and nothing currently beats 102 megapixels in a larger-than-FF sensor. I could go on at some length about the advantages—to us—of Fujifilm's balanced approach. But it's a post for another day.

Anyway, I put in a call to my friend Izzy at B&H Photo and requested a GFX 100S and GF 50mm ƒ/3.5 (40mm-e) lens for review. If they can't provide it, Fuji says they can send me one soon. (When new products are hot, smaller outlets have to wait in line for review units.) So hopefully one way or another I'll have a review before the end of the Summer. It won't be the first camera I've ever reviewed that I can't consider buying. I'm looking forward to the education—to acquainting with Maximum format. (Am I calling it that now? I dunno....) It's one of only a few photographic formats I have almost zero experience with so far.

My thanks to Fujifilm for its assistance with this post.

Mike

P.S. No new post tomorrow, I don't think (lots of posts in the past couple of days) but I'll be actively moderating comments.

Book of Interest this week:

Ralph Eugene Meatyard: American Mystic (Fraenkel Gallery, 2017). An excellent introduction to Meatyard's quirky, spooky worlds. "Photography is a dream of awaking to a world still dewed in sleep." And Fraenkel Gallery's productions are always a cut above. The link is a doorway to Amazon.

Also sponsored by...

Original contents copyright 2021 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:

Sharon: "If we lived closer, you could try one of ours. I absolutely love the 100S. It is a heavy system but I walk around town with the 110mm on a lot. It's a beast but I forget all about the weight when I'm shooting, and I have serious issues with my hands. The in-camera stabilization is amazing. We shot after sunset, handheld, and the files are sharp. What I love most is that any failure of the photograph will be an artistic one on my part, not because of any technical shortcoming of the camera."

Rob de Loe: "The data from Fuji on new adoptions make sense to me. My anecdotal evidence is the wave of new members to the DPReview Medium Format forum. People seem to like posting there that they are now in the club, and why. The why part is the GFX 100S, almost without exception."

Thom Hogan: "Not sure '60% new to GFX system or new to Fuji' is a meaningful statistic. GFX is a relatively new system to start with, so that number would be high no matter what.  ;~)  . And it's down from the 100% that would have happened with the first entry four years ago. To make sense of any such statistic, we'd need volume numbers, both past and current. Makes a big difference as to whether they've sold 50,000 units or 150,000 GFX units so far."

Peter: "Here's my vote that 'Maximum Format' will be your second addition to the worldwide photographic lexicon (#1 being Bokeh, of course)."

Jim Simmons: "Oh come on, Mike, you're a wordsmith, you know better. 'Large' format worked because the word is flexible. 'Maximum' implies it's the biggest, and that is impossible to know."

Christopher May: "Sometimes a point of reference remains the reference point long after it's been swept away into the dustbin of history. Witness railroaders saying they're 'highballing' when they receive clearance to move their trains. This stems from a type of signal with large balls raised and lowered by pulley. When the ball was raised, the train was clear to go. This type of signal was already mostly obsolete at the turn of the 20th century but 'highballing' is still an almost universal term in railroading today. I think the fate of 'medium format' may be similar. It originally made some sense when digital backs were attached to medium format film cameras like the Mamiya 645AFD and Contax 645. The Fuji cameras may have little to do with those cameras or their associated film format but the terminology remains."

John Dougan: "I'm an American living in Russia, and I just got rid of my Sony A7R IV to get this camera. I was so impressed, that even though I bought Sony's 135mm ƒ/1.8 just three weeks before the purchase of the GFX 100S, the image quality was enough to convince me to take the loss. And my God, is this an amazing camera. One thing that I learned though, for long exposures on a tripod, make sure you shut off the image stabilization or you'll be left scratching your head wondering what went wrong. Here's my first night of night photography with this camera."

Kirk Tuck: "Why words? Why not numbers? Start with 35mm (full frame) as 1X and then everything bigger is whatever the size difference might be. Such as a 1.25X, 1.50X, 2X etc. And, in the other direction an APS-C would be a .5 and smaller sensors a .25 etc. I'm sure camera makers will eventually make an array of image sensors bigger than the current Fuji ones and it's a quick and easy way for people to understand the difference in sizes."

darlene: "After 30+ years of shooting professionally, people ask me what I currently shoot with, so I started slowly working on a page that will show the gear. The categories go like this: Large Format (Sinar, Linhof, Cambo) Medium Format (ALPA, Hasselblad, Mamiya) Small Format (Fujifilm, Nikon, Minolta). Most pro shooters I know refer to camera sizes as Large, Medium and Small. The lenses covering the formats make us distinguish things even further when need be. Currently I have three digital backs in-house; (2) 44x33 sensors and (1) 49x37 sensor and they are for my Medium format and Large format cameras. If I had a Fujifilm 50R (want one), it would fit into the medium format category. Why? Because of its real estate. I like the KISS principle!"

richardp_london: "Full Frame goes up to Fuller Frame. Beyond that are Impressive Frame, then Excessive Frame. In the other direction Full Frame goes down to Sufficient Frame, Adequate Frame, Scant Frame, Inadequate Frame and finally Insufficient Frame."

Mike replies: That actually does about nail it! I've shot with Insufficient Frame, and an 8x10-inch sensor would clearly be Excessive Frame. I usually shoot with Sufficient Frame and Adequate Frame.

The Missing Featured Comments for the 'Menu Problem' Post

Ed. note: These are so late I figured I'd give them their own post. Sorry for the delay! The links and suggestions kept sending me down rabbit holes.

Here's the original post: How To REALLY Fix the Menu Problem, from this past Thursday.

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "I think that sounds great. It would also really familiarize the new owner with all of the capabilities of the camera. Most people, myself included, usually only scratch the surface of some of the tech innovations within the camera."

Bruce Bordner: "I've done things like this, and it starts out simple. The camera companies could easily do a setting-setting app or interactive website. However, I think what you really want/need is Thom Hogan in an app, with a few others to answer 'why would I need that?' Demos of effects would be great...now we're talking some real money with AI and gotta have blockchain, bro! It's still worth a start, but I think it has to start with the camera designers. They have to compete and cooperate with cell phones anyway. Why not add some image processing in your phone.... Now you got me going dang it!"

Malcolm Myers: "I've basically had similar thoughts for years: set your camera up on your computer. Want a faux-Leica? Turn everything off and shoot! Want your own menus? Great, set them up! Want different profiles for different situations? No problem! Two bodies? Make them the same! I'm amazed no-one's done it."

Speed: "There is a very large camera company which also manufactures printers. These printers are set up and controlled by users' personal computers. My experiences with printer setup has been...not good. The last thing I want in this world is having this or any other camera company writing more software to 'help' set up my camera or anything else. Their user manuals are bad enough. Eventually some camera manufacturer will do it. It will be painful and costly. In time it will become the norm but I'll wait for version three.

"As a software developer friend (I don't hold it against him) often reminds me, 'Software is hard.'"

Keith: "This is actually a well thought out concept, and could be carried over to many other items as well. How many off us still struggle with programming the VCR to record 'Sanford and Son'? Yes I'm being a bit sarcastic there, but I recall VCR's as being one of the first consumer items that was widely regarded as a bit of a user interface vs. user manual nightmare. Working in the field of industrial automation, I see this with many of the newer electronic components. From photo-eye sensors that have multiple pages of programming options, to basic control modules that require a full Ethernet setup for that device plus anything connected to it. I recently installed a small temperature controller (about the size of a four-pack of 120 roll film) that had nearly a 400-page manual. Companies that recognize this and implement a program to bridge the gap between their products and end users' understandings will have an edge on their competitors."

Robert: "A great idea Mike. Sign me up. There are examples of this in other technologies. For example, Logitech has a 'lead you through it' app for setting up their all-in-one remotes. You then download the setup to the device. It's not the world's best software, but it's better than the alternative."

Peter Wright: "This is such an obvious idea that I keep wondering why it has not been done. It would be I believe a major selling feature for a large part of the buying public. It could even have kept me using the Olympus EM-1 Mark II."

Kirk Tuck: "Or you could just buy into a system with a very well-designed menu system. The Leica SL2 is a joy to configure. It reinforces the idea that Olympus and Sony menus are first translated from Martian and then to Plutonian and only, finally to a human language. The one flaw with your idea is the need to have a computer just to be able to initially access your camera. We should be going the other direction and try to figure out more and more how not to go to the computer first. Leica; three buttons and a joy stick. That's it. Check it out if you are looking for simplicity in an interface. And a very logical menu."

JH: "I suggested this to several camera company reps in 2003 when I bought a Nikon D100 and again after buying an Olympus Micro 4/3 camera in 2010. The Oly U.S. rep I corresponded with told me they never passed suggestions along to the factory because they had been told that they did not want to get sued by somebody who claimed their idea was stolen. Actually I suspected the real reason was the NIH syndrome—not invented here."

Mike replies: Years ago I made some detailed suggestions to a hi-fi manufacturer. The VP (there were only a few principals at the company) entered into an involved discussion with me as to why they would never take my suggestions, with several rounds of long back-and-forth emails as I tried to persuade him that my ideas were good ones. He reported back to me about the reactions of others in the company, including engineers.

A year later, the company implemented all of my suggestions exactly as I had outlined them. When I contacted my 'friend' the VP to express my pleasure, to my astonishment he insisted he had never heard of me before, that our correspondence had never taken place, and that their actions were independent, were developed completely in-house, and could not possibly have had anything to do with me. I felt like I was being gaslighted! When I mentioned this odd development to friends in business, it was explained to me that they were probably afraid I would want to be paid if they acknowledged me. I had never asked for pay and I never had any expectation of payment, but it must be a problem for companies.

Anyway I don't do that any more.

David Dyer-Bennet: "I would never consider buying a camera that depended on an external website for configuration! The site might not last as long as the camera. Maybe, as a local app, taking advantage of the greater power and space on a computer compared to the camera; that could work. Also doesn't freeze out people working far away from Internet access."

Adam Lanigan: "I think there would also be a ton of value in your approach to the camera company as well, as this approach would really allow them to understand the features their customers actually use, how they set up their cameras, level of experience, how often they change that setup later on, etc., etc."

John Krumm: "Still sounds complicated! I would like my menus to look like Hasselblad's do now."

Alex Mercado: "'We are sorry, but the page you are looking for cannot be found. Click here to browse our latest selection of cameras.' I can't help but think one would vehemently regret such a solution, the very moment your camera's menus-on-a-website returns a 404 error."

Ed Hawco: "Mike, you might recall that I suggested essentially this on this very blog in a comment in October 2011. Specifically: 'Self-configurable menus. Not by jerking around with the buttons on the camera back, but by uploading a configuration file to your computer where a nice user-friendly GUI lets you drag & drop menu items around until you have menus that make sense to you. You can bury (or even remove) all the silly functions you don't care about and arrange the frequently used ones at the top where you can find them easily. Re-download to your camera and bingo, customized menus.'"

Mike replies: I wouldn't be surprised if that's where I got the idea! Could have happened. After moderating ~250,000 comments, I've learned a huge amount from others here. And by the way, many of your comments over the years have been great ones.

Scott Abbey: "This sort of user interface has been in use for many years in other fields. For instance, I use a multi-effects pedal board which allows me to have different guitar effects—reverb, equalization, compression, and many others. While the one I now use (a Line 6 Helix) has a pretty robust on-device UI, it also has a PC app which makes it even easier to configure, and it also lets you store sets of configurations which you can load as needed—your settings for a wedding gig, and another set for that thrash metal band you also play in. Why camera manufacturers have never done this is beyond me. It ain’t rocket science."

Mike replies: Speaking of which, the other day a reader called ghmcs recommended Gary Friedman's series of guides to Sony cameras—for instance this one about the A6100 and A6600 (search "Friedman Archives" on Amazon for others). Anyway, Gary Friedman literally used to be a rocket scientist!  :-)

Sroyon: "What a great idea. Could go even further (though I don't know if it's feasible in terms of computing power) and six months later, let you run an analysis of the metadata in your Lightroom gallery or whatever other archive, coming up with suggestions like 'You haven't used X in six months, do you still wish to keep it in your menu options?' or 'You appear to use Y frequently, do you want to assign it to a custom button?'"

Ed. note: The following two comments came in one right after the other, just as you see here, no foolin':

Joseph Reid: "Fantastic idea! You could store the settings on a card or just tether the camera for the setup routine. I wonder what Thom Hogan would say about how likely it is that camera makers would do this."

Thom Hogan: "I've been advocating something different for years (decades?). That something different is 'named settings files' that can be saved/loaded. You could supplement that with a computer/tablet/phone application that creates/manages such files, but it's not necessary. Why isn't it necessary? Because there's a huge ecosystem out there that would develop and distribute such files. I'm finishing up a book (!) on setting up a Sony A1. I could easily provide some named settings files if only Sony allowed it.  ;~)  "

Peter: "This is the best post / idea that you have had in the many years that I have been reading your blog. Well Done."

Harry B Houchins: "Brilliant idea, but sadly impractical...."

Thanks to you if you left any comment, 'Featured' or not! (I'm going to dispense with the end matter on this post, as it's not really a separate post. I'm sure there will be comments on this; should I then do Featured Comments on these Featured Comments? Talk about rabbit holes....)

—Mike the Ed.

Canon v. Canon

The other day in the "Competition from Used" post I said, "It's almost like we're in the exact opposite situation of the one we were in at the turn of the millennium." Which got me to thinking.

Back then, Canon had just introduced the D30 (not 30D, but D30) a "reasonably priced" digital SLR that had a three megapixel sensor. It was bigger news in the photography world then than anything at all is now. Photo writers across the globe breathlessly ventured the holy-grail claim—that the D30 it was almost as good as, or as good as, or a little bit better than, the results you could get with 35mm film! This was hotly and happily debated far and wide. I was Editor-in-Chief of Photo Techniques magazine at the time, and at the magazine we offered a selection of "Collector Prints" taken with the new D30 by a guy from Canada I had met a few years earlier by the name of Michael Reichmann. Michael's prints were meant to show off the new Canon and make the case for digital as something that might actually be viable for enthusiast non-pro photographers, an idea to which there was still a lot of resistance at the time.

Now cut to today and compare that situation to this: the Canon EOS M6 Mark II is in its second iteration already and it's hardly even made a blip on my personal radar screen...even though I prefer small cameras and tend to pay attention to them. Lens options are limited, but paired with its standout 32mm ƒ/1.4 normal prime lens, its capability compared to Y2K norms is just insanely good. It's a small carry-around camera no bigger, really, than an original Barnack Leica. (Strange that Leica would let another company call any camera M6, but maybe some kind of statute of limitations has run out.) The little lens, which is about two and a quarter inches long (56.5mm) and weighs just slightly more than eight and a quarter ounces (235g), is nevertheless a no-apologies fast normal with superlative performance—and very nice bokeh I might add. The little camera has a spectacular 32-megapixel sensor (more than ten times as many pixels as the D30, n.b.) and is reputed to be very fast. Any way you look at it, the little M6 Mark II runs rings around the hot news from October 2000.

Despite all this over-the-top goodness, though, the M6 II barely moves the needle in today's world as far as consumer excitement as concerned, at least that I can tell. Certainly nothing like the frenzy of interest in the D30 in 2000.

The lens and camera together cost $1,328, which might be somewhat of an impediment to interest, but then, it's neither a compromised camera nor meant to be a budget alternative. And consider that, adjusted for inflation, that $1,328 would have been only $866 in 2000, the year the Canon D30 came out at $3,000 and DPReview called it an "unbeatable" value for money. Put the other way around, the D30 would cost $4,600 today. That was cheap compared to the digital SLRs that newsrooms were paying $25,000 for only a few years earlier. And by the way, DPReview calls the M6 Mark II "a good bit cheaper" than the Sony it competes against (they must mean the A6600). Of course, you might also want the M6's removable $199 EVF-DC2 viewfinder, but that's up to you.

The M6's only problem? Odd, but it might be a little too old fashioned. Not enough bigger/better than its biggest existential threat and wannabe competitor, the smartphone.

Mike

Book of Interest this week:

How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to the Digital Age, by Andy Grundberg, Yale University Press, 296 pages. A longtime critic and observer attempts a synthesis. Good reading. Also available from The Book Depository with free shipping worldwide.

Original contents copyright 2021 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:

Ken Bennett: "Back in the fall of 2000, the university where I work hosted a presidential debate. I was going to cover it shooting all film, of course, but Canon Professional Services offered to loan me the as-yet unreleased D30 digital camera. So I got one and shot some test images, figuring they would be okay for maybe a website, and I was amazed at the overall quality of those photos. I ended up shooting most of the events surrounding the debate and some of the debate itself with that D30. Had a double-truck image in the alumni magazine from one frame, and it looked great. Nothing like today, of course, but easily comparable to or better than the Fujicolor 800 color neg we were shooting at the time.

"Then I had to send it back, which turned out to be a huge blessing. I had shot 1,500 frames and had no idea how to handle them; editing, viewing, captions—none of it. I was used to shooting film and scanning individual images for print reproduction (or making actual prints in a darkroom). So I spent the next couple of months figuring out how to manage all the digital files. Then we got our first D30 that winter, the second one a few months later, and a pair of the original 1D bodies the following year. (Four megapixels! Eight frames per second! Amazing autofocus! Seriously, they were da bomb, and the later 1D Mark II was my favorite Canon ever. Shot a lot of good photos with those.)

"Kudos to Canon for the D30. It changed my life and my career in so many amazing ways. I could go on at length.  :-)  "

Tom Burke: "I use Canon cameras and have for many years, so the M line ought to interest me. However, it doesn't—there aren't enough good lenses (and none from third party suppliers that I know of) and a lot of the cameras are missing viewfinders—I need a VF.

"I was however attracted to that sensor, so I bought the M6's cousin, the 90D, which has the same sensor in an APS-C DSLR body. Yes it's bigger and heavier than the M6 but it's lighter than the full frame camera I had previously. I'm delighted with it, and given the price of Canon's R series, I suspect I've bought my Final Camera. The 90D and my iPhone 12 Pro will do me for the foreseeable future.

"I never had a Canon D30, but I did have its successor, the D60, which I bought used. That was my first DSLR and was the game-changer for me—previously I'd had EOS 35mm SLRs."

R. Edelman: "The Canon D30 made me think of Bill Biggart, the photographer who was killed at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. He had some film cameras and a D30. The only images that survived were from the D30. Even though the lens was ripped from the camera, the compact flash card survived. That's one tough camera."

Ed. note: Bill Biggart's website is still up, and contains a picture of his ruined D30 as well as a small selection of his recovered 9/11 images. 

The Worst Player in the NBA

Reader Luke S. sent me a link to an article I enjoyed a lot. Here it is: "The Worst NBA Player Is Way Better Than You." I liked what veteran NBA journeyman Brian Scalabrine told an amateur challenger: "I'm closer to LeBron than you are to me."

It was interesting to read the comments of the WNBA professional player Devereaux Peters, too. I've heard the same thing about golfers—that a lot of guys with a USGA handicap of one or two or three think they're just a few strokes away from pro caliber—meaning they could get there if they just buckled down and worked for it—when in fact there's a huge yawning gulf between them and the average tour pro.

Reminds me of a similar photography-related story. A friend of mine used to shoot features for Air Force Magazine because the art director was a friend of his and they'd travel to locations together. This was back in the '80s when point-and-shoots were a relatively new thing. So the art director got a point-and-shoot and started shooting alongside my friend. The trouble was, my friend got paid by the picture and the art director was so proud of himself and his own work that he would often pick his own pictures over my friend's, even though my friend knew his pictures were better. So suddenly my friend's paycheck was cut in half because his friend the art director was choosing to run his own pictures half the time.

A while later I asked my friend about the Air Force situation, and he grinned. "Everything's back to normal again," he said. Turns out an Air Force general who happened to be a photography enthusiast had called the Air Force Association and went on a rant about how the quality of the photography in the magazine had suddenly taken an inexplicable nosedive. The general wanted to know what the hell had happened to the photographer—he named my friend, whose name was still bylined on the stories he shot—who "used to be good." He thought the guy ought to be fired.

Well, a photographer got "fired" all right...the chastened amateur-photographer art director who had been so impressed with his own snaps abruptly stopped running his own shots.

Luke S. thought the article about Brian Scalabrine called to mind my post about playing tennis with Chrissie Evert, in which I described ever-so-briefly being of the opinion that I could hang with a pro myself.

Tomorrow's housework day at TOP Rural World Headquarters, so see you back here on Sunday. Thanks so much for reading TOP. I really appreciate it.

Mike

Books o' the Week

Nikon fan are ya? Nikon: A Celebration by British automotive writer and Nikon collector Brian Long covers the history of the company from its beginnings to the end of the film era. A U.S. parallel with more concentration on opinions about the equipment is B. Moose Peterson's Nikon System Handbook. The 6th Edition covered film equipment up to 2000. <—These are portals to Amazon.com thru TOP; you can also search for Nikon books from The Book Depository, which offers free shipping worldwide.

Original contents copyright 2021 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:

Enrique: "I manage a studio of Photoshop artists in Cupertino. Yes, exactly what you’re thinking. You would not believe the number of applicants who think they know Photoshop."

Steve C: "It's the same in cycling. I watched national-level, A-grade racers—the local elite—being blown out the back of a handful of professionals who were sitting up at the front, in the wind, having a casual chat. Unbelievable. And it goes against what you regularly hear about diminishing returns."

hugh crawford: "My Porsche mechanic raced at LeMans, and won the 24 hours of Daytona. My car always ran better when he drove it. On the other hand I never hit the top of a tree at 200 MPH so there is that."

Dave Fultz: "Ha! That was fun!

"It’s complicated, though, as things often are. One of the curiosities of our modern, hyper-available information world is that all of us, whether Internet-connected or not, have access to the best in the world that was undreamed-of a hundred years ago. Want to listen to Itzhak Perlman playing the piece your violin teacher just told you to practice? How many versions do you want? How about looking at the sketches of Degas when you’re thinking about drawing ballerinas? Surfing the Internet, did you discover that Don Knuth just tossed off an algorithm in a day that solves a problem you’ve been tussling with for months?

"This access is wonderful; there’s no doubt of that. But it has two surprising effects. The first is the intimidation of such world-class skill—how can I, a kid in Mongolia, play like that? I should stop (don’t). The second is the familiarity bred by screens in your living room. They’re your friends, right? After all, they’re in your living room! Heh! Michael! Nice dunk! I bet I could do that.... Well, yes! You could! That’s what keeps us all going! Every once in a while you do something extraordinary. But, extraordinary, professional athletes and artists and engineers and leaders and skilled persons in every domain do that level way more often than you. They are different and they are the products of a long process where they’ve been challenged for years on a basketball court, in a lab, competing for a gallery show, spending months taking pictures of birds in the arctic, or just simply sitting and thinking about things.

"It’s complicated."

Mike replies: Re your first "surprising effect," I like to tell the story of the guy my first cousin Liz married. His name is Dan. Growing up he was a very good baseball player, but he quit playing seriously in his teen years. The reason was that he had a same-age first cousin whose name was Don, and Don was always a little better than Dan was. No matter how hard Dan tried, he couldn't surpass his cousin, and that discouraged him. Dan reasoned, how can I expect to be a good baseball player out in the world when I'm not even the best baseball player in my own family?

The kicker is that the cousins' last name is Mattingly. Don Mattingly, for those who remember the '80s and '90s, had a stellar career as the first baseman for the New York Yankees and is now a Major League manager. Dan, who now owns a concrete business, says (I'm paraphrasing), "How was I supposed to know that I was measuring myself against the kid who would grow up to be Don Mattingly?"

Not sure if he thinks he should have kept trying, but maybe he should have.

Jim Natale: "No brief, fleeting, moment of glory here. Just the story of a conversation. I once worked with a fellow who had played minor league baseball. I asked him, 'Major League pitchers have batting averages like .080 and .090. What would a guy with average or good athletic ability hit versus big league pitching—.050 maybe?' His answer: 'Try zero zero zero.'"

Mike replies: I was never a baseball player, but I played tennis and I could smack a softball at the work picnic, and I have a good way of knowing that what that guy said is true. I went to a batting cage once. I felt pretty good hitting 30-MPH pitches. But with the machine ratcheted up to spitting 50 MPH pitches at me, never mind getting the bat to connect with the ball, I couldn't physically bring the bat around fast enough so that it was even aligned properly to hit the ball. I was always too late. My reflexes weren't fast enough. My few touches were behind the ball such that they angled off into the net in front of me. Then, I figured, just extrapolate from a 50-MPH pitch to a 90-MPH pitch like the Major League pitchers throw. It was very obvious I wouldn't stand a snowflake's chance in a fire!

Gave me new respect for hitters.

Albert Smith: "I remember when people use to make fun of John McCain for coming in near last in his class at the Naval Academy. The attrition rate to just get accepted, then the drop out rate for those that couldn't hack it during the four years were things that most couldn't imagine. Besides academics, every cadet had to participate in a sport on a team. Then there was the military training, with all the cosmetic ceremony that that entailed. Oh yeah, those academics are still expected to be done at a high level, no making excuses for the pomp and sports taking up too much time. I'd match last in class at a service academy to a lot of top ten percenters from most universities."

John Y: "There are studies of this kind of thing. I have been in the software industry for more than 20 years. We know that good programmers are 10x more productive than mediocre programmers. 'This degree of variation isn't unique to software. A study by Norm Augustine found that in a variety of professions—writing, football, invention, police work, and other occupations—the top 20 percent of the people produced about 50 percent of the output, whether the output is touchdowns, patents, solved cases, or software (Augustine 1979).'"

Mike replies: ...Or blogging? In the early days—it never happens any more of course—I even had people ask for information interviews to help them establish a successful blog. Back then, I saw a lot of people start a blog with high ambitions and a handful of magnificent, well-researched, well-written posts, only to find it too onerous. They would take a break, perhaps adding one or several more posts after a week or a month or two, only to have the "break" eventually became permanent. My readers are intelligent, educated, interesting people, the great majority of whom could write dozens of absolutely outstanding blog posts if they put their minds to it (the only possible exceptions are those for whom English is not their first language, and in those cases I'd bet money they could do it in their own native language). The question is, what kind of person would or could do it more or less every day for sixteen years?

Wait, don't answer that!!  :-)

Tom R. Halfhill: "I heard an old joke about people who yearn to be a country-western music star. Before driving all the way into Nashville, stop at a gas station just outside of town. If you can't play guitar better than the station attendant, go home!"

Bear.: "My moment was as a young man playing table tennis—I thought I was pretty good—at least I held my own—until I met a top 100 world ranked player. Although my muscular reflexes were quick enough, I could barely see the ball, let alone process the spin rate, and return it except by chance. I did not and could not win a point. Since it was obvious to me that I had reached my level of incompetence—all the training in the world could not improve my visual processing speed—that was my last game. After all, the sole purpose of a solo sport is to win, which was just not going to happen, at least at the level I wanted to play.

"To my own surprise, I was not really disappointed but instead was privately quite proud that had made it as far as I did.

"It's been nearly 40 years now and I still have my bats in their case, as well as the ball from that game as a memento, in the attic somewhere. But the real lesson for me was to pursue sports and hobbies for enjoyment and preferably those in respect of which no objective measurement of output determines a sole winner—I expect that’s why I enjoy photography so much—if I enjoy myself, that is sufficient, and it’s just a bonus if anyone else enjoys my work too."

Let's Try That Again

Evidently, I did not make my point clearly enough in the previous post. Such mistakes are usually the writer's fault, so mea culpa. What I'm saying is that if the camera market were purely rational, Micro 4/3 would be the dominant format now. Instead of Olympus selling its camera division and Panasonic putting all its R&D into full frame mirrorless, Nikon and Canon would be making Micro 4/3 cameras just to compete and Micro 4/3 would be dominating sales of non-phone picturetaking devices. It's the format that makes the most all-around sense for the largest segment of the general market in my opinion.

Sorry for not being more clear.

Mike

P.S. This is the first post I typed with my new keyboard in Dvorak! I moderated all the comments last night and this morning with it too. I'm definitely not ready to switch over yet.

Gear o' the Week:

If I could shoot with any 50mm focal-length-equivalent lens, it would not be unobtanium: it would be the relatively modest, relatively older HD Pentax 35mm ƒ/2.8 DA Macro Limited on APS-C (it has recently been revised with new coatings). I don't know how it measures and couldn't care less. If you care first and foremost about pictures, especially prints, it is one beautiful lens. Luverly. As a normal too. This link is a portal to Amazon, through which most anything you purchase will be credited to TOP. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

B&H Photo also has the Magic Macro, naturally.

Original contents copyright 2021 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:

Robert Roaldi: "In a rational world, a non-Micro-4/3 user would not even pay attention to what Olympus/Panasonic are doing. (And by the way, Panasonic is getting set to release several Micro 4/3 products, so they haven't abandoned the format.) And yet, when the E-M1X was released, many non-Micro-4/3 online experts lost their minds. Why? If they wanted a smaller Micro 4/3 body, there were several to choose from already, so why were they bothered? They complained about the size, but it is about the size of my 1st gen E-M1+grip, which it not that large. Compare it to a D3, why don't they, and not to a Rebel.

"I think I know the real reason. They were jealous. A reasonably sized fully professional body, with many available pro lenses whose weight would not dislocate their shoulders, for less than half the price of the Canikon flagship models. It must be starting to bother them by now that they have to spend $8,000 on a body alone and carry around 50 lbs. of gear just to produce down-rezzed JPEGs for the web. In a rational world, Micro 4/3 should be the preferred system for pro sports shooters and birders; why they still cling to last-century technology is a mystery. And I don't buy the argument that it's because they are heavily invested in lenses. Reading online forums, all they seem to do is to perennially trade in their Canon system for Nikon and then trade in that for Sony. Investment in lenses never stopped them from doing that. Boys just want big toys. (Just having some fun.)"

Kenneth Tanaka: "Your sense of what is 'rational' is anchored in the era when photography was in the artsy-craftsy world. Of course that’s long over. Cameras have long ago become part of the gigantic consumer electronics world where survival requires growth, and growth requires relentless 'improvement.' It’s hard to argue that Micro 4/3 established a sweet spot nexus of size/price/performance. It was more than good enough for nearly all amateur needs, and affordable. But it boxed itself into a corner and consequently stagnated. Very unimaginative, uninspired business management and leadership. And that, in the consumer electronics world, is not rational." 

John Camp: "I would like to know where people are getting information that Panasonic is about to release new Micro 4/3 products—I've seen this a couple times here in the last two or three days. My GX8s are getting a little long in the tooth—I've had them for five years now—and I would be overjoyed to see a follow-up.

"Something about rationality—I think it's extremely hard to see in the present. It's mostly afterwards that the rationality seems to sort itself. To go back to the tulip craze, it apparently seemed to some Netherlanders that the very best tulips were worth more than their houses, what they thought was a rational judgment. It wasn't. In retrospect, that is quite clear, and the market made it clear even to the final fool who spent his last buck on the most expensive tulip bulb. To sort out a rational decision in a controversial subject (like camera futures) in the present is quite difficult—not even the camera companies seem to be able to do it."

Ronny A Nilsen: Micro 4/3 might be rational for printing up to some size, but printing is not how people look at images any more. In a few years many (most?) will have large 8k TVs in their homes, and then full frame or bigger with 45+ MP will actually be useful or even needed. I show my images to my family and friends on my 4k 65" TV, and even that 'small' you need good lenses, because the magnification from the 24x36 sensor is so large. But the images really look great on a big screen. For looking at images on a phone, even Micro 4/3 is overkill.  :-)  "

Benjamin Marks: "I have never found consumer markets rational. How could they be? They aim to create desire for things you don't need and then to fulfill those desires. On the contrary: this is the height of irrationality. What markets are is reasonably efficient at fulfilling those desires. Hence the declining cost of the megapixel (not quite Moore's law, but something adjacent).

"I am in NYC for a week caring for an Aged Parent. The only cameras I brought with me? An Olympus Pen FT and an E-M1 Mk III. Perfect walking cameras, IQ that has never held me back. Light, good images, acceptable high ISO, etc. etc. What's not to love? That last shouldn't be rhetorical. I tried some of the Panasonic Micro 4/3 cameras and just never bonded with them. But I find the Oly's perfect."

Cecelia: "I just cashed in my entire Micro 4/3 kit after five years of using it exclusively. The reason? There were basically three:

1. 20 MP was not enough for some of my uses.
2. The low-light performance of Micro 4/3 is poor compared to larger sensor alternatives, which was a problem when shooting moving subjects in natural interior light.
3. Full frame mirrorless alternatives are excellent.

"The files from my Z7 are joy to behold and much more pleasant to edit, especially when cropping. The 50mm ƒ/1.8 S lens is spectacular—like having a small and affordable Otus. The stabilization, focusing, and general ease of use is quite good, and using the 24–200mm makes for a very similar situation to my Oly setup with the 12–100mm. The Z bodies are not that much bigger than the Oly E-M1 bodies, and the files are much better. The 24–200mm kit weight is 1,135 g for Oly and 1,245 g for Nikon and the 50mm prime kit weight is 984 g for Oly and 1,090 g for Nikon(ƒ/1.2 pro on Oly and ƒ/1.8 S on Nikon). The only things I miss are the closer focusing of the Oly zoom and the really tiny ƒ/1.8 primes.

"In other words, my phone is excellent for most web, snapshot, and notetaking uses, and when I need better than that, I want much better. No regrets so far. (I am drooling over the Fujifilm GFX 100s now....)"

Whither Micro 4/3?

I like to imagine camera kits, and one that I find increasingly attractive is the idea of marrying a late-model iPhone camera with a "medium-format" digital camera. It seems like the two are about as far away from each other as cameras can get, and complement each other nicely: the one a handy always-with-you note-taker, ideal for quick sharing, and the other a deliberate and involved tool for very high-quality results and large prints. What we call medium format is really digital's large format, and I like the idea of thinking of a medium-format digital camera as serving the same purpose as, say, an old Deardorff 8x10. I wouldn't mind if it were slow; I'm familiar with that way of working, and it's very amenable.

I'm not even an amateur economist, but one of the myths of capitalism that has always baffled me is the one that claims that markets are always rational because the players are always acting rationally in their own best interest. This immediately seemed flat wrong to me the moment I first encountered it as a teenager. Tulip bulbs, anyone? Markets are just as irrational as humans, and humans are exceptionally irrational, especially when behaving en masse. (One of my father's favorite books was the classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The chapter on tulip-mania is a must-read.)

Anyway, we agree that what's happening in the market over the past half-dozen years is that tiny sensors, having lost the battle in cameras, have been coming back like a resurgent virus in smartphone cameras; and smartphone cameras are getting so overpoweringly adequate that they are driving traditional cameras toward bigger and bigger sensors as the cameramakers seek meaningful differentiation. If someone already has a late-model, good-performing smartphone camera, he or she is not going to be very impressed with the promised improvements of a Micro 4/3 camera, let alone a 1"-sensor camera. So the aspirations of traditional camera fans are turning toward cameras with sensors of the old 135 size, 24x36, which is considered large now, and larger ones.

But rationally, what really makes the most sense for general photography would be for the standard to settle on Micro 4/3 size or even 1". Years ago Hasselblad had a marketing campaign (somewhat contrived, I admit), that had the tagline "Bigger is better up to a point." Naturally, what they wanted you to think was that increasing negative size up to 6x6 cm was an advantage, but increasing it any more than that was just a hindrance, requiring bulky cameras and unwieldy lenses to get enough covering power (6x7 cm cameras were making inroads on Hasselblad's sinecure at the time). But we might now turn that around and say "Smaller is better up to (down to?) a point." The "point," of course, being the one at which quality noticeably begins to suffer. Until that point, handier cameras, cheaper fabrication, smaller and lighter lenses, longer telephoto reach, are all advantages. As sensor tech has gotten better and better, gradually the limitations of smallish sensors are being beaten back; Micro 4/3 sensors are now at least as good as the early full-frame sensors. These advancements make smaller sensors more viable by bringing image quality up to "good enough." If Micro 4/3 were the standard and receiving more in the way of development resources, the advancements could be greater still.

As it is, Micro 4/3 seems to me to be the smallest sensor size before quality begins to suffer noticeably. And rationally, smaller is better...up to a point.

Of course, what's actually happening is that Micro 4/3 has fallen on hard times and 1" has more or less disappeared beneath the waves. Olympus's "pro" Micro 4/3 camera (also discounted by $1,000 right now) was met with perplexity among customers and ended up being one of its swan-songs. (The swan is reputed to sing only once, as it is dying.) 

Of course, at the present moment, Micro 4/3 is still viable, and you can choose it if you want to. But it looks like the handwriting is on the wall, and what the hand is writing is that Micro 4/3 is inching (sorry!) toward to the dustbin of history. We can understand why, even if you agree with me that it isn't objectively rational. 

By the way, regarding those Pollyannas (sorry, but still) who like to assert that the Olympus camera division was merely sold and will continue unchanged, consider what Eamon told us about how many billions of dollars Olympus lost on the camera division in the last decade. How likely is it that a private equity firm is going to want to invest, and lose, a billion dollars a year on an acquisition? And do it year after year? That's how Olympus was maintaining its camera business. Whatever happens with OM Digital Solutions Corp., the catchy name of the old camera division in its new state, it's not going to be business as usual. The old Olympus we're used to is gone. At least as we knew it.

Mike

Gear o' the Week:

If I could shoot with any 50mm focal-length-equivalent lens, it would not be unobtanium: it would be the relatively modest, relatively older HD Pentax 35mm ƒ/2.8 DA Macro Limited on APS-C (it has recently been revised with new coatings). I don't know how it measures and couldn't care less. If you care first and foremost about pictures, especially prints, it is one beautiful lens. Luverly. As a normal too. This link is a portal to Amazon, through which most anything you purchase will be credited to TOP. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

B&H Photo also has the Magic Macro, naturally.

Original contents copyright 2021 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:

Keith: "What we've learned from Olympus over the past decade or so is that they have a bit of an integrity problem in regards to managing and reporting financials. It may be that imaging was the scapegoat to spare the rest of the company. JIP specializes in financial management, running a tight ship so to speak. So long as they have a goal of advancing a competitive product line and growing market share, and have the right people in place to do so, they may very well make Micro 4/3 relevant again. Key to this is developing and implementing a strong marketing message while they are still able to utilize the Olympus brand name. Micro 4/3 has a very complete system that provides sufficiency and more to a large percentage of the photography market, but was never promoted well as it could have been. Too many consumers are of the 'Canon or Nikon' mindset. JIP and OMDS has to overcome that mindset. This means looking beyond the Asian market to the European and North American market in order to meet minimum numbers of unit sales to remain viable."

Robert Roaldi: "To play devil's advocate, I'd take a different point of view. Given my assertion that the number of people who print large rounds to zero, it's 'full frame' whose future I think is in doubt. Why spend all that money and carry all that weight? There are advantages to larger sensors, of course there are, but are there enough people who care? Only time will tell, I suppose, but I think that the demise of Micro 4/3 is not so imminent. There are new Micro 4/3 lenses announced almost every week, and it is probably only a matter of time before those Chinese Micro 4/3 lensmakers turn their hand to making serious camera bodies."

Moose: "Re 'who like to assert that the Olympus camera division was merely sold and will continue unchanged': It will inevitably change. The question is whether it will continue as a camera company.

"Re 'who like to assert that the Olympus camera division was merely sold and will continue unchanged, consider what Eamon told us about how many billions of dollars Olympus lost on the camera division in the last decade': I spent decades at a huge company with many different operations. Allocation of income and expenses between operating sub-entities is a highly arcane business. Even with pure intentions, it's impossible to do perfectly. When internecine politics are involved, amazing things can happen.

"Rumors have said that Oly has forever been dumping expenses more properly allocated to other divisions into the camera division. Whether this is true or not, we will never know directly. If the camera business happens to continue as a viable company, and become profitable, that would be an indirect confirmation.

"I don't recall who Eamon is, but I'm willing to bet he has not been inside a company going through an LBO, restructuring, re-evaluation of internal allocation of income and costs, and thus on the profitability of all its divisions, shedding of unproductive assets—emerging as a viable company and eventual IPO. I have. I oversaw the valuation of billions in real estate assets for the LBO. I am confident that no outsider, reading annual reports, etc., can know whether divisions of a company are actually profitable or not, nor whether it may be successfully reorganized or not.

"You highlight possible overproduction of the E-M1x. I choose to point out that the 100–400mm lens has been on back order since the first shipment; when mine arrived it was still on back order—and still is. Shipments haven't kept up with demand. Sales of the huge, expensive 150–400 have exceeded Oly's expectations. Strong sales of highest margin products is not a bad sign. Neither proves anything.

"You can't know how it all turns out until the fat lady sings. \;~)> "

Kye Wood: "DxO Photolab 4 with Deep Prime processing has turned my two G85 Micro 4/3 cameras into medium-format-rivaling monsters. In a word, stunning, which is truly an understatement. Lush thick colour and gradation to die for. The extra three stops of ISO is just a bonus. My phone camera is the best available today. And its best images are so far behind the G85 with DxO that it's laughable."

Kevin: "After shooting 24x36, 24x65, 6x6, 6x7, 6x9, 6x17, and 4x5" film for many years, I borrowed a digital Rebel and was astounded by the results. No more film! After shooting APS-C digital for years, I tried full-frame, and was astounded by the results! After shooting full-frame for years, I tried 33x44mm, and was astounded by the results! Now, 33x44 cameras are actually smaller and lighter than a good 24x36 camera, and they even have IBIS. Going smaller than 33x44 now does not seem rational at all. The results (without resorting to any magic 'Deep Fake' processing) are the proof. (Yep, I print big.) I get your point about 33x44mm equating to a big, slow Deardorff, but it's not correct! It's as small and light and fast as popular 24x36 units, and feels right in your hand. So, I disagree. Half-frame (4/3) is now more irrational than ever."

Starry Nights and Stormclouds on the Horizon

I had a very nice 64th birthday yesterday. I took the day off, had a nice meal midday (with a scoop of ice cream, the second one I've had this year, with a candle in it! Special occasion...), and I got done most of everything I wanted to do. I got to talk to my son Xander, my brother Scott, and Peter Turnley, who by a nice coincidence called by for the first time in months without knowing it was my birthday. I'm sure I'll talk to brother Charlie soon. It was a sunny, pleasant day, followed by an evening with a nearly-full moon in clear and starry skies after the sun went down. I went out photographing, and (because I'm a lunatic) took pictures that included the rising moon.

I was cheerful all day.

Powerful change
Regarding Wednesday's post, on the decline of the camera market, I wanted to add a further reflection. In 2010, which CIPA shows as the high water mark of the camera industry (in all of history, mind you), 121 million cameras of all types were sold. Last year, however, the dreadful COVID-19 year, when economies were suddenly hamstrung, Apple alone sold 81.9 million smartphones...in the fourth quarter. Although Apple had the largest market share in that quarter, it was still only 21% of all the smartphones sold in Q4 2020. And the phone market is apparently considered to be recovering from a slowdown!

Two observations seem pertinent about that. One is that people are buying cameras-in-smartphones, but not necessarily as cameras per se, so sales of smartphones, unlike sales of dedicated digicams, aren't necessarily a direct indication of the market's interest in the picture-taking feature of the devices. And second, as Scott Abbey pointed out in the comments, is that in 2010, sales of Canon digicams, say, were supporting Canon, which also made high-end cameras for serious photographers. The sale of these new mass-market cameras, digicams-in-phones, are not supporting camera companies—that is to say, the companies that support us and our interests. That is indeed a big change, and one that does seem like it might represent storm clouds on the horizon for the likes of us. Apple seems pretty unlikely to ever make a 1DX Mark III competitor, wouldn't you agree? But sales of iPhones don't subsidize the 1DX Mark III.

Meanwhile, sales of DSLR and mirrorless ILCs—categories closer to what interest most of us—have declined from 21 million in 2012 to 5.2 million in 2020. That's a 75% decline rather than a 97% decline cited sensationally by Lensvid. But it might make more sense to compare 2012 to the last non-pandemic year, 2019, when 14.8 million DSLR and mirrorless ILCs were sold, a decline of more like 30% from 2012. That seems fully explained by changes in circumstances—the fact that there's no longer the same need to keep replacing cameras to keep up with rapid technological advancements (or because the new stuff is so cool), for one, as John Camp noted in his comment.

Anyway, all I'm saying is that, painful though the contractions must be for the companies, the situation is not yet exactly "disastrous" or "catastrophic" for us as photographers. I don't think we're even close to that point.

But then, as I said before, I'm in a sunny mood!

Mike

P.S. I'll try to get the comments from Wednesday posted soon.

Book o' This Week:

Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. The definitive 4th edition of this perennial bestseller, in print since 1979!

The above link is a portal from TOP to Amazon. The book is also available at Amazon Canada.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Here's a handy portal to B&H Photo:

Original contents copyright 2021 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:

Kenneth Tanaka: "A belated Happy 64th to you, Mike! Glad to read that you had a good day in weather and spirit! Did you have the Beatles' 'When I’m Sixty-Four' buzzing in your head all day like I did on that day? More to the point, did you take one photo to commemorate the date?"

Mike replies: Thanks Ken! Yes, I did listen to "When I'm Sixty-Four" four the first time in years, the remastered version on YouTube. I listened to it intently, and admired what a beautifully crafted pop song it is. Paul has never been my favorite musician or even my favorite Beatle but when he was good he was very good. (My brother Charlie and I were so competitive when we were growing up that we split up everything between us—if he did something I stayed away from it and vice-versa; and when it came to the Beatles he was [and is] the Paul fan and I was [and am] the John fan).

I did do something distinct and I hope memorable to commemorate the day, but it wasn't a photo. I can't say anything about it yet but hopefully I'll get around to telling you all about it someday. 

Bill Tyler: "About 64. It's a marvelous number in terms of pure meaningless arithmetic. It's two to the sixth power, four to the third power, and eight to the second power. It will be a while before your next birthday with so many ways of getting to it by taking powers of integers. 81 is the next birthday that comes even close (nine squared and 3 to the fourth)."

The Catastrophic Crash of the Camera Market

The excellent site Lensvid, which has been analyzing and presenting CIPA data for the camera and lens industry for ten years (CIPA is the Camera & Imaging Products Association, which succeeds the Japan Camera Industry Association), has presented its information in simpler form this year, analyzing the years 2010–2020.

Summary first: there's that little box that says, "The entire camera market in 2020 saw 97% drop compared to 2010."

(That's looking at numbers of units, not profit or gross, but wow, still....)

2020 was obviously the pandemic year, and COVID-19 did no favors for camera and lens sales: year-on-year there was a 58% drop in shipped cameras from 2019 to 2020 and a 63% drop in the number of lenses shipped. Respectively, that's 8.7 million down from 14.8 million, and 8.7 million down from 13.8 million. Pretty bad, but there's no way of telling how much the "coronavirus economy" is to blame for that. Would we see a bounce-back if/when COVID-19 largely goes away?

Mirrorless has gone down from its high in 2018 but in 2020 made up a greater share of the market than it ever had before. Unfortunately, Micro 4/3 took a one-two punch as Olympus sold its camera and lens division and exited the camera business, and Panasonic turned its attention away from the smaller format and toward the vigorous development of full-frame mirrorless product lines.

Should you care?
I'm not sure if I was ever overly concerned with the industry and its fortunes. Medium-format photography in particular was a saturated, moribund market when I came along, with tiny profit margins, mainly held afloat by the smallish number of professionals and wannabe-pros who would invest heavily, but infrequently, in expensive equipment. I was a darkroom specialist early on, and the darkroom market was really a backwater. The biggest business development in the camera industry when I was young was the onset of the so-called point-and-shoot, all-in-one compacts the public loved for their simplicity. Those just didn't have all that much to do with me or people like me. The closest I ever got to a point-and-shoot that was important to me was the Konica Hexar, a fixed-lens, autofocus interpretation of the Leica M6. (I did review the Contax T2. Contax to me in those days was like Fuji is now). The Hexar wasn't even really a point-and-shoot unless your definition was pretty encompassing.

Enthusiast interest in cameras as business commodities is really a post-internet-era thing. I went to art school, and identified, then and since, as an art photographer. And although some art photographers have fetishized cameras, few of them felt strong fealty to the business as such. In a park in Georgetown one day I ran into David Hume Kennerly, then the unofficial White House photographer, and during our short conversation (I was a student), asked him what camera he shot with. "It doesn't matter," he repeated emphatically, "it doesn't matter." That's the way the majority of photographers in those day felt about it. I'd say it was actually actively uncool to care too much about gear. What mattered was what you did with it.

In 2021, yes, of course I'm concerned about photography as a pastime and a pursuit—I'm interested in its culture, and cultures don't survive in vacuums. But there is more interest in cameras now than ever before—it's just that most people are buying cameras as one feature of their smartphones, rather than as separate dedicated single-purpose devices. That's market shift, is all. It labels the traditional manufacturers' troubles as an instance of "creative destruction" rather than implosion or catastrophe for the medium itself. It certainly doesn't signal a shift of public interest away from taking pictures (or capturing images as the same thing is expressed now).

As far as "our end of the market" goes, I'm concerned, yes, but not panicked. We had a lot of good choices back in the '80s when I went to art school, and we have a lot of good choices now. There were 5.2 million DSLR and mirrorless ILCs sold in 2020. If you compare that to the top end of the market in 1985 when I graduated from the Corcoran School of Art with a degree in photography—setting aside all those point-and-shoots—well, I don't know for sure, but I'll bet the players at that time would be plenty impressed with that figure. Yes, I was sad we lost Olympus; but consider that, thanks to Andreas Kaufmann, Leica survived to thrive in the digital era, which looked pretty darned unlikely at times during the transition. I would have bet against it. And Panasonic was definitely not a player when I came up. Fuji was mainly a film manufacturer. Lose some, win some.

Consider, too, that in the late '90s and early 2000s, plenty of people were predicting that photographers wouldn't be able to buy film at all in five or ten years. And yet here we are, still with a lot of choices in films and papers.

So: the numbers are dramatically bad, but maybe really only in contrast to the transitory high point of an expanding market in 2010–13.

The numbers wouldn't look so bad if you counted smartphones. CIPA, and photo enthusiasts, might not count those as cameras, but the people who buy them do.

Mike

Book o' This Week:

Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. The definitive 4th edition of this perennial bestseller, in print since 1979!

The above link is a portal from TOP to Amazon. The book is also available at Amazon Canada.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Here's a handy portal to B&H Photo:

Original contents copyright 2021 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:

Brian Small: "I'm 57. All the cameras I will ever need have already been made."

John Camp: "Cell phones are the point and shoot cameras of the 21st century, so we don't need point and shoots as a distinct segment anymore. And while there may have been (I'm sure there were) some art photographers who used point-and-shoot camera in the '80s and '90s, just as David Hockney famously used consumer Polaroid cameras, most serious art, pro and news photographers did not, because they were too limited. So, I think we're going back to the pre-2000-like photo environment where serious photographers use professional cameras, and people taking family snapshots (and a few odd professionals and art photographers) use cell phones.

"The big bump that camera companies enjoyed in the first part of this century was mostly a sales illusion caused by enormous jumps in the quality of digital cameras in that time period. I don't know how many cameras I bought between 2004 (Nikon D2 for me) and 2015, but I bet it was ten or twelve, at least. Probably a new camera every year, or more than one. So many I can't even remember them all. Since 2015, for me, the number is three (two GX8s and a Nikon Z6) and I still have and use all three with nothing on the horizon that will cause me to seriously upgrade, unless I back up the Nikon. I believe that there will always be enough enthusiasts to support three or four camera manufacturers, but the companies will be smaller and tighter, and the new releases will be fewer. And that's fine."

robert e: "It occurs to me that these numbers also follow a half-dozen or so years of technological sufficiency for general photography. There was a time when most of us, up- and down-market, anticipated steady progress in noise suppression, or low-light sensitivity, or responsiveness, or dynamic range, etc. These days, there seem to be more and more of us who feel that our cameras are not what's limiting what we can achieve (not even the camera in our phone, often)."

Bernard: "I see a huge upside: 97% of fixed-lens camera sales are gone, but they've been replaced with a much larger number of smartphone cameras. Should we pine for the days of near-disposable digicams that would stop working after 18 months? How about the demise of the 110 blister-pack camera sold at the supermarket checkout? I'm not. I certainly don't miss having to save-up my allowance for weeks to get a cartridge if 110 or 126 film processed. Kids growing-up today have access to great photography equipment, and you can bet that this will lead to a generation of great photographers, all over the world. That can't be a bad thing."

David Raboin: "Photography is doomed. That's why I bought a copy of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain."

Dillan: "I do worry a little. It seems much more difficult for companies to shrink than it is for them to grow. If they get the timing wrong, companies are left paying for unsold product and unneeded production lines. I fear that there may be more casualties than Olympus.

"As for my own position in the market, your essay gave me some comfort. You are right. We did have decent choices before digital. I worry that photography will become too expensive for the likes of me, but again, you are right: where there is a market, there will be a supplier. The remaining market is likely to be larger than it was pre-digital, so my worries are likely unfounded. Thanks for tackling this subject, Mike."

David Dyer-Bennet: "Pocket computers were in SF well before they were real; Niven and Pournelle had them in The Mote in God's Eye in 1974.

"But then Edward E. Smith had portable radio phones in 1928 (not with cameras though).

"Robert A. Heinlein had portable phones at least as early as Space Cadet (1948)—with the remarkable insight of a character finding his phone a cumbersome leash, and finding ways to avoid that.

"Both those 'phone' examples, unlike Dick Tracy's '2-way wrist radio,' connected to the phone system, and could call or be called by ordinary phones."

s.wolters: "In 2011 we celebrated my aunt’s 95th birthday. At that occasion I was the only one who brought a camera and I took many pictures of the family. Everybody wanted to pose. The next day I made made them happy by digitally distributing the pictures.

"In 2016 at my aunt’s 100th birthday I wanted to repeat my act. But nobody was interested in me taking pictures. They all had their own smartphone. They took the pictures themselves, mainly of themselves. And of course they shared a countless number of images of babies. The role of photography has changed a lot in the last decade. It already changed our lives drastically in the last one and a half century or so, in how it plays an important role in supporting our memory. But now it also got a dominant role in our relationships and how we communicate."

Big, Bold Bad News

I have to admit that I'm a little worried about Nikon in 2021. Thom says there's little real significance to the recent announcement about Sendai that you've been reading about, and he's the expert, but what I worry about is something slightly different—it's that once again Nikon seems to have demonstrated a tin ear for perception, and casually dosed itself with self-inflicted harm without even seeming to realize it. It might be true that the Sendai plant was merely a test bed for ramping up manufacturing of new models, and that centralization in Thailand makes good business sense. But jeez, the great wash of news that ripples outward from this little dance move is "Nikon ends camera production in Japan"—after 70 years—Google the phrase I put in quotation marks and you get page after page of results from all over tarnation. If it's not actually a worrisome thing, then what's worrisome is that Nikon doesn't seem to care about the symbolism—the appearance of all those headlines and the misperception they no doubt are creating. Nikon seems unconcerned. They're Nikon. What, me worry?

The world grabs on to simple stories, not subtle ones. You have to be cautious about spreading big, bold bad news. And hasn't this happened before?

Not in the top ten
Meanwhile, back in the badly-buffeted USA, for what it's worth: at Lensrentals, which as far as li'l ol' me can discern is the leading rental house for higher-end photo gear, the top ten most-rented items in 2020 were all Canon and Sony. The Nikon name doesn't show up till the sixteenth slot.

Nikon isn't worried. That's what worries me.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Book of interest this week:

The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St Clair
(clicking on the links above takes you to Amazon)

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

Niels: "On the premier Japanese price comparison site Kakaku.com, the Best Selling Interchangeable Lens Cameras list shows that Nikon has 10 cameras, Sony has 7, Canon 6, Olympus 3, Fujifilm 2 and Panasonic 2 cameras in the top 30 spots. Canon takes the first three spots, but Nikon dominates the list, interestingly mostly with DSLRs. Canon has no DSLRs in top 30. (Pentax show up at #31 with the KP DSLR)."

gary bliss (partial comment): "I bought my first Nikon in 1979, but shot with them the previous decade; my SLR/DSLR systems have been Nikon since then and they have worked well for me. Still, it has been hard not to be struck by Nikon's major missteps going back the AF transition. When they get a leg up on the competition (DSLRs) they find a way to blow it (lagging FF transition). Who thought we needed a one inch sensor system (Series 1)? Or another junky video 'action' camera (KeyMission)? They even managed to mess up a retro-DSLR (the Dƒ). All of these examples took significant enterprise resources to bring to market. Cumulatively they sink a firm by diverting management focus and squandering resources as well as, maybe more importantly, the careers of some of their best talent. Firms rise and fall on a road that looks like this (IBM, GM, etc.) and Nikon has been on the managerial downslope for quite some time."

Zyni Moë: "Very unclear why you think 'Nikon seems unconcerned.' Here is a quote from their financial report for fiscal year ending 31st March 2020: 'As a result, revenue for the Imaging Products Business decreased by 23.7% year on year to 225,894 million yen, and restructuring costs and impairment losses on non-current assets were recorded, resulting in the operating loss of 17,153 million yen (operating profit of 22,069 million yen was recorded in the previous fiscal year).' That is nearly a decline of one quarter in revenue, in one year, almost all of it before COVID. And a look at the quarterly figures since then is really alarming. Some of this is COVID, some not. Nikon are staring death in the face and they fully know they are: Nikon is very, very worried indeed. They probably have decided they must move production out of Japan or they must die rather soon. They have chosen not to die, or not to die yet. That is the decision I would have made, too."

Robert Roaldi (partial comment): "I'm not at all worried about the geographical location of assembly plants. It's mostly myth-making so far as I am concerned. Truth is we have no idea where almost anything is made anymore. When you go on company websites, it's almost impossible to figure out where their head office is or in what countries they operate. Are Japanese cars still Japanese when they built them in Tennessee and in Ontario, Canada? Are Toyotas from Ingersoll, Ontario, not Toyotas? Is a manufacturing robot in Mexico really less reliable than one in Bavaria or Malaysia? We still mentally operate based on 19th and 20th concepts of nation states."

Thom Hogan: "Oh, Nikon is indeed concerned. The internal debates this past year, as reported to me by a few in Tokyo that have been involved, have apparently been intense. There's a sense of urgency at Nikon HQ I haven't seen before with regards to the Imaging group. I would characterize that not so much as 'survival urgency' as 'relevance urgency.' The frightening thing to Nikon appears not to be whether they'll stay in business, but rather whether they can hold the #2 position in ILC and be perceived as a leader.

"But you're correct, their public face doesn't show this intensity or urgency. I've pointed out for years that Nikon's customer communication and interaction has been sub-optimal, and today is no different (though it's even more important today to get this right).

"As for Lensrentals, I've mentioned this before (and in conversations with Roger): Nikon users tend to buy what they need/want, not rent. More so than Canon users did. That's true of everything from books to exotic telephoto lenses. Moreover, a business like Lensrentals tends to be self-enforcing over time. If most of your rentals were Canon, you cater to Canon."

Craig Yuill (partial comment): "A number of people at various sites have pointed out that a significant percentage of rentals (approximately 36%) were for dedicated video cameras. Canon and Sony make those—Nikon does not. Also, several of those top rental items listed are top lenses for video. When it comes to stills cameras and lenses, Nikon is doing relatively well."

What About Panasonic?

Just curious—what should Panasonic do, now that Olympus is jettisoning its cameramaking business?

I mean that question in two ways. What should it actually do, and how should it announce its intentions to its customers—or should it?

If I were in the business of making and marketing Micro 4/3 cameras and lenses, I'd be in a hurry to reassure customers that the format is still alive and kicking despite Olympus's recent bombshell. Of course, that presumes that Panasonic wants to keep making Micro 4/3 products. Maybe it doesn't. So maybe we haven't heard from the company because its PR people don't know what to tell us.

What do you think? Naturally I'd like to see the company continue to champion Micro 4/3. The format actually makes more sense now than ever, in my not-so-humble but sometimes wayward opinion. It's gotten good enough when compared to most formats over most of digital's past. I'd hate to see it wither away.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 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.

Please help support TOP through Patreon

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

beuler: "I guess Panasonic is now trying to figure out if Micro 4/3 is a viable business proposition. If they decide to exit, we will be the last to know. We will get very strong comments from the management to the effect that Panasonic stands behind its customers and will continue to provide Micro 4/3 products to the market. All that means is that they still need to sell inventory. If Panasonic decides to stay in the Micro 4/3 game, the GH6 will launch this year and G9 successor will launch at the start of 2021. If either of those are no shows, then we know Micro 4/3 is over."

Bahi: "I've been wondering the same thing. I took the existence of last year's 10–25mm ƒ/1.7 Panasonic lens as a good sign. Too expensive for me, but indicative of continued Micro 4/3 development, so I was pleased. They could do no better than to release the GX8 Mark II that you've been writing about. I'm still using the GX8 and loving it—would appreciate better low-light performance and stabilisation but that's all that needs to change for a stills photographer. The GX8 was thought of as too big at the time of its release but today, its size would be par for the course for Micro 4/3 bodies."

Henning Wulff (partial comment): "In April Panasonic's position was stated. Even if they are the only major manufacturer to continue with m43 they are fairly well positioned at this time with a comprehensive range of bodies and lenses."

Mike replies: My point was only that in April, Olympus's plans had not been revealed yet.

robert e (partial comment): "My guess is that Panasonic will simply soldier on with Micro 4/3, both in stills and cinema, where the mount has done very well, thanks in part to Panasonic's revolutionary GH and AF lines. Micro 4/3 always made sense for cinema—the sensor is similar in size to the old 35mm film formats (roughly half a still frame), and so adapts well to existing, often prized, cine lenses. And by now there are many modern Micro 4/3 cine lenses, too—from budget Samyang fisheyes to $25K Zeiss jewels. There are also a few other Micro 4/3 cam makers—Blackmagic, Z cam, JVC. I don't see the still or crossover cameras and lenses going away any time soon, but I can see them becoming more video-centric (or at least becoming so quicker than they have been already). Between pro and am video, and having relatively deep pockets, I don't think Panasonic is feeling much urgency to do anything different, at least they wouldn't under normal circumstances. The pandemic must be affecting sales, so who knows?"

Naming Things

Mazda, the car company based in Hiroshima, Japan, recently ran into a problem. Its range of "crossovers" and SUVs went from the CX-3 to the CX-5 to the CX-9, and it wanted to insert another model in between the CX-3 and CX-5. What would the logical name be? To go in between "3" and "5"? Any guesses?

The company decided on "CX-30."

I know, right?

The problem was that Mazda already had a CX-4 in China, and the new car for the rest of the world was not that vehicle; it was a different vehicle. So the decision was made (passive voice again!) to call the car the CX-30. I think if I had to name a vehicle between the 3 and the 5 and I couldn't use 4, I would just pick a verbal name, meaning a word, such as "Stinger" or "Tacoma." If it has to be an odd-man-out in terms of the established naming protocol, my reasoning would be, then just go all the way.

Of course, sometimes word-names aren't to everyone's taste. I've read over the years about product names that have unfortunate meanings in foreign languages. Sometimes that's done on purpose: consider that currently there's there's a line of inexpensive audio products branded "Schiit."

My uncle raised racehorses for many years, and he mentioned once how hard it was to name racehorses. You can't give a racehorse a name that's already been used, which is why you get names like Ghostzapper and Nosupeforyou (at least the latter wasn't named "Supenazi." Or maybe that name was already taken). I figured it would be easy, so I asked him if I could help, and he agreed. I came up with a list of ten potential names, including several I liked a lot.

Not only were seven or eight of my ten names already taken, but my uncle, off the top of his head, could list the accomplishments of several of the racehorses who'd been given the names I proposed. I ended up naming "Montana Blackfoot," who had an undistinguished career, winning three races and earning $21,111 in 26 starts. But I learned the lesson: naming things is hard.

I thought about that when I was considering the mistakes and missteps of Olympus Corporation's Imaging business. Let's face it, not only is OM-D E-M[x] not going to go down in history as a name to conjure with, a name with resonance, but even owners can't remember where the hyphens go. I can't tell you how many times I've corrected "OMD" or "EM-1."

It's like naming a magazine "Darkroom & Creative Camera Techniques," which was the name of the magazine I edited when I got there. On the evening of the day I got the job, I went to a dinner party at my brother's house, and when I told them about my new job everyone wanted to know the magazine's name. So, slowly and clearly, I told each of the people who asked. Later I went around and asked those same people if they could remember the magazine's name. Not one could.

I figured that was a problem.

Over the years I've poked fun at various camera companies for their awkward product names. I like to assume, in that smug, superior way we have of thinking about things that don't actually concern us, that I could do better. But in fact I probably couldn't. Naming things is tough.

After an arduous, drawn-out process that frayed many nerves, we renamed "Darkroom & Creative Camera Techniques" "Photo Techniques." It had nothing to do with creativity—it was entirely a negotiated settlement, and it was a tough slog to get there. The business manager felt we had spent a lot of money promoting the words "darkroom" and "techniques"—the magazine's original name had been "Darkroom Techniques"—and she didn't want to lose both words, and the newsstand sales manager wanted to put the word "photo" in the far upper-left corner, so newsstand browsers would stand a chance of seeing the P and the H and at least part of the O when the magazines were half-hidden behind other magazines on the newsstand.

And here's the story of that Schiit name, from Jason Stoddard, co-founder of the company:

[I]t always seemed like I was running out to the garage (where the workbench was).

“I’ve got schiit to do,” I’d tell Lisa, and disappear.

She’s endlessly patient, but one day, she’d finally had enough. “Why don’t you just call it Schiit?” she shot back, crossing her arms.

“Call what schiit?”

“The new company. You’re always saying you’ve got schiit to do. Why not just call it Schiit?”

At first, I laughed. A company called Schiit? No sane company would do that. If we proposed that name to any Centric client, I imagined what they’d say. Way too out there. Can’t believe you’d propose that. Piss off too many people. What a crazy idea. Then they’d fire us.

But I’d had 15 years of marketing playing it safe, second-guessing everything we did, and watering down every great idea until it was meaningless. Maybe you can blame my decision on that history. Maybe it was nothing more than that.

And this company wasn’t about playing it safe. Hell, we were trying to reach Chinese prices here in the USA. And do it without a million-dollar investment. That was about as crazy as it got.

“Nobody would ever forget it,” I replied, finally.

“It would cut down your marketing costs,” Lisa agreed.

“And we could say we make some really good Schiit.”

Lisa laughed. “Why not? Go ape Schiit.”

“And Schiit happens,” I agreed.

“If you don’t have our stuff, you’re up Schiit creek,” Lisa added.

I nodded and sat back. Suddenly it didn’t seem so crazy. Hell, the word was meaningless for, what, 80% of the world that didn’t speak English? And if you spelled it funny, it could sound vaguely German.

Hey, they've got us talking about them, right? Even though I personally absolutely refuse to buy anything called Schiit. Not gonna happen. When it comes to naming things, about the best you can say is that you can't lose them all. But you certainly can't win them all, either.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 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.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

Patrick Murphy: "Company and product names can take on a life of their own. In the 1980s I was working on a the World Wildlife Fund publication with a cover story was about pangolins (until recently very obscure creatures...). For some reason I started making jokes with my friend Andrea about famous pangolin TV shows of the 1960s: My Three Pangolins; Pangolin: Impossible; The Pangolin Bunch, etc. It seemed hilarious at the time, working late, under pressure. When time came to name my one-man graphic arts company, I called it Pangolin Graphic Design. Then I started another one-man company doing laser light show programs. I wanted to answer the phone the same way for both, so it became Pangolin Laser Software: 'Hello, this is Pangolin, can I help you?'

"Fast forward 40 years, and Pangolin Laser Systems (slightly renamed after I sold it in 2000) is the world leader in this small but fun field. Probably any major laser show you've seen, from the Super Bowl to the Olympics to Disney to Pink Floyd—the vast majority were created and presented using Pangolin software. But imagine if the World Wildlife Fund story had been about aardvarks...."

Ken Ohrn: "My fave naming blunder is Chevrolet, who named a car the 'Nova.' In Spanish, of course, this means 'doesn't go.'"

Bob (partial comment): "If I could be the super-duper all powerful, I don't know, guy for a few hours, I would allow marketing people a maximum of seven syllables for a product name. Seven. If someone used all seven, I wouldn't fire them, but they'd lose their bonus and merit increase for the next two years. Too extreme? Consider this: iPod. iPhone. iPad. Three products. Three product names. Six syllables total! The company that adopted those names managed OK (and I don't work for that company, if it matters). You establish the brand through the quality of the product, not by making its name more bloated and idiotic, or illogical, than it should be physically possible to do."

John Camp: "I agree that naming things can be tough, but OM-D E-M[x]? Give me a break. Bozo the Clown could have come up with something better. 'Bozo' would be better."

Mike replies: Fewer syllables.

John Seidel: "Sitting here listening to music running through my Schiit DAC. It's good Schiit. You should give this Schiit a try, Mike. Dis Schiit's da bomb."

Weekes James: "When we go out to a market in Provence my friend Ian and I skip the market and go for a walk. We meet our wives at a little bar. We each have a nice cold beer and the ladies prefer a lemonade. The prevalent brand in our area is called Pschitt! With the exclamation point. It is meant to sound like the bottle being opened. Needless to say we always announce too the wives, 'You’re in luck! The have the good Pschitt!'"

Soeren Engelbrecht: "When I worked for Nikon in the noughts, we had three lines of COOLPIX compacts: S (~Style), L (~Life), and P (~Performance).

"We of course never told our customers what the letters meant—and they had to figure out themselves that cameras in the 'L' line were mostly cheaper than the 'S' Line. Most people could figure out that the 'P' line was the expensive one. Now here's the really weird thing: The three lines were managed by three product teams, who used different numbering schemes.

"So the L-cameras were simply named consecutively after the release date: L-1, L-2, L-3, through L-24. A lesser camera could have a higher number than a better one.

"The P-series also started out with P-1 and P-2, but that quickly went to two, three, and four-digit numbers. Within the same number of digits, a higher number was usually better than one with a lower number.

"The S-cameras were a mix of the two other numbering schemes—I never managed to understand that fully. Except that any camera with a 'c' appended had WiFi.

"Just imagine being a customer looking for a camera and trying to grasp this...."

Lee: "By coincidence I ordered three pieces of Schiit this morning while you were apparently writing this post. I also subscribed to D&CCT and Photo Techniques until the very end. I'm using isolation time to get my Schitt together."

Mike replies: People love talking Schitt.

Kurt G Kramer: "The current name change that I just don't get and think is stupid is from "Weight Watchers" to "WW". Typically acronyms serve the function of reducing a long name to a short one. International Business Machines became IBM. In this case they went from 3 syllables to 6 syllables. Not only is WW not descriptive of the product, but their name gained weight!"

Mike replies: I didn't know about that one, but you're right, it's incredibly stupid. "Weight Watchers" is one of the iconic brands, extremely well established and well known to people way outside its sphere of business operations. It's even descriptive, which most businesses would dearly wish for. "WW" connotes "world war" and perhaps confuses with "world wide web" and is otherwise meaningless. You might as intelligently change "Coca-Cola" to "CC" or "Ford Motor Company" to "FM Co." Very, very stupid.

Acronyms and initialisms are fashionable, but a lot of them are inane. I thought it was a big mistake for Photo District News to switch over to "PDN." PDN was long used as a nickname among initiates, but it only makes sense if you knew it stood for Photo District News. So why not just keep the name? Besides, the full name was cool, and distinguished their mission from that of magazines for amateurs.

Mike Chisholm: "I'm surprised nobody has so far mentioned poet Marianne Moore's attempts to name what eventually became the ill-fated Ford Edsel. Her offerings included: Thunderblender; The Resilient Bullet; Bullet Cloisoné; The Intelligent Whale, and The Ford Fabergé Mongoose Civique. The list is long (she was obviously taken with the idea), but culminated in the best of all: the Utopian Turtletop."

Olympus to Sell Its Imaging Business

Ach, well, unfortunately my inbox lit up this morning with the news that Olympus Corporation has signed a "memorandum of understanding" announcing that it will be "carving out" (i.e., divesting) its renowned 84-year-old camera and lens business. The Olympus Imaging business will be sold to a private equity firm called Japan Industrial Partners Inc. (JIP) in a deal planned to be signed on September 30th and closed on December 31st. JIP is the same firm that bought Sony's Vaio Group and turned it in to Vaio Corp. six years ago, so it's likely that the former Olympus Imaging will continue independently. The press release specified that the new owners may use such names as "OM-D" and "Zuiko" but didn't specify if it will be able to use the name "Olympus" to label future cameras.  

The Imaging division contributed 5.5% of Olympus's revenue, and posted operating losses for the last three years. According to Bloomberg, restructuring efforts in the Imaging business have been underway since U.S. hedge fund ValueAct Capital Management, which owns 5% of Olympus, placed two directors on the Olympus board earlier this year. No financial terms for the upcoming deal have been disclosed.

Olympus called the digital camera market "extremely severe" and pointedly blamed the "rapid market shrink caused by the evolution of smartphones" for its predicament.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 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.

Please help support TOP through Patreon

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

Richard T: "For those alarmed by the prospects of Olympus being acquired by a private equity firm: Ming Thein, who I believe has a background in finance in addition to his photography knowledge, has an informative analysis on this. As he writes, Japan Industrial Partners appears to be 'a sort of quasi-government-linked fund that buys domestic brands that for want of a better description, are deemed significant to national interests. A large part is probably not wanting to have major Japanese brands fall into foreign ownership—or at least not publicly.' So 'unlike a western VC/PE, they are unlikely to do an asset or IP strip even though this would be the best option to maximise immediate value given the patents held etc.'"

William Hughes: "My two favourite cameras that I've owned were Olympus. The XA which was an absolute jewel with a fantastic lens, and an OM-4. You could put the OM-4 in one pocket and a 50mm in the other and walk around all day. The OM-4 controls made sense and I absolutely loved the shutter speed being round the lens mount. Speed aperture and focus all under the left hand. I really enjoy and appreciate my digital gear but I love my Oly cameras. I still have them of course.

"Significantly no Olympus cameras since those grabbed me enough to buy them, I picked up and played with every OM-D and then put it down again."

Severian: "Having been among the burned from Olympus film camera days (OM lenses did not have any meaningful path forward in digital, unlike most other brands) I am no great fan of the company, even with my positive feelings about some of their products. Their accounting scandals from a while back should have been sufficient warning that trust in Olympus corporate management on anything was an iffy proposition. I'm glad I steered clear of their entire 4/3 product set(s)."

Mike Ferron: "With trouble in the Olympus camp and Panasonic dabbling with full frame I worry for the future of Micro 4/3. There are some critics of the smaller sensor but as one who has used Nikon FF I see no huge penalty in using the Micro 4/3 sensor for most of my needs. That 20mp sensor that these two companies are using is quite impressive. As far as size, I ask, how small do you want your camera to be? For serious use one needs full-featured well-spaced controls, and cameras that are too small cannot offer one that."

John Krumm: "Olympus has always managed to be both ahead and behind the curve at the same time. It's surprising that they stayed coherent this long through the rise of full frame and APS-C DSLRs, the 2008 crash, the rise of cellphones, and now Covid-19. Hopefully Ricoh doesn't follow closely behind, but I think Ricoh is used to barely sustaining a small operation.

"Maybe the new company will surprise us and move them in a new direction while keeping the Olympus character, a combination of really good lenses, high quality bodies, and excellent sensor stabilization. It's possible the Olympus name will bounce around the world like a retired motorcycle make, seeing production here and there, getting hopes up of renewed glory as some new company tries for a resurrection. I personally had the most fun with their old 4/3 system, jointly developed with Kodak and a few other companies. I now have the Micro 4/3 E-M1, which works very well. I've mostly moved to Fuji and a few lenses, which I find a little more fun. I hope Fuji sticks around, but who knows?"

Richard Nugent: "The 43 Rumors site has an essay by Doug Janis that gives a dark assessment of Olympus's future based on an analysis of the fate of previous JIP acquisitions. Worth a read."

Coronavirus Could Kill a Camera Company

I hope you won't think it's tasteless of me to talk about this. The most important thing in this crisis is the health of people, far and away.

But the global situation is having drastic effects on online shopping—and it's possible that the suspension of normal life around the globe might have the effect of driving one or more players in the camera market to flee the field, either by pushing the companies into oblivion outright, as happened to Bronica, or by causing a more diversified company to pull out of making cameras, like Samsung did.

Most people are inspired to buy new cameras for reasons such as a trip or a social occasion like a wedding or the birth of a baby, or attendance at a big spectacle like a sporting event or a concert. With many vacations and social events curtailed or on hold, camera sales have taken a dramatic nosedive during the coronoavirus outbreak. And that's on top of already shrinking sales caused by camera phones.

A site called visualcapitalist.com recently listed the product categories seeing the most growth, which include disposable gloves, bread machines(!), cold and cough medicines, soups and dried grains and other packaged foods, and weightlifting equipment. Apparently people are thinking of their health while sheltering.

Very Mike-like digression (skippable!): People want to bake their own bread but not make their own soups? Crazy, man. I've baked my own bread, and I make my own soups. Bread machines are the pits. I say, get yourself a basic Instant Pot and make your own homemade soups instead! It's easy, and veggie/whole-grain/legume soups are easy to make at home, without the sky-high sodium content of canned and packaged soups. Homemade soup consumption correlates well with health and with weight loss; eat slowly, and savor.

The variety of Instant Pots can be confusing. Basically, they all do the same thing, with one exception: the WiFi model can be started remotely with a phone app. The newest, fanciest, easiest Instant Pot even has a Sterilize function. (On older models, "Steam" will do it.) The Instant Pot can destroy the geobacillus spore, a bacterium that's so hard to kill it's used to test commercial autoclaves. Cooking rice in an Instant Pot has been shown to reduce aflatoxin contamination, should it be present, to safe levels. A 653% increase in bread machine sales sounds impressive, but how many people were buying bread machines before? Bread machines are the epitome of the gadget you'll use three times and then never touch again, if you ask me.

And the biggest losers? Unfortunately, the only product category that's seen a worse decrease in sales than cameras is luggage. People aren't traveling. Camera sales online are down 64%, according to the report, luggage 77%.

It's quite possible this won't tilt any cameramakers into bankruptcy...most are thought to have sufficient reserves and strong enough fundamentals to survive even an extended restriction in the market...like, say, three years, which is about the longest projected time-frame for the development of a vaccine. So this might be wrong.

Is any company safe?
One company that won't be going anywhere is Fujifilm, which not long ago saw its stock prices soar because of a drug called Avigan, an existing flu drug made by its healthcare subsidiary which has shown promise in helping sick COVID-19 patients to recover more fully. So there's your silver lining.

Mike
(Thanks to Bob Rosen)

Original contents copyright 2020 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.

Please help support TOP through Patreon

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

Ben P.: "I cannot stress how bad breadmakers are at making bread. If you don't want to knead, then get yourself a stand mixer with a dough hook—it doesn't have to be a fancy-schmancy Kitchen Aid, anything will do—and then use your oven. Honestly, you'll thank me."

Greg (partial comment): "The other sad note is that we almost certainly are going to have a worldwide recession which will further depress the market for cameras. And no doubt because of economics and fear of traveling to 'strange' places, travel will be significantly reduced. And what do people get for their trip? Often a new camera. Added to the already declining camera market, optimism is not warranted."

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "Another very vulnerable group in this environment are professional photographers. I am 20+ years in with a pretty diversified revenue stream across dozens of clients, so I am optimistic. But I returned in early March from shooting a PGA event in Florida and the entire Spring calendar evaporated. My busiest season of the year, reduced to zero income.

"It is what it is. Millions of us are battling our own unique economic challenges that come with this thing. We'll manage."

The Contax Brand, 1974-2005

Apropos the previous post, Roger Bartlett wrote:

Having coined the term 'bokeh' you have a track record for instigating new stuff—so if such a lens were to be created, no matter who the manufacturer, then a lens with this feature set would have to be called the 'Johnston' or at least have the letters MJ included in the name on the filter ring. Mike, you already have a Patreon following—perhaps start a cloud funding drive and get this lens on a production line. A project for 2020.

Well, I had about as much influence on the camera industry as I had on the word "bokeh"—a slight emendation. Here's the only camera product I ever had any direct influence on (and I'm not even absolutely positive about that):

Contax S2b, 1994

Contax released the S2 in 1992 for its 60th anniversary. It was conceived as a "purist's camera," something you might imagine I would have liked. I also liked it because it was similar to the Contax 139Q, the camera I went through art school with. It was fully mechanical, with an uncoupled meter. The battery powered nothing but the meter. Really not a bad concept, if you happen to remember that "independence from batteries" was a value amongst camera mavens and advanced amateurs at the time, as evidenced by cameras like the Leica R6 and Olympus OM-3 (and, negatively, by the scorn heaped on the battery-dependent Nikon FE by Nikon FM fans). The conventional worry, often repeated but seldom experienced, was "what would happen" if you were caught photographing miles from civilization and your batteries failed? Oh no. With a batter-dependent shutter, you'd be SOL. Yeah, like that ever happened to anybody more than, like, twice ever. And the solution was not exactly beyond comprehension...you could just carry an extra set of fresh batteries in your bag. We're talking button batteries, remember, which are tiny and weigh nothing.

However, the S2's meter was a spot meter—the camera didn't have any other metering option. After discussing this with the American Contax rep at the time, I wrote a brief arguing for a center-weighted meter for the S2. He said it wasn't going to do any good, but he promised to take it to Japan. A number of months later the rep got back to me and reported that, much to his surprise, the brass in Japan bought the argument and would be making a variant of the S2 with a center-weighted meter. And the S2b was born.

So that's my sole influence on the camera industry, as far as I'm aware.

Embarrassingly, I couldn't even buy an S2b myself when it appeared in 1994. I was a single parent with a one-year-old and had just gotten hired as Editor-in-Chief of Darkroom & Creative Camera Techniques magazine at the time, and the premium price of the S2b was beyond my pay grade. I think it cost $1,100—something like that—and it was simply out of reach.

You know what they say: Oh well.

Some Contax history
The "anniversary" marked by the S2 was something of a manufactured occasion, in reality.

Here's a brief rundown: Zeiss Ikon first labeled a rangefinder "Contax" in 1932. That was the problem-plagued Contax I, which was essentially released as a "beta" as we might call it today. It was rushed to market and underwent many modifications after release, not really maturing until it became the Contax II in 1936. After WWII, with Zeiss split into West German and East German branches, the East German VEB Zeiss Ikon developed the Contax S SLR in 1949, followed by subsequent Contax models. (The Contax S is where "S2" as the name of the anniversary model came from.) But the Contax name didn't really resonate worldwide because export models were labeled "Pentacon." After the Japanese essentially blitzkrieged the German camera business in the 1960s (Germany had long been identified with cameras like the Swiss were associated with watches), Zeiss stopped making cameras. But in 1972, German Carl Zeiss and Japanese Yashica launched a co-operative venture with the in-house name of "Top Secret Project 130." Yashica would make the cameras, Zeiss the lenses—best of both hemispheres, right? The launch of the new brand did make a big splash in the early and mid 1970s. The first product was the Contax RTS, a beautiful camera with industrial design by the Porsche Design Group, accompanied by lenses in uniform livery made in Germany by Zeiss.

This partnership turned out to be not so cooperative as it appeared from the outside. It was instigated and motivated mainly by Yashica, which licensed the Contax name from Zeiss. Yashica had to order runs of lenses from Zeiss, paying up front, and Zeiss was sometimes less than forthcoming about filling the orders...something that became clear later. Yashica was acquired by Kyocera (originally Kyoto Ceramics) in 1984, and in the '90s Kyocera wanted to follow the hot trend and create an autofocus camera. But when it asked Zeiss to make AF lenses, Zeiss refused! Supposedly the tolerances could not be strict enough for Zeiss's standards (Nikon had weathered lots of criticism for this), so they just said nope, ain't gonna do it.

Kyocera, frustrated, in 1996 introduced its workaround, the Contax AX. The AX used Zeiss manual-focus lenses, but autofocused by moving the entire film plane back and forth! Keep in mind that the film still had to be transported past the gate as it was exposed, and held flat and in position to quite high tolerances, and you'll realize what an undertaking this was. Obviously this was not an ideal way to do autofocus. The AX was expensive as well as large and clunky by the standards of the time, and was understandably not a big seller. It was never followed up. It remains a true oddity in camera history. It was, though, as Barry Reid points out in the Comments, the only camera that could autofocus a tilt-shift lens.

Zeiss eventually did relent and there were a few AF lenses labeled Carl Zeiss made for the ill-fated Contax N, although it's likely Zeiss didn't really have much to do with them.

Back to the S2. Kyocera had swallowed Yashica, but was not shy about outsourcing cameras if it was convenient. I don't know this for sure, but I think it's fairly likely that the S2—celebrating the anniversary of the Contax I, an essentially failed camera that happened to mark the first use of the Contax name—was manufactured by Cosina. If true, one nice thing that would mean is that the S2 and S2b would have direct links to the Zeiss Ikon ZI rangefinder, which was manufactured for Zeiss by Cosina. (Cosina, one of the largest camera and lens OEM manufacturers in Japan, is the maker of Voigtländer cameras and lenses now.)

Another little factoid: Camera mavens were (and sometimes still are!) adamant in preferring German-made Carl Zeiss Contax lenses, but the Japanese-made versions were actually better because all the tooling was new.

The most beautiful true German-Japanese Contax if you ask me was the RTS II, a deluxe film SLR with an electronically controlled shutter, an electromechanical shutter release, and industrial design by Ferdinand Alexander ("Butzy") Porsche. I owned one briefly and had it stolen from me. It would be fun to have one with a Carl Zeiss 45mm ƒ/2.8 Tessar, a lens design that is central to Zeiss history and dates to 1902. You'll need sharp eyes, though—that combination is difficult to focus.

Contax discontinued the S2 and S2b in 2000. After hemorrhaging money trying to bring to market a deluxe and advanced 6-MP DSLR too early on*, Kyocera left the camera business in 2005.

Mike
(Thanks to Roger)

*It's a footnote now, but that camera, the Contax N Digital, was the world's first full-frame DSLR.

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

You can help keep The Online Photographer going through Patreon

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

Gaspar Heurtley: "There’s a typo under that picture. It’s not a Contax from 1994, that camera is a Fujifilm X-T100 from 2018."

Mike replies: Twin sons of (very) different mothers.  :-)

Al C. (partial comment): "Wonderful history lesson. Thank you. The Contax S2b has beautiful massing—perfect, actually. Its Fuji 'twin' has such ugly massing. The prism is fake, stacked on, entirely un-inflected by the rest of the body."

Peter: "Wow, memories...I was smitten by the Contax RTS back in the day before I could ever afford one, at the same time that I was smitten by the Lotus Europa before I had a drivers license. But 40-odd years later, I picked up a Pentacon FM, with its proto-steampunk whirligig shutter speed selector, and a 1932 Zeiss Ikon 520/15 folder, both great cameras—maybe no RTS but hey, no batteries to die on you either.  ;^)  "

Mike replies: You need to seek out the episode of "Pawn Stars" in which they buy a Lotus Europa. It'll make you smile and roll your eyes both.

Eamon Hickey: "I've had fun over the years tracing back the origins of camera and lens brands and manufacturers, and this post brings up one of those llttle threads for me. When Kyocera bought Yashica, the company (Yashica) was an integrated lens and camera manufacturer. But Yashica had acquired its lens manufacturing capability only a few years previously by buying Tomioka Optical in the late 1960s. Tomioka had been supplying Yashica with lenses for a couple of decades (and supplying lenses to other camera companies, too). The Japanese-made Contax lenses were manufactured in the Tomioka factory.

"Tomioka, in turn, was founded by an optical engineer who had worked at Nikon from its beginnings in 1917. At Nikon, he would certainly have worked with (apprenticed under?) one of the German engineers (some had worked previously with Zeiss) that Nikon had hired to teach them how to be a lens and glass manufacturer. Connections within connections.

"Something of Tomioka still lives at Kyocera."

Mike replies: So that was it! Tomioka. And I never knew exactly who manufactured the early Japanese-made Contax C/Y lenses. A piece of the story that has always been missing for me. Thank you my friend.

Pierre Charbonneau: "Mike, Have you ever sprung for the Contax G?"

Mike replies: No, but I followed its introduction closely and as it happened I was the first writer in N. America to receive the press kit for the G1. Another of my .15 seconds of fame: I was the first photo writer to receive T-Max 100 and 400 films for testing. One precious roll of each! Oh, how I brag.  :-)

Oskar Ojala: "I never owned a Contax, but since getting into full-frame mirrorless I realized that all my lens options are either sharp on sharper and adapting older manual focus lenses works better now than ever. So I started playing with the idea of getting some older Zeiss lenses for Contax, did some research and bought a 85mm ƒ/1.4, which I like very much for its look. This lead to me thinking 'why not get a Contax body for the original experience? surely they must be cheap now.' I was partly correct; the basic Contax body is indeed inexpensive, but the S2b, which would be appealing since the electronics failing do not render the camera inoperable, is quite expensive and rare. I'm not really surprised though, I doubt many people were tempted by an expensive full manual SLR in the mid '90s."

Mike replies: See if you can find an RX. I liked that one, and it might not be so dear.

Phil Aynsley: "Your words on the 'phobia' regarding cameras featuring batteries, or rather what happened if the batteries failed, reminded me of the lengths Canon went to with the design of the 1981 Canon New F1 (my all time favourite camera, with the T90 a close second). As a Canon technician at the time I could fully appreciate the elegant engineering that went into the mechanism that converted the shutter release from electronic to mechanical by simply removing the 6V battery."

Dan: "Kyocera is an interesting company that seems to get in and out of businesses. In the early '80s they made some top-notch high-end stereo equipment. Then went out of business in that field in the mid-'80s if I remember correctly. I still have my Kyocera receiver from 1982."

John: "I loved my Contax N and G kits and briefly the 645 MF camera as well, before all fell victim to the digital onslaught. There’s a follow-up story: when Kyocera left the business, PhaseOne wanted to buy the tooling and production lines for the 645 cameras. Kyocera refused and destroyed everything. The Contax name went back to Zeiss, which strangely enough doesn’t use it for its new digital camera."

Barry Reid: "Very interesting story about the S2/S2b. It’s amazing how expensive those bodies remain, even now. The 'batteries are for wimps' hair shirt mentality seems to be strong in many film photography fans.

"I do have the AX which is just about the only Contax body, along with the RTS III, which is big enough to counterbalance the Zeiss 28–85mm and 35–135mm zooms! Although, much like the Zeiss zooms, The AX doesn’t seem so large compared with modern DSLRs. It’s still quite an extraordinary experience shooting with one. Even more extraordinarily it’s actually quite an effective AF camera and able to hold its own against the early screw drive AF bodies, say pre-1990. With the PC-Distagon attached I believe it remains the only camera to allow AF with a shift lens.

"The RTS II the most stylish and usable of the RTS line. The original model went too far along with the ‘Real-Time System’ idea—the separation of metering preview and shutter release made it awkward. Something the RTS II fixed along with adding TTL Flash. If only they had added a spot meter option.... Unfortunately that only came with the ginormous beast that is the RTSIII. The 139Q is sweet though, a mini-me of the RTS II and probably nicer to use too.

"However the 159 which superseded it has by far the best spec (fastest shutter, highest flash sync, best selection of modes) of any of the non-motorised Contax bodies. The 159 with 25mm, 50mm and 85mm ƒ/2.8 was the camera my 15-year-old self would have most liked to get his hands on in the mid '80s. Thanks to the end of Contax plus the DSLR revolution, I’ve been able to pick up a really good collection of Contax bodies over the past 10 years or so. Sadly all the hype around the T2 and T3 seems to be lifting the SLR prices now."

Mike replies: The 159 was one of those cameras that always fascinated me but always remained somehow over the horizon, just out of sight. I do believe I finally saw one, long after they were new. I seem to vaguely recall that I bought a used one but learned on trying to get it CLA'd that it had a fatal flaw and couldn't be fixed.

Jerzy Z: "Was it really stolen? I bought an RTS II with 45mm ƒ/2.8 from you in the '90s through listserv for $460, if I remember well. ...Unless you had two copies of the camera, of course. I still have it and it’s an awesome camera. Thanks again for selling it. Best wishes for the New Year."

Mike replies: That's awesome that you remember that. And cool that you still have it. That was my second RTS II. The first one I bought in '85 when I got my first real job after graduating. You could still buy them new then. That was the one that was stolen.

Vijay: It’s intetesting to me that your last two posts have been about the 40mm focal length and Contax cameras. Several years ago, I purchased the Voigtlander Ultron 40mm lens to use with a Nikon FE2, inspired by your earlier article about the focal length. I loved the focal length but didn’t like the eyepoint of the FE2 so I sold the lens. Another article you wrote about viewfinders and eyepoints led me to the Contax Aria, which I love using for its light weight and great viewfinder. For the longest time, I had to 'settle' for using it with a 50mm lens. But much to my surprise, I found a 40mm Ultron in Contax mount listed on eBay a couple of years ago. I bought it and now enjoy the best of both Mike Johnston inspired tool choices! It’s the only film setup I use regularly in my kit. Thanks for your writing over the years!"

Mike replies: Very cool. You're more me-ish than me!

New Look for Nikons

How is it that a deliberately retro digital looks more 2020 and
up-to-date than a black-blob polycarbonate DSLR?

Respectfully proposed: isn't it high time for a new look for Nikons?

A few days I wrote about that great closeout deal on the Nikon D610, and it really is just a heck of a great deal. And I did like that camera. It feels sharp and capable.

But let's be honest. It's not a looker.

It got me to thinking.

Nikons just look old these days.

And dated. They just exude "yesterday."

Not even yesterday...last year. Last decade. Last century. Yeah, that black-blob polycarbonate lump (BBPL) look that came into the mainstream in the 1990s is just plain last millennium.

As with all BBPL cameras, originally it was inherited from the work of the renegade industrial designer Luigi Colani, via Canon. But Colani himself grew old and departed this coil, and anyway his original idea has morphed through so many less talented hands at Nikon that it's merely vestigial...and greatly debased, much as Frank Lloyd Wright's "open plan" concept—originally a subtle idea, in the master's hands—has come to merely mean barnlike interiors with no finishing.

Even the logo looks yesterday. Just because Ford and Coke keep their original typefaces (because they're glorious) doesn't mean everybody should. Yes, Nikon's italic forward-slanting sans-serif typeface was clean and modern...in 1953, when it made its first appearance. Now, it insistently screams "'nineties" to me, like scrunchies, slip dresses and Seinfeld.

Aaaugh!!
And speaking of screaming, I think if I see that poor shriveled misbegotten red "Nikon slash" stuck brainlessly on yet another camera, I think I might! Scream, that is.

A long way back, Nikon asked Giorgio Giugiaro, the famous car designer, to design a few of its cameras. Such was the fashion at the time: Contaxes (a cooperative nameplate from West German Zeiss and Japanese Yashica, later part of Kyocera) were originally designed by Porsche Design Studio (now Studio F. A. Porsche), the industrial design firm founded by Ferdinand Alexander "Butzi" Porsche, designer of the fabled and famous 911 and grandson of Porsche founder Ferdinand Porsche. Canon (in second place, and a striver) hired zany Colani. Nikon followed suite by engaging Giugiaro, who boldly put a red line down one side of the angular F3. Brilliant! It looked new, it looked fresh, like the bright new dawning decade!

...Trouble is, that decade was the 1980s.

Now, like a 90-year old who still pomades his ducktail like he did when Elvis was King, Nikon just keeps insisting on that same little old tired design fillip, doing like they were told by the cool guy way back when.

Same sad red accent a third of a century after it first appeared. Giorgio,
what hast thou wrought? Here on the D610 it's so tired it's literally drooping.

The very essence of anti-fashion is to stick with ancient styles and never change. I've seen hot-rodded Mennonite buggies shined to gleaming that look cooler than most Nikons do.

Black blob is the new old
One proof of this concept is that even the most "retro" of new cameras somehow look much more up-to-the-minute than the average Nikon does. How is that? Yet it's true. Possibly the most retro camera out there is the Fuji X-T30, and somehow even it looks more up to date than a BBPL camera. Have a look. My Fuji X-H1 just looks the business; it's really a handsome camera, whatever else you might think of it. Ditto a variety of Leicas, Panasonics, and other Fujis. Nikon DSLRs are ugly stepsisters. 

Automobiles have "house looks." And even those change from time to time...at least after a few decades they do. (Sometimes not for the better, I'll admit. I miss BMWs.) Even F.A. Porsche's 911, which is famous for staying the same, has changed an awful lot. 

Yeah, I know, cameras are tools and meant to be ergonomic, not pretty. Sony A7 family cameras look better but are said to handle worse. I get that. Then why is it that Canon BBPL cameras look about five times better than Nikon BBPL cameras do? Like Volkswagen sedans, Canons look clean and sleek and grown-up. Nikon DSLRs look blobby and frowsy and dumpy, and a little haphazard, like stuff just got stuck on wherever. You know what they say about camels—horses designed by a committee.

Cool. (I'm ignoring the red accent, because it looks like the
designer hated the idea and some suit insisted.)

Maybe the Z line will be the new Nikon look. Do they really look that good, though? I hear some people don't like 'em. I do like the Z7 myself. I think it's cool, like it would fill the hand like Wild Bill Hickok's Colt—but I'm not sure the Z7 [$700 off!] is pretty enough to hang a whole new house style on (or that Nikon has any intention of doing that).

Glass house
And yeah, yeah, I know, TOP itself is dowdy and frumpy and never changes, and Yr. Hmbl. Ed. is the furthest thing from a fashion plate, and I shouldn't talk. Got that, and yes. But doesn't that mean that if even I think there's a problem, there might actually be a problem?

All I'm asking is, is it time for a new house look for Nikon? A top-to-bottom rethink. Sometimes old is classic, but sometimes old is just old. Enough is enough. Even the Rolls-Royce grill has evolved! Enough with the black-blob plastic-lump look, the tired red bit tacked on like a dowager's pin, and the 1990s-looking Helvetica logo. However sharp and modern Nikons perform, most of 'em do it looking dated. And that's not cool.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

Gordon Lewis: "Life is too short to wait for Nikon (or any other camera company, for that matter) to produce something I want. Instead I choose from what's currently available, like it or leave it. So, rather than wait for Nikon to introduce a camera that's more like a Fujifilm X-T3, I bought a Fujifilm X-T3, and guess what? I even mount my old AI-Nikkors on it from time-to-time. It's all I can do not to feel smug."

Thomas Rink: "I've used a Nikon D800 as my main camera for more than five years. A couple of weeks ago, I bought a Fuji X-T20 secondhand as a camera for family snapshots. In regards to aesthetics, I share your point of view. The Nikon is big, heavy and ugly, whereas the Fuji looks small and nimble, much like a '70s film SLR.

"In terms of function, both cameras are similarly competent picture-making tools. They provide everything I need, and the technical quality of the pictures from both cameras is very good.

"But: the Nikon is much easier to use, and handles much more 'fluidly' than the Fuji! There is a button to control each essential function right under my finger. In my opinion, the button-and-command-wheel interface is more ergonomic than the retro-style dial interface of the Fuji. Also, I find the general handling of the X-T20 a bit 'fiddly'; it is quite easy to inadvertently change a setting. This never happened to me with the D800!

"To sum it up: Yes, Nikon DSLRs are big, heavy and ugly, but their UI and handling has been refined during each subsequent camera generation since the '80s."

Larry Johnson: "Your design points are well made but I'll offer a counter view. I rather like the anonymity and blahness my camera (D610) exudes when I'm out in a crowd or alone on a remote trail. It doesn't shout 'hey! Look at ME!'

"As the most modest of the 'serious' Nikon DSLRs it's a notch above a nothing burger, but I keep getting good pictures out of it. I admire the 'look' of the new Leicas but don't want one. I think the little Fujis are nifty looking but I prefer a larger sensor. Furthermore, I can't easily handle their smallness.

"I love the look of the Fiat Spyder but I'm more of a Highlander guy. For me, pretty is as pretty does."

Happy 100th Birthday Pentax!

November 27th, 1919, marked the founding of Asahi Optical Joint Stock Company, the original parent company of what later became known as Pentax.

Asahi had humble beginnings—it was founded by Kumao Kajiwara, a younger son of an old Japanese Samurai family, in the Tokyo suburb of Toshima, for the manufacture of lenses for eyeglasses. After many years of manufacturing lenses, including camera lenses for Konica and Minolta, Asahi Optical Co. Ltd. (as it was by then known) introduced its first camera, the Asahiflex, in 1952. It was the first Japanese SLR-type camera to use 35mm film. Asahi acquired the name "Pentax" (a portmanteau of "pentaprism" and "Contax," a Zeiss brand name at the time) from East German VEB Zeiss in 1957, and from then on all its cameras were called Asahi Pentax. Honeywell was an early importer of Asahi cameras into the United States, where they were labeled Honeywell Pentax.

The beautiful, high-value K-1 II

Recent years saw the company name officially change to Pentax Corporation in 2002. In a complicated and somewhat contentious merger, Pentax became a consolidated subsidiary of Hoya Corporation, a precision instruments company with its roots in glass and optics, in the Summer of 2007. Hoya split off the camera-making imaging division (its chairman calling its acquisition a "mistake") and sold it to Ricoh, a copier manufacturer with a spirited devotion to cameras and photography, only four years later, in 2011. The company was at first called Pentax Ricoh Imaging Co. Ltd., but in 2013 was simplified to Ricoh Imaging Co. Ltd. The old word Pentax, which is now used by no fewer than four separate companies for a variety of products, returned once again to being a model and brand name where cameras are concerned. Thus far, the greatest production of the Pentax-Ricoh partnership is the very highly regarded K-1 Mark II full-frame DSLR. [UPDATE: Yr. Hmbl. Ed. may have misspoken. See the Featured Comments below.]

Happy 100th Birthday and congratulations Pentax, and thank you Ricoh!

Mike
(Thanks to Ned B.)

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

Greg Heins: "It’s crazy, I know, but I tend to judge cameras by how they feel to use and by what the final prints look like. On both counts, my K-1 and 645Z consistently bring me joy. Not that I’ve tried everything else, but still...."

Tex Andrews: "Re 'Thus far, the greatest production of the Pentax-Ricoh partnership is the very highly regarded K-1 Mark II full-frame DSLR.' Oh, but I beg to differ! And I own this camera (upgraded version), and it is splendid. But I would say that thus far the greatest production remains 2014's 645Z. At its introductory retail price, it was at the time by far the least expensive digital medium format camera made, and it came with stellar DR and ISO range specs, plus video and more, all in a very robust, weatherproof body. I also own this camera.

"The K-1 Mark II is a very fine camera, but broke little new ground in the market's overall context, except perhaps in price. The 645Z was quite the bombshell, on the other hand, even more so than the 645D of 2010. So much so that both DPReview and DxO Mark both chose to bury their testing results for years (DPR has a somewhat lame excuse...DxO has none), as those results at the time made it the best camera out there in terms of IQ. Fuji has since caught up and with one camera exceeded Pentax's great achievement, but it's notable that the 645Z remains thoroughly competitive five whole years later, going on six. That is a whole lot of time in the camera world! Happy Thanksgiving, Mike!"

Mike replies: I must have had a synapse-lapse—as I was writing this post somewhat hurriedly yesterday afternoon (our last training session for pool league was yesterday evening), the medium-format Ricoh-Pentaxes completely slipped my mind.

At this moment, for Thanksgiving, you can save $3,199.95 on this camera and 55mm lens kit. That's not the price, that's the discount. Over the years since 2014 I've never heard a bad thing from a 645Z owner about the camera, and I've encountered a number of owners who, like Tex and Greg, are quite content with theirs. If I had to guess, I would say that's probably partly due to the satisfactory nature of the camera itself, and partly due to the calm, easygoing, phlegmatic disposition that seems to be characteristic of Pentaxians.

In any event, yes, I stand corrected, the greatest production of Ricoh's stewardship of Pentax thus far would be the 645Z.

Gaspar Heurtley: "I’ve been a Pentax film shooter since I was a kid,. My first camera was a Spotmatic my father gave to me when I was about ten years old. Still have it and use it from time to time. In digital I’m an Olympus shooter (I use a good old trusty E-M5 Mark I), but the lens I use the most, by far, is the Super Takumar 50mm ƒ/1.4 from that Spotmatic. I find the 100mm equivalent to be just perfect for my style of shooting, and after using that lens for more than 25 years (I’m 37 now) I know exactly how it’s gonna work in any scenario at any given aperture. As much as I like my E-M5, I really don’t care which body I use, just as long as I can keep taking pictures with that Super Takumar. I don’t think I’ve ever been that committed to anything."

Mike replies: You and Henri. He used the latest M bodies as they were introduced, but always stuck by his faithful fifty, a seven-element collapsible 50mm Summicron (1953–1960). It's not a bad thing to remain committed to a lens. Cartier-Bresson also sometimes carried a 35mm and an 85mm, but the then-President of Magnum Photos, when I visited in New York City, told me that you could page through book after book of his contact sheets (some of which I got to look through) and see only an occasional single picture that wasn't taken with the 50mm.

Dillan: "The first camera that I ever used was my parent's Pentax Program Plus, an SLR camera from the early 1980s. I enjoyed it so much that I have been shooting ever since."

Tom: "What Greg said. The ergonomics of Pentax cameras feels natural to me. The 645Z may have a few too many buttons, but at least it's nearly impossible to push one by accident, like say the GFX 50R. I've had more Pentax cameras than I care to list (see above photo) and along with some superb lenses using them is second nature. Photo is of my printer room with a display of old film cameras. Top shelf bodies are all Pentaxes (pun intended), except the Yashica 124G and a squirt gun camera."

Open Mike: Poetry

["Open Mike" the not-always off-topic Editorial Page of TOP. It appears on Wednesdays.]

-

I just sent a private message to my Patreon supporters with my ideas about when Leica "lost its soul." One more thing, though, that I didn't mention...people have soul, companies don't. We're speaking figuratively and metaphorically and imaginatively when we talk about companies having a "soul."

But the subject reminds me that there are many qualities that there are words for or that can be described that just can't be defined or "nailed down" so to speak. I wrote yesterday a little about Peter Henry Emerson, surely one of the more interesting (odd?) figures in the history of photography, so I looked to see what books about him are hanging around on Amazon. The classic, of course, is Nancy Newhall's P.H. Emerson: The Fight for Photography as a Fine Art, which is still procurable at reasonable prices. I read that one many years ago and found it tough slogging in places but engaging overall (there's something intrinsically boring about books about photographers—maybe it's what Martin Mull touched on in his famous quote "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." It's easier and more exciting to see a photographer in his or her photographs than it is to sift through details about all the effort of them doing their work). There's a newer title I don't know, a 2008 exhibition catalog, Peter Henry Emerson and American Naturalistic Photography, by Christian A. Peterson, which was published by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Christian Peterson was Acting Curator of Photographs at the MIA at the time. After more than 30 years at the Museum, he now writes independently about the history of photography and is a dealer in out-of-print photographic books who issues three catalogs a year. Here's his website.

Anyway, in the process of that, I noticed that there's a slight but expensive Emerson title called Poetry in Photography—not Emerson's own title; the book evidently contains selections from his writings, a little bit of which goes a long way.

It's funny, but one adjective that's been a linchpin of my own critical notions over many years has been the word "poetic." Yet I've never really developed the idea and certainly never defined it; I'm not sure you could define what "poetic" means where it relates to poetry, much less as it relates to photographs. I always tippy-toe around the subject. I don't even like talking about it.

Soul is another word like that. I used to have to dismiss 96% of all the photographs I see and now I probably have to dismiss 99%, and the hardest test for any randomly-encountered photo to pass is probably the simple question of whether there's any soul or poetry whatsoever in whatever I'm looking at. Is there a person in there, behind that random-seeming snap? A viewpoint—not literally but conceptually? Something, anything being said? Anything to be gleaned about the being behind the finder? If it's what's called expressive photography, well, does it express anything—anything at all? With most camera-pointing and "testing" photography today (most photographs these days are test shots!—tongue partly in cheek there, but only partly), not a scintilla of soul that can be inferred. I feel awash in a vast sea of sharp bright photographs of settings with nothing in them. It's not that the photos have nothing to say, it's that the camera-pointers don't.

And yet, what the hell does "poetic photograph" even mean? How in the world would you define a photograph with soul? It's too glib to say you know it when you see it.

Maybe your soul senses it.

I kid. Sorta.

People might have soul; and a lot of the people who used Leicas for many years did indeed have soul—so many they're like a parade. But remember, one real reason Leica is famous is that a whole generation of vital and vigorous yet penurious young photographers, photographers who felt an urgency about photography, found good solid sturdy castoff Leicas for sale on camera store shelves in the 1960s and '70s. They were there because people like thee and me who wanted the latest and greatest thing had all moved on to SLRs, which were better, and shucked off their limited and limiting once-expensive 1950s rangefinders. It's those many photographers' souls that rubbed off on Leica, eventually, not the other way around. Heck, in the '50s, Zeiss was top dog among German cameramakers; Leica played second fiddle. But for Zeiss's finicky and fragile shutters and Leitz's durable ones, we'd all be talking about the soul of Zeiss this Wednesday, not of Leica.

Companies don't have souls. It's just that we sometimes wish they did.

Mike
(Thanks to Scott Abbey)

Disclaimer: Whenever I say anything about my own notions about photographs, I'm only talking about myself. I'm not suggesting that my ideas are or should be valid for everyone or even anyone else. We all own our own photography, and different people have very different ideas of what they're after, and what they like, and why. That's as it should be, and is not something that anyone should or could seek to change.

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

Jonathan Morse: "Yes, the term 'soul' is as slippery as a banana peel. But an aid to thinking in an unpeeled way about what you attempt to see through the finder might be an essay written in Russia 102 years ago by Viktor Shklovsky: 'Art as Technique.' Here's a quote. 'Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important.' The essay is online."

Graham Byrnes: "Maybe not soul, but Zeitgeist. If Leica fitted the needs of poets, it was a poet's tool; if many poets used the same tool, chances are it was a tool that helped them make their poetry. And so as ever, someone wishing to be a poet would be inclined to equip him- or herself with such a tool, neglecting the past tense.

"As for the word 'poet,' it seems to have been mutated in a similar fashion: the poets of the School of Athens or Alexandria were more likely to be physicists or mathematicians or physiologists: they were doing science but saw 'poetry' as a fitting description for their enquiries into the truth of the world, while writing with elegance and precision. I expect the poets of the ancient world would be disappointed to see their discipline pass under the heading 'art' when science and art separated in the modern world (see e.g. C.P. Snow on The Two Cultures), after which many modern poets were proudly opposed to the scientific world view. They may have been happier to see technological devices used to capture and transport images of the world in a search for its 'truth.'

"Then one could also say much the same for the lost anchor of art, where fashion, nostalgia and marketing allow the word to take any meaning that can be forced into the public habits of thought...."

Kenneth Tanaka: "I don’t subscribe to such metaphysical concepts as 'soul.' But companies / organizations of people do usually exhibit an ethos at some points in time, usually near their inception. Leica was positively swimming in Lake Ethos for decades until it nearly drowned."

Mike replies: ...Or until it started selling tickets to sightseeing tours of the lake. (Are we torturing this metaphor yet?)

Curtis: "Reading or writing poetry can help promote the type of non-linear thinking that is required to produce soulful photographs."

Aaron C Greenman: "And Leica cameras don’t have a soul either, despite this (nicely shot and effective) advertisement (titled 'Soul'!) about a Leica camera’s lifetime, including being born in Wetzlar. Or the Leica official launch video for the M-10D, which described the camera as 'digital body, analog soul.'"

Martin D: "Thank you to our fellow TOP reader Jonathan Morse for his reference to the essay by Viktor Shklovsky: 'Art as Technique.' I admit I was completely ignorant of the man and the essay. A very perceptive essay. And yes, Shklovsky's reflections about the role of 'defamiliarisation' do help me think about what I do when I take a photograph. A real find (for me)."

David Comdico: "It’s interesting to note that the root of the word soul is anima, which means 'breathe of wind' which recalls many creation myths where God breathes life into humans and 'animates' them. Anima is also the root of animals (something like 'beings that breathe') and so all animals have souls (vegans +1) which is then contrasted with their form. Related, animus highlighted the mind/body duality and Socrates emphasized this quality of the soul (reason). It’s interesting that the term has become negative over time and codified in legal definition (is it reason that sways a jury?). So, I think it is reasonable to say that a camera can have soul. And one who wields such a device is always re-enacting a primal scene, the demiurge who breathes life into a pile of mud (a kind of sol, perhaps freckled with rare earth minerals)."

Geoff Wittig: "Peter Henry Emerson and American Naturalistic Photography is probably a niche title for a limited audience. It's a very nice, modestly sized book with good reproductions of photographs spanning the transition from Pictorialism to 'straight' photography around 1880 to 1920.

"I find it fascinating because this period matches the heyday of the Tonalist movement in painting. Tonalism emphasized moody, emotionally resonant landscape paintings, often representing intimate forest or field views rather than grand scenics. The photographic aesthetic highlighted by this book really strikes me as tonalism on film."

Dont' Worry, You'll Be All Right

My worries, reported yesterday, are not unreasonable...and yet there's no reason to be unduly pessimistic.

Yes, smartphone cameras have replaced digicams almost entirely, and this has hurt the camera-makers' bottom lines. Yes, sales of digital cameras and interchangeable lenses are down, and that's painful for the camera companies too. And it is very likely sales will decline further—Canon itself not long ago predicted that its own sales will soon be half of what they were in the peak year of 2012 (fast receding, alas). But the fact is that despite these contractions, interchangeable-lens cameras (ILCs) and the lenses for them are still selling very well. The camera industry continues to be blessed with a robust customer base. Sales will continue to decline to well below the peak; but the peak was very high. What remains as the market stabilizes will easily be enough to sustain the development and sales of new cameras.

I recall an article in Popular Photography in the 1980s which explained that the mass market had always supported the enthusiast market—the people who Kodak (and me, too, taking its lead) liked to call AdAms, for "advanced amateurs." (Art photographers are advanced amateurs, too.) That article, way back then, had a section of gloom-and-doom because point-and-shoots were robbing camera stores of accessory sales. A good SLR needed extra lenses and a flash and filters and a bag and a strap—follow-on sales galore—whereas a point-and-shoot had a fixed lenses and a built-in flash and no filter threads, and came with its own strap and could fit in a pocket or a purse. No accessories needed, or even possible. Disaster?

Maybe it was...for stores. Somehow, though, serious cameras continued to be made.

Recently there have been lots of articles sounding the death knell of "stand-alone" cameras. The Wall Street Journal had an article back in May called "The Tech My Toddler Will Never Know: Six Gadgets Headed for the Graveyard" by Joanna Stern (it's behind a paywall so I won't link to it)—it probably goes without saying that one of the doomed gadgets named by the article is the ILC. And two days ago Om Malik published a nice blog post called "Camera sales are falling sharply," in which he compares cameras to servers, and likens companies such as Nikon to Sun Microsystems. Interesting.

And he's perfectly correct—camera sales are falling sharply. But take a closer look at his second chart, which goes way back to the '70s.

Somewhere in his excellent book Life on the Mississippi (which is wonderful and essential reading for Americans in my opinion, whether as a companion to his two masterpieces or on its own), Mark Twain recounts that the river had been shortening at a certain rate, due to the fact that "loops" called meanders can be short-cutted when the river cuts a new channel. He then calculates the rate at which the river's length had been contracting, and extrapolates that by such-and-such a year the river would be gone altogether. (Forgive me if this is ill-described or badly reported—it's been decades since I read the book.) Of course he's being funny—the river obviously can't get shorter than the minimum distance from its source to its mouth as the crow flies.

I think there's a parallel to the market for ILCs and their lenses. Although (unlike the river) there's no absolute minimum size for it, just because the camera market is shrinking fast doesn't mean that it will continue to shrink and shrink until there's nothing left of it. In fact, what the second chart in Om Malik's article makes clear is that camera and lens sales are still more than three times what they were in the film era. Canon's ILC sales can shrink to 50% of peak and it will still be selling far more cameras and lenses than it was in 1989.

Sure, certain companies might go out of business, or leave the camera business; the pace of improvements might slow down; AdAms might be happier with what they have and keep their cameras longer; the used market might continue to cannibalize new camera sales; and so forth. Styles and fashions in what people prefer are fickle and will surely shift. Change will happen, including changes none of us can foresee. But a current trend doesn't imply eventual catastrophe, necessarily. It's just the normal warp and woof of business, which always has its ups and downs.

As I said yesterday, the important thing for people who love photography is that photographers continue to have what they need to do their work. Maintenance of an entire industry at 2012 levels is absolutely not a requirement for that to continue to happen. Gloomy memes in the press notwithstanding, camera sales are falling, but the sky is not.

Mike
(Thanks to several readers)

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

Amazon.com • Amazon UK • Amazon Canada
Amazon Germany • B&H Photo • Adorama

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

Donald Johnson: "As a software engineer who has deployed on Sun Servers(then), Linux Servers (later), and Cloud-based containers (now), I don't think it is an apt comparison to Nikon or other companies. I can run the same bit of code on all three types of servers, and get the same end results. The difference between the types is around such things as scalability and redundancy, and the cost of getting the same performance. Sun died because you could get the same result on much cheaper commodity Linux boxes, even if it took more of them to do it (and more effort as well). Also not mentioned in the comparison is the rise of Open Source software, of which Linux is one of the most successful examples. Is there even an equivalent in the photography world? Right now the bits from a phone are not the same. The real advantage for phones is the ease in use and sharing, which makes the quality 'good enough' for most people."

Kenneth Tanaka: " The future of cameras doesn't worry me in the least. Conversely, the current state and short-term future of photography itself (beyond hobbyist spheres) is certainly somewhat of a worrisome, incoherent mess right now."