The camera industry used to be much quieter, and
predictable. The biannual Photokina held at the Koelnmesse in each even
year since 1950 has been the focal point in the photographic industries and all
the major photographic equipment suppliers which they plan their product development
cycle and introduction accordingly – until the flourishing of World-Wide-Web and the
increasingly popular of camera rumor sites, today, hardly the major camera
maker can stick to the 2-years cycle of development and introduction, rather,
built along with the public anticipation from the internet traffic, they
release the product utilizing the latest technology before their competitor
do. These are all good news!
Like what I have covered in previous posts, carry over the
so-call film format made little sense anymore. It was said 6 million pixels will be roughly meet the quality
of traditional 135mm film (O.K. many people argue over this, it is not the
purpose of this post) and now we are at 36.3 million pixels as the case of
Nikon D800, or 22.3 million pixels as the case of Canon 5DIII.
The real point of discussion is that today the traditional
of one model replacing the previous generation is no longer the case – at least
for Japanese makers. For example I recently bought a Canon 5DIII – in all
public materials say it is meant to replace 5DII but I rather to think it is
replacing 5DII and 1DsIII at the same time. 5DIII has improved its built and most importantly the
ability to focus swiftly and accurately – particular in studio – thanks its
adaptation of using the top of the line 1DX AF engine – finally. And it now allows me to use the 5DIII
in studio. The Japanese has
started to learn the artificial marketing practice in last century may no
longer apply today – at least in the magnitude it was before. The Apple model works successfully to
have virtually identified phone that varied by only the memory capacity, and
open a large possibility to the app developers to allow user to customize each
of their phone.
Are we going to see this happened to camera, I bet, and not
for long, I believed. I think we
are about to see some revolution in cameras that is more modular – the AF
engine should be unified, and an entry level of camera may just have lower
level sensor with less memory buffer. The higher model will not have better
focus engine but due to more computation power it will perform better, so as
use of higher-level sensor. Doing so the camera maker can focus on their
R&D just on what’s best than try to develop something better and something
less at the same time. And the
camera capabilities? Are we going
to see apps stores for cameras? I certainly hope so. Can we add the time-lapse feature on Canon as it is on the new
Nikon? Can we add the
sweep-panorama as it is on SONY NEX cameras to other cameras?
Image of inner Mongolia, taken with SONY NEX-5, use of its
sweep-panorama mode, original size 8,192 X 1,856 pixels.
Ejina Qi, Inner Mongolia, 2011
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