Cameras and Photography Explained

If you just want the answer to the question, scroll down to the second bold-faced line later in the article. However, you really need to get there via some set up, so I hope you read my whole treatise. 

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"It seems that we are in a period of time we reached the end of miniaturization! We can't go to smaller microchips, the strength of the currents inside the chips will cause the electricity to skip around circuits and cause problems." — Internet forum post

When you read something like the above quote on the Internet, you're seeing an uninformed opinion that's wrong. I can't state that more bluntly. Unfortunately, the Internet has this amplification effect, so once someone posts their paranoia online, that can quickly swell into first legitimate concern and eventually full acceptance. 

In my talks with semiconductor experts, they all seem to believe that we've got at least a decade's worth of a reasonable (slower) form of Moore's Law (miniaturization) ahead of us (and I don't believe cameras are near current state-of-the-art, so they already have quite a bit of catching up to do). Moreover, we've been through these "Moore's Law is ending" suggestions before. The first time I heard that expressed is now almost twenty years ago. 

As most of you know, I'm a technophile, and I'm optimistic that science continues to take us on a journey of discovery that generates new and better technologies in the future. Assuming, of course, that we continue to pursue and pay attention to science, which unfortunately isn't a given. I fear we're currently headed into the modern equivalent of the Middle Ages.

At the heart of statements like the above are people pondering what happens next with "cameras." I put that word in quotes because I think what we call a camera is likely to change in the coming decades. You can already see that in some forms. For instance, "cameras" in Tesla vehicles have been used in everything from court cases to art. One could claim that instead of a device that you hold in your hands and look through, Tesla "photographers" just drive their cameras to where they want to take a photo.

I get the "what's next for photography" question near constantly. Partly because I was right about predicting the transition from film to digital, as well as the transition from DSLR to mirrorless. Most of those questions are not actually about photography, though. They're gear questions, as in "I'm using a Nikon ZX; what am I going to be using in ten years, and will Nikon still be making cameras?" I don't know the answer to the first part of the question at the level of detail the person probably wants, but the answer to the second half is "yes, but maybe not in the form you're thinking of."

The interesting thing about being at the front edge of the tech business for so long is that you see in the failures the future. I'll give you a very simple personal example: back when we first imagined Go and the PenPoint operating system, we quickly stumbled on the use of tabs in the UI. Indeed, the whole PenPoint user experience revolved around moving between tabs to get access to different data. Recognize something about that statement? Does the Web browser you're currently using have tabs to move between data? Go failed, but quite a few of our ideas have had full and productive lives ;~) 

Ideas that are basically correct in tech do live on. Here's another one that people have now dismissed but shouldn't: Lytro's light field capture. Like Go, Lytro burned though nine figures of capital, only to disappear. Yet I still remember quite well the excitement among the Hollywood crowd when Lytro demonstrated their Immerge system at NAB in 2016. I had originally thought that it was the three-dimensional virtual reality that was the selling point—witness today's Apple Vision Pro attempting the same thing—but it wasn't. In a cab with a Disney executive I found out the real reason they were interested, and that was the volumetric video aspect of the system: because the entire space in front of the "camera" was fully mapped in 3D, doing special effects—"replace that cardboard box with a robot"—could be easily done. Actually "easily imagined to be done."

Volumetric video is still coming. The ideas, the scholarly work, the physics, the geometry, everything about the idea still percolates, it's just not fully brewed into useful consumer products yet.

Which brings me to my answer to the question "what will cameras be like in ten years?" First, they will have multiple inputs (sensors). Second, they will integrate what we know about the world with what the sensors measure (AI). Third, user control interaction will (mostly) disappear and be replaced by user processing interaction. My marketing slogan? "The world is your camera." 

This is a tricky bit for the Japanese camera companies. I'd say that virtually all of the "innovation" in cameras we've seen out of Tokyo has played off of things others discovered and proved before them. Digital image sensors didn't get invented in Japan. More like Bell Labs. But once out of the labs, the notion of converting photons to electrons and recording that became a pretty clear goal, particularly since the way we had been doing that revolved mostly around chemicals emanating from Rochester, New York. That allowed the Japanese to disrupt an entire industry. 

Disruption has always been part of business cycles. The trick is to find the next technology that allows you to create that disruption. 

You might think that the AI built into your camera today—virtually all focus systems use one now—means that the Japanese are on top of things. They aren't. The type of AI you see in your camera today is mostly the machine learning derived AI we were talking about in Silicon Valley ten to twenty years ago. The current focus system AI is just past the problem that Netflix encountered back in 2006 when they were trying to figure out "movie recommendations." Personally, I can actually see what the focus systems were trained on, and what they weren't. They're just babies with limited abilities at the moment.

My sense is that the Japanese are trailing the US and China in what we think about in current AI engines and uses. That doesn't mean they always will, however. It's a potential point of disruption to the Japanese camera industry, and I'd be looking closely at DJI and what they're doing in that aspect, because that's where the next generation of "cameras" may really come from. 

Of course, smartphones are also in the mix, as well. Too many people get caught up in the limitations of small image sensors when they discuss smartphone "cameras." Smartphones are actually towards the forefront of the #2 and #3 of what I said a camera would be like in ten years (five paragraphs above). 

Thus, my final thought is this: the camera industry is going to be disrupted again. Perhaps in five years, maybe in ten years, but absolutely within twenty years. That disruption will come from China or the US (as long as things continue to progress the way they are currently). Japan is on a clock. 

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Bonus: Oh, I just have to write it. My fingers are way ahead of me here. 21st century cameras will be communicative. There, I said it (again; I first wrote that in 2007). That means that they don't exist in a vacuum by themselves. They integrate into all your other technology. Naturally. Conveniently. In real time. The Japanese like to think that they're making systems. Nope. Their product is (or should be) part of a bigger system they don't control. 

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Some of you want a higher level of detail than the three points I made. I can actually do that. However, I still consult with tech companies and startups from time to time, so I'll reserve my detailed thoughts for those discussions. 

"We're often asked: 'Will AI-generated images replace photographers?' The answer is yes... for certain kinds of photography. For example, stock photography might be replaced by AI-generated images in the next 3-5 years." email from Eric Yang, CEO of Topaz Labs.

Good lord let's hope not. The implication of these kinds of statements about AI is that everything that could be done has been done. That's because the current AI implementations all work from knowledge of things that they've scanned. AI is not really a creative thinker. Even those so-called "hallucinations" you might hear about are based upon what was scanned, not completely made up from scratch. 

One reason why stock photography exists is because if everyone uses the same images for their landing pages (or whatever) on the Web, then all marketing starts to look alike. Thus, if you subscribe to any stock photography market (disclosure: I do, though I rarely use such images, and then mostly only as ornament) you discover that the stock goes through trends, almost like fashion. I don't think AI is going to be dictating fashion. Indeed, to a large degree, one reason why fashion changes is that people want to avoid what everyone else is doing.

But this does suggest that if you want to stand out as a photographer you need to approach photography from your viewpoint and create new and compelling works, not simply copy others. Funny thing, that. I've been preaching that for decades now.

"I think that many in the smartphone generation are happy with one or two lenses...we don’t see the same numbers of people shelling out for four lenses as we used to..." interview with Fujifilm UK manager Theo Georgiades in Amateur Photographer

I'd describe this differently. We go through cycles in terms of camera buying, even as we go through technology cycles with cameras (e.g. film SLR, DSLR, mirrorless). Early in the new technology cycles, many of the first to move are those who are already using cameras but see an advantage to the new platform. That certainly happened with DSLR, and I believe it happened with mirrorless, as well. Current camera users saw something in the new technology that made their photography life better and jumped to the new form. It isn't that consumers discover the new form and then the established customers slap their wrist to their forehead and go "doh!"

After awhile, the excitement from the prosumer/pro users already having made a shift tends to get the attention of consumers, and you eventually get a new crowd buying, and buying mostly in the lower half of the lineup. That happened in the 70's with film SLRs, the 00's with DSLRs, and is now happening in the 20's with mirrorless. These folk don't have lenses, and don't yet know how lenses can be used to distinguish their work. So obviously they just buy the kit and use one lens for awhile. 

It's actually up to the marketing departments of the camera companies to somehow convince those new users that they should be considering getting other lenses. Hmm. Who's doing that level of marketing at the moment? Bueller? Bueller? (Bonus aside: the lecture that Ben Stein, the economics teacher who say those famous words, was about tariffs and what happens when you apply them broadly, as with Smoot-Howley or...)

If we talk specifically about the smartphone generation moving to dedicated cameras—and indeed that's happening, just not in the huge volumes Tokyo would like—they're actually used to one "lens" being built into their device. Even the three-lens setup on the current iPhone Max Pro is essentially operated most of the time much like a mid-range zoom by the people I've watched. 

That actually explains why cameras like the Fujifilm X100VI are so popular: it's just a "better" all-in-one solution than a smartphone (you "zoom" with its 40mp sensor by invoking real-time crops). Ironically, most of the X100VI users I've watched don't use that really sophisticated viewfinder. We'll see plenty more camera companies targeting this kind of device without really understanding why it's popular and then missing a key point or two in their design. I'd rather see someone such as Nikon make a Z9-generation Z30II but also figure out how the lens angle should be played with it other than "buy the kit."  (One hint: you can get more telephoto from pinch to crop (or button to crop), as 8mp is more than enough for the uses these cameras are put to; but there's much more you need to do than just that.)

So as to that second part of the quote, the reason you don't see new-to-dedicated-camera users buy more lenses is because you, the camera company, have failed to show them how that becomes a useful extension to what they're already doing. Marketing is failing the camera companies big time these days. This is a marketing fail, not a completely new type of user that doesn't want lenses. 

Finally, there's this: the overall market is smaller than it was. If there were one million users buying four or more lenses 15 years ago, there are only 300,000 or so doing so today.

"The problem with such reviews by individuals is that they are far too subjective. They only tell you about that one person's experience.”   —dpreview forum

The implication of the first sentence is that reviews should only be done by organizations, and that organizations aren’t subjective. My experience, however, is that the larger the organization doing reviews, the more likely that their judgment is contaminated by other factors, including but not limited to how the group is funded. In the camera industry, we have a long history of magazines and others pulling punches on reviews so as not to offend advertisers. 

Reviews contain basically two components: facts, and interpretation of said facts. For instance, someone could write “the camera produces 24mp images” or they could write “the camera produces 24mp images, which is (far) below today’s standard.” The first clause is a fact, the second is an opinion and based upon a second opinion (what today’s “standard” is). 

You’ll note that I split my reviews into a few parts. The “What is it?” portion tends to stick to factual information about the product. A knowledgeable reader can form their own conclusions from that information (e.g. maybe they think f/6.3 is too slow an aperture for their work). The “How’s it Handle?” Is 100% my own subjective experience, based upon now 50+ years of using cameras from all makers, and a great deal of experience working as a professional. The “How’s it Perform?” section is a combination of facts and opinions. A buffer size can be reported in factual numbers, for instance, but subjectively that number works differently for different cameras. I’ll give an example: if a Zf-type camera had a 20-image buffer that might be fine for it while if a Z9-type camera had that same 20-image buffer it would be highly limiting. In order to understand that difference, you need a competent, reliable, and consistent reviewer who writes clearly. 

Which brings us to the real thing about whether to trust a review or not: is the reviewer competent, reliable, and consistent? If you’re just browsing around the Internet and hit a review from someone you don't know you can’t make that assessment; I’d say that you have to take what they write with a grain of salt until such time as you can determine that they are competent, reliable, and consistent.

Now let’s deal with the second sentence of the quote, in particular the “one person’s experience.” The implication here is that someone else would have a different experience with the thing being reviewed. That’s possible, for sure, but the way that happens most often is that the other person’s experience biases their experience. Let me explain: if you hand a Canon camera to someone who only uses Sony cameras, their “experience” with the Canon is likely to be poor from the start. Controls are in different places, names are different, menus and customizations are different, and there’s a lot to learn about the Canon technology before you can master it (the implication is that they already learned the Sony technology and mastered it). Meanwhile, a reviewer who’s had broad use of Canon, Nikon, and Sony products actually has a better ability to describe where the product in question succeeds and fails. Yes, it’s an opinion based upon experience, but it’s an informed opinion. 

More often than not, what I’ve found is that when people are objecting to reviews, they’re objecting more on the personality of the reviewer (including me) than the review itself. You see this all the time on the Internet fora. Indeed, it appears that the thread that generated this quote was removed by a moderator, likely because the discussion got into making strong negative comments about the reviewer, not the review. 

“Company X should release a Y variant and let the market decide.” —common post, most recent of which was on dpreview

That’s not typically how successful businesses work. Throw spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks is a tactic that has been used by some, but it’s also an indication that they don’t know what business they’re in or who their customers are. With cameras and lenses there’s usually a two or three year creation process from idea to entering manufacturing, and R&D is one of the Japanese companies’ biggest expenses, particularly with lenses. 

Nikon Imaging, for instance, is projecting a 24.5b Yen R&D cost this year against a likely 47b yen gross profit. Put another way, their profit is about twice what they put into development. They can’t afford to throw spaghetti at a wall; that increases R&D costs without necessarily generating profit.

This gets back to a common theme I’ve been writing about for three decades now: do the Japanese companies properly understand their current customers as well as their potential new ones? I’d argue that they are far less efficient at that than they should be. They miss clear easy pickings that I can see through my own user surveys, and they do silly things like leave out one or two features from cameras that should be configured identically (there’s no financial benefit to leaving HEIF out of the Z9, for example, or Cycle AF-area out of the Zf). 

The most recent occurrence of the above quote had to do with wanting Nikon to put out a 400mm f/4.5 or 500mm f/5.6 with a built-in TC. The interesting thing here is that I tend to agree. If Nikon were to bring the 500mm f/5.6E PF VR over to the Z-mount, they certainly have the “air space” to stick in a TC and make it different. Moreover, it’s really clear to me that there’s a huge advantage to providing built-in teleconverters on the more expensive, exotic lenses, particularly for the 45mp users, as that gives you prime, prime+1.4x via teleconverter, prime+1.4x+1.5x via DX crop, which is effectively as good as a zoom much of the time. Even better, putting out a 500mm f/5.6 TC PF VR S might be enough to get people already using the F-mount version on the FTZ adapter to bite on the new version, too, as it gets rid of two extra mounts (you have to use an F-mount external TC and an FTZ adapter to get the extra reach now) and simplifies the switchover from one focal length to another. 

But this isn’t “let the market decide.” It’s “the market would embrace this.” While that seems a subtle difference in wording, it’s the difference between doing something without knowing what your user might want versus doing it because you know what your user might want. Successful businesses always opt for the latter.

Finally, there’s this: some keep claiming that there’s no benefit of an internal teleconverter to an external one. Most of the time that argument centers on optical difference, not practical difference. Having now used the 400mm f/2.8 TC VR S for several years, I can tell you that being able to photograph at 400mm, 540mm, or 810mm with just a flip of a switch (TC) or a press of a button (DX crop) is vastly different than unmounting the lens, digging the teleconverter out of the bag, mounting the teleconverter, and then remounting the lens. It also doesn’t introduce a weak link in the lens/camera connection and another thing I have to carry, track, and clean. Personally, I’d pay for an internal teleconverter option on any long telephoto Nikon made. 

This is another of those “learned things” that turn out to be wrong (“external teleconverter is more flexible”). Just because something has been done one way in the past doesn’t mean there isn’t a better way of doing it in the future. And that gets me back to my point: the camera company has to understand its customers well enough to know that something like a built-in teleconverter is highly welcome, not just throw the option out there and see if they like it. Look carefully at the most popular long telephoto lenses of recent times and you’ll find all of the internal teleconverter lenses in that list. The customers have already spoken.

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Bonus: Let's go back to that review quote. So why wouldn’t we trust an AI response to the question of “which camera is best?” Simple: AI is not overly competent at the moment (depends upon how well it was trained), not reliable (sometimes makes up answers, called hallucinations), and is not consistent (same question asked by different people at the same time get different answers). 

Search isn’t any better, mostly because it’s no longer reliable (the search prioritizes how the search engine will make money, not your answer). 

None of this is new. Throughout the history of media you find the same thing: the outlets that spend the time, money, and effort to be competent, reliable, and consistent are the ones that people eventually find and stick with. Indeed, the long-term viability of media tends to center around this notion. 

We've got lots to talk about, but lets start with a basic trend for mirrorless cameras over the past several years:

The average selling price (left axis) of a mirrorless camera went up 200% in five years (bottom axis) according to CIPA. That probably reflects that the serious users who buy more expensive equipment have been transitioning from DSLR to mirrorless. The plateau of average selling price for the past three years is troublesome, though, as it hints that the primary buying spree for the highest end cameras may be over.

Still, as I pointed out in my recent article on zsystemuser, a lot of the dollars Nikon took in recent years came from just the Z8 and Z9, the two highest priced cameras in their lineup. More dollars from those two products than from any other line Nikon makes. For instance, the Z8/Z9 take has been about double the dollars that the Z6 lineup produced in its entire history in the US. The problem with this is the self-fulfilling prophecy that gets built in: to entice all those Z8/Z9 purchasers to buy again means you need something even higher end (new models and existing model iteration), and as you push more and more on high-priced products, you begin seeing volume drop-off. Let's face it, I have two Z9 bodies as my primary cameras. Is there anything they can't do? No. Getting me to replace them will be tough.

The camera companies are going to want more revenue in the future, so how do they get it? Some combination of: (1) push lower level camera users into higher end products; (2) sell subscriptions/features; (3) make more enticing, even higher priced cameras; (4) sell lenses, accessories, and services; (5) find new potential users; and (6) raise prices.

The Fujifilm X100VI turned out to be an almost perfect combo of #1, #3, and #5, but how many companies can replicate that kind of success (and how much of the X100VI’s success was luck in timing and viral hyping)? And can you do it with more than one product (i.e. across your entire lineup)? 

We've seen the 24-33mp full frame sweet spot camera (R6, Z6, A7) slowly rising in price (not accounting for inflation), and I believe that the camera companies are hoping that they can do the same for their entire lineup, though that seems to be failing at the low end, where that US$1000 boundary is tough to push entry cameras above. 

I just mentioned inflation. We're just now finding out that the camera companies were all hit with significantly higher semiconductor costs coming out of the pandemic, and that's slowed their development and delivery cycles as they try to adjust. I'm told by one insider that some inflation-caused costs haven't yet materialized in the final product cost, but probably will. 

But throw into this the possibility of tariffs here in the US. The campaign promise was a 20% tariff on all foreign products—which would include all cameras and lenses, as none are made in the US—with the potential for higher tariffs on products coming out of certain countries, such as China (16 of Nikon's Z-mount lenses are made in China, for example, as are all of Tamron's). 

Tariffs are effectively another form sales tax. It's possible (but not likely) that the camera makers would eat that tax themselves, much as B&H eats the state sales taxes via its PayBoo credit card, but I wouldn't count on it. 

The combination of all the above factors makes me think that #6 (raise prices) is coming. We've already seen that in countries where the currency has declined against the dollar, but price bumps will eventually make their way to the US, as well (unless, of course, the yen somehow gets dramatically devalued for some reason).

Thus, if you're trying to stay current with your camera gear it's likely that you've already bought a higher-priced camera, or you will in the future. Photography's getting more expensive #1.

Meanwhile, you want to do something with the photos you took from that high end camera. That impacts computers and software. You probably have already heard that Adobe is raising their Photography Plan prices by 25 to 50% (unless you opt for a full year at a time). I hinted at this last fall when I first heard the rumblings, and now it's officially here: no 20GB Photography Plan for new customers, and price increases for the 1TB Lightroom and 20GB Photography Plan users. 

Couple that with Photo Mechanic, TopazLabs, and others emphasizing full subscription, and now the software side of photography is tracking more as a on-going fixed expense instead of one you can cost manage by not buying updates when you don't have the money for them. Photography's getting more expensive #2.

But that's not all. As you moved up with your camera, you probably went to a higher pixel count (e.g. 24mp to 45mp). Your files are larger so you need new, larger cards and more storage for the resulting images. Because it takes longer to process the larger files, you need to upgrade your computer. Because new software is using AI and machine learning features more than ever before, you also need a new computer that has better GPU/NPU capabilities. Photography's getting more expensive #3.

Into this mix we have a lot happening behind the scene that hasn't fully surfaced yet. The Web sites that you go to learn about photography and the products you use are finding it more and more difficult to use the old ad-based and affiliate-driven revenue models to deliver "free" content. If they try to push more ads or links, they dilute their content and their user base goes away because readers don't want to have to sift through all that. Meanwhile, the amount the sites get from an individual ad keeps going down.

You've already seen Petapixel and CanonRumors push new membership models that remove the banner ads. I can tell you that in my discussions with every one of the big and serious photography sites, they're all talking about how to build new revenue streams they can rely upon. So either these sites go away due to declining revenue, or they find a way to charge you money. Photography's getting more expensive #4.

Hobbies have always been expensive. Going pro at anything always incurs significant expense, too. So in one way there's nothing really new in all the above. It does seem, however, that we currently have multiple factors simultaneously in play that are pushing harder at nibbling away your dollars, though.

I believe that 2025 will be a year where many more people start realizing just how much their costs are rising and start making significant changes in their habits to combat the money drain. The primary way that tends to happen is that the dedicated camera goes in the closet not to be used and, if the person still wants to take some photos, they just rely on their smartphone, because it's now competent at many things photography-wise. 

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Bonus: lest the "creator" community think they're immune from the above because they can just use their smartphone, they need to think again. Sure, the smartphone-to-social-media thing seems free, because you need a phone anyway and the social media sites don't charge you anything to post. But it isn't free if you want to stand out in any way. I've watched the influencer/creator folk scramble more and more to function in that social media free-for-all; if they actually want to make money off spending all their time posting short form content and generating followers, they actually start buying more gear, spending more time processing, doing more elaborate staging, and putting in more marketing and promotion efforts so that they can get to user base numbers where companies like YouTube and others will actually pay them. It's pay to play, baby.