News/Views
Exceeding Supply Again
Once again we have a camera manufacturer (Panasonic with the L10) announcing that orders for a new camera “greatly exceeds our expectations.” The actual truth: orders exceeded what they can deliver initially. Why not just say that?
By using the “exceeds our expectations” wording, the Japanese are constantly saying, in essence, that they are producing cameras that that they thought wouldn’t have all that much interest initially. That they could deliver to expectations, and expectations were low.
Further, this wastes early buzz for a new product, as people get in line, find they can’t get it, and then buy something else for their upcoming trip, vacation, event, whatever.
There was a time in the digital era when companies announced their initial production level for a new product, and if demand exceeded that, they’d apologize that they couldn’t deliver to demand and would increase the manufacturing level. Unfortunately, as total unit volumes plummetted after 2011 and supply chain issues started becoming a regular problem, no one seems to want to say how many they can produce or whether they can increase production to meet demand.
Instead, they’ve all taken the “this product went viral on us” approach when demand exceeds supply, but that may actually be counterproductive. The thing about “going viral” is that it is a very temporary thing. Yesterday’s viral is today’s out of sight. If you ask your local camera dealer, they’ll tell that when a wait list for a new product lasts longer than a month, quite a few people on that list decline to buy when the product finally becomes available.
I’m a believer that accurate information, updated as necessary, is the best approach to just about everything, including marketing. If it were my company, I would have said “We hoped that [this] would be a popular product, and initial demand confirms that. However, our initial production won’t meet that current demand. Accordingly, we’ll do our best to rapidly increase production and get cameras to everyone that wants one as quickly as possible.” (I’d be tempted to put real numbers in there, but customers don’t always understand numbers. 50k units a year would be a good sales number for something like an L10, for instance. And maybe the monthly production capacity is 5K units. That doesn’t sound like much to most people, but it’s actually a healthy number and a lot of today’s cameras are produced at or just above that level. After all, only 8m cameras of all kinds from all Japanese makers were sold last year, and almost half of those came from one company that makes a couple of dozen models.
The real issue is what happens two or three months after a camera introduction and demand is being met. How do you keep demand up? That’s called marketing. And the Japanese companies are still pretty poor at that. It doesn’t help that they’re putting all their shouting voice into what happens during launch weeks.
May’s News
LEDE ON
It seems that the camera producers are all claiming that they’ve “secured” memory and some other critical part supplies for the year. I noted that in at least one case they also talked about increased pricing, though. Meanwhile, CaptureOne doesn’t have a parts issue, but they’ve now announced that their pricing will go up 6%. Frankly, in times of inflation I expect everyone pushes their pricing as much as they think they can get away with.
The problem I see coming is that all these cost increases that are happening—don’t forget cards, SSDs, and hard drives—eventually will have people giving up something, with subscriptions being one of the first to go. Particularly subscriptions that don’t add anything to the product over time (I’m looking at you Nikon NX MobileAir).
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News
Sony’s Month
Sony awoke from their product slumber with a bang, announcing the now 67mp A7RVI along with a 100-400mm f/4.5GM OSS lens. If that wasn’t enough, the Xperia 1VIII smartphone also came along for the ride. It didn’t hurt that a lot more FE lenses showed up at the Beijing photography show, including a prototype of the Sigma 85mm f/1.2, or that the first major firmware update for the popular A7V showed up. It was a busy month for Sony users, and the news provoked fandom responses.
Let’s start with the big lens. The new fixed aperture 100-400mm looks like a real winner. Only a third of a stop slower than f/4, this US$4300 lens is a solid focal length for both sports and wildlife, and my sports photography friend Patrick Racey Murphy seems to like it a lot. Yes, it’s in a different price range than the competitor’s 100-400s, but the difference between f/5.6 and f/4.5 is meaningful to a lot of users, both for low light work as well as for background separation. Nikon’s got their work cut out for them, as the aging Nikkor 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 VR S isn’t as sharp at 400mm or as full featured as this new Sony.
Most of the talk this month was A7RVI worship. A new stacked image sensor coupled with attention to getting dual gain results (at least with mechanical shutter) makes for a lot of the excitement. At 67mp (technically 66.8) it’s the most pixels in a full frame sensor, yet the early results show the new sensor more than holds its own while making some clear rolling shutter gains. 30 fps blackout free bursts aren’t exactly what you might expect on a pixel pusher, though the A7RVI is not quite a sports camera due to some lingering roll in all-electronic shutter.
New to the A7RVI are a bigger battery, 32-bit float audio, illuminated buttons, and a dual USB-C arrangement. The grip is also a bit different due to the larger battery. While the EVF is still 9.44m dot, it gets a brighter OLED panel that can provide HDR viewing in a near P3 space.
Overall, it looks like Sony addressed many of the primary complaints about the A7R. They may have even fixed my primary complaint about the preceeding model with that dual gain use while operating under mechanical shutter. The Mark VI seems like a solid update that will win new buyers, though it has risen US$600 in price from the original V to US$4499.
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News
Canon's Month
“Hey, we’ve got a new camera and new lens, too” said Canon on the same day as Sony fanned heat from their supporters. Surprising to some, Canon’s new offerings didn’t quite get the same rabid response as did Sony’s.
That’s probably because the new US$2500 R6 V is basically the current R6 III in Nikon ZR form. In other words, designed for “advanced creatives.” The R6 V did have one significant fan on day one, though: the fan built into the camera to keep it cool while recording video. That’s fine, but Canon now has to explain why their ZR needs a fan while Nikon’s doesn’t.
Personally, I find it difficult to believe that there is enough market for the Canon R6 V, Nikon ZR, and Sony ZV-E1—let alone the FX’s—to all thrive. Moreover, I don’t think any of the three hit the nail quite on the head; each has liabilities and missing features that the others don’t, an indication that no one really yet knows exactly how their small full frame slinger should be configured.
Along with the camera, Canon launched a new 20-50mm f/4L IS USM PZ lens (US$1400).
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News
Nikon's Month
Nikon didn’t launch any new products while I was out of town, but there were two announcements from them of note.
The first was Nikon’s full fiscal year results, which produced quite a bit of the usual “Nikon is dying” response from the amateur inexperts. While most of the Nikon businesses either hit or were close to their forecast revenue, the issue that triggered the naysaying was the higher-than-expected loss. Nikon Imaging actually sold more cameras and lenses than originally expected, but a lot of the volume was lower priced Z50II and Z5II models, plus the write-off associated with the “sale" of Mark Roberts (now in bankruptcy) didn’t help the bottom line for the group. Considering Nikon didn’t launch a new camera in the last half of their fiscal year, the results seem fairly strong to me.
The Nikon weaknesses are three: (1) Nikon Precision seems to have no way to take advantage of the semiconductor boom and keeps missing targets due to write-downs and delays; (2) the new Components and Manufacturing businesses aren’t showing the expected sales and profit growth that was promised; and (3) free cash flow has been negative for four straight years now, and in a time where interest rates are no longer zero in Japan that has longer term implications if the problem is not fixed. Still, I’d simply characterize Nikon’s results as weak this year, and not close to fatal. We’ve seen this play before, and the protagonist survives just fine.
Nikon’s other announcement was developmental, as in “we’re working on a 120-300mm f/2.8 TC VR S lens.” Uh, thanks Nikon, but we already knew that. We did get a few photos of the new lens, though, and they reveal that Nikon learned nothing from my criticism of the placement of the controls on the 400mm f/2.8 TC VR S. The Fn buttons are nowhere near where my hand will be, among other things. Meanwhile, for some reason everyone is betting this new top line lens will sell for US$8000. I’d say that’s tremendously optimistic. It’s more likely a US$10,000 lens, particularly given the inflationary market we’re currently in (sensing a theme, yet?).
Do I want one? Not exactly. At 120-300mm plus 420mm via TC and effective 610mm via DX crop on the 45mp cameras, it just barely qualifies for my wildlife use, yet it looks to be almost as big as the 400mm f/2.8 I currently use. On the other hand, if I do more sports in 2027 than I did in 2026, maybe I’d be more interested.
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News
Fujifilm's Month
If Nikon was relatively quiet, Fujifilm was mostly silent. While management did talk about possible lenses to the press—I think Fujifilm is starting to feel the Chinese lens threat—nothing much else got said. The fiscal year results were good (an 18% increase in revenue from the digital side, though that pales against the 26.2% increase on the InStax side).
It strikes me that Fujifilm is at a critical juncture now. They’ve built a small user base that seems loyal. They’ve made very good products at the high compact (X100VI and GFX100RF), APS-C (X-E5 and X-T50 added to the bigger lineup), and medium format (GFX100II). As a Fujiflm user would I be looking to upgrade anything? And as someone outside the brand, can they make something that would get me in?
I see Fujifilm’s main problem as still lagging in autofocus. But fixing that isn’t enough, I think. Fujifilm needs to get X-Pro and X-H users to upgrade now, and that’s going to be tougher given the competition’s advancements.
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News
Panasonic's Month
Panasonic took a small idea and made it larger. Literally. The modest-sized LX100 is now replaced by a larger-sized L10. The good news is all the S1II-sourced goodies (autofocus, video, etc.). The bad news is that I think Panasonic might not have gotten the UX quite right (I’ll hold final judgment on that until I can test one; I still have to post my Ricoh GRIV review first). It certainly looks as if I’d be using the customization features on the camera to get it to operate the way I want it to.
My first impression is that it presents as a very simple camera externally, only to send the user into customizations to get it operationally optimized. The fact that subject detection doesn’t fall back to general autofocus when no subject is detected isn’t user friendly and also seems wrong for a “simple” camera. Couple that with the body size increase on a m4/3 sensor camera that was properly sized before, and I’m not sure what to make of things from press releases and quick glances. At least we have an on/off lever instead of a button. At US$1500, the L10 is in a rich crowd, though each of the competitors has a completely different take.
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Wrapping Up
And in other news
The Chinese lens parade continued throughout the month.
▶︎ 7Artisan’s 135mm f/1.8. The budget Plena is here, with FE and L mounts coming. I’d be surprised if it seriously matched a Plena, though.
▶︎ Thypoch’s 24-50mm f/2.8. An autofocus zoom from an unlikely source takes on the Sony.
▶︎ BrightinStar had a big month. An autofocus 12mm f/2.8 for the FE mount, plus some additional manual focus lenses.
▶︎ Laowa produced a zoom fisheye. The 4.5-10mm f/2.8 is small, but that’s partly because it only covers the APS-C sensor.
What Goes Away Next?
One thing that people don’t always expect with the long march of technology is that things go away. We’re nearing the end of USB-A, for instance, with virtually everything now coming only with USB-C due to European regulations.
Frankly, the camera makers seem a bit behind the times. With my Insta360 and DJI devices, for example, they only have a USB-C port, but my current cameras have many. Too many. And badly placed ports, on top of that.
So let’s start today’s discussion with one about what ports are likely (or should) go away.
First up is HDMI. Be honest now: when was the last time you plugged something into your HDMI port? Before you say “but I plug in my Atomos Ninja all the time,” let me warn you, that’s not a good answer. HDMI was designed as a way to transfer video and audio simultaneously through a single cable (as opposed through the three cables it used to take in the RCA Jack era). The consortium that created HDMI had vested interests. One of those was copy protection of material being transmitted on the cable.
With USB4 currently being deployed, there’s really no need for HDMI, as via a single USB-C connector you can now do multiple things (power, data transfer, video display, etc.), and do them at the same or better speeds than the current typical state of HDMI.
I expect HDMI to be the first connector to be dropped from virtually all cameras in the future. While some might say that keeps users from directly plugging cameras into TVs, how many are doing that, and no, you may not even need a cable to do that.
Which brings me to microphone and headphone jacks. The 21st Century way—the Japanese camera makers are still dragging their feet in the 20th Century—is to use wireless connections. I rarely use wired mics any more. Bluetooth is currently at 2.1Mbps, which is more than adequate for compressed audio. But there’s always Wi-Fi, as well, which currently hits 1000+Mbps if you need faster communications.
Why would you drop connectors from cameras? For a number of reasons:
- Each connector costs money and often requires ribbon cables internally. Between the two, there’s a real cost per unit implied here, and while you might think it low, low adds up when you make a million devices.
- Everyone seems to want smaller cameras, and smaller cameras don’t have a lot of real estate to dedicate to connectors. The classic left-side location interferes with hand grips and articulating screens, adding a frustration level.
- Connectors are entry points for moisture. This requires more parts, typically a door or flap to keep water from ingressing into the vulnerable digital interior of the device.
- Reliability (and thus repair costs) goes down. Physical connectors can wear over time, but the real issue is related to the first bullet: the connector mounts to something, a ribbon cable connects it to something else. The more complex that warren of connections gets, the more likely that something works loose. In talking to service technicians, not only are a fair number of repairs related to connectors, but a number of “needs to be returned for a second fix” services are due to not getting everything properly set during the repair.
- Some connectors require licensing fees. Generally these are patent pool fees and relatively low per unit, but again, even a few cents a unit adds up when you ship enough product.
Quite frankly, the Chinese are eating the Japense for lunch right now when it comes to “connectivity.” All the latest gear coming out of China is basically a single USB-C connector for power and sometimes communication, and Bluetooth/WiFi to well designed mobile apps for everything else.
But the real issue lurking for the Japanese camera companies as they contemplate taking out parts is that the Japanese typically don’t address users directly when they do. They take something out because it makes sense from a production point of view, but not always from a user point of view.
I’ll give you a recent example: the Ricoh GRIV has internal memory and Ricoh suggests that the user doesn’t need a card. But Ricoh relies upon the user to understand how they might connect to that internal memory to get to their images. The Ricoh uses the old media transfer protocol, which may or not show the device on your computer when you connect it. On a Mac, for instance, you have to use Apple’s Image Capture application to see the camera, but how many people will know that without reading the manual thoroughly? (It’s in the Frequently Asked Questions for a GRIV, which should tell you something.)
Personally, I’m for removing connectors and maybe even cards. But not without directly addressing usability when things get removed. I still need to connect to mics, monitor audio, record video, move files to my computer, and so on. I want all those things done in ways that are seamless, reliable, and simple to use. That requires a software team that’s a good as the hardware team, and that is going to be the real issue for the Japanese as they start trying to simplify their product and make it more reliable, all while also making it cheaper to build.
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Bonus: A similar common complaint comes with phones and laptops: why are there no longer removable batteries, for instance? I can tell you that the design goal in Silicon Valley has long been “lasts a full day.” That, coupled with product reliability, has led to the demise of changeable batteries. It’s a long discussion around the “reliability” bit, including the fact that a lithium battery that’s not directly accessible by a user is less likely to develop problems, but I’ve seen the data, and it’s pretty clear: support issues went way down. Given that every internal battery these days is either USB-C and/or MagSafe chargeable, if you need “more batteries,” you can just buy a generic USB-C power bank.
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Double Bonus: If I were designing a serious camera these days, I’d be dropping a lot of things that you probably take for granted. Two USB-C connections only. If more connections are really needed, I’d do that through a proprietary hot shoe connection scheme, but frankly, excellent Bluetooth/Wi-Fi support with the right app is probably all that’s necessary. No cards; all internal memory (64GB; longer video can stream to the USB-C port). No user changeable battery (charge/power via USB-C). There’d therefore be no real doors on the camera, reducing the need for additional weather sealing, simplifying manufacturing, and increasing reliability. The real decision point would be the Rear LCD: I suspect that I’d make it attach magentically to the camera back and be fully removable. Need selfie position? Hot shoe stand for the Rear LCD facing forward.