I was tempted to do this as an April Fool’s article, where I would announce that I was going full on Gen Z with my sites and begin to abbrev almost all long and mult syl words and write only in soc friendly fash.
But there’s a serious topic here, and one that’s actually important to the camera industry (import to the cam ind).
Before I get too far, let me just say that if you’re annoyed by the young calling merchandise merch, or other similar syllabic reductions, then congratulations, you’ve lived a long life. Language changes some with each generation, some more than others. You can live in and hang onto the past if you’d like to, but imposing that past on others is not particularly productive.
Which is sort of the issue the camera makers face. Even the latest and best mirrorless camera is pretty 20th century in most ways. Hierarchical, indirect control, clumsy and crude communication, and even a high reliance on sneaker net. If you think you’re going to continue to sell that to those that grew up with an iPhone in their cradle and an iPad hanging above it, you’re going to eventually fail. To align to my previous sentence, the future is distributed, direct, and communicative.
I started understanding that fully back in the early 1990’s, when my friend, investor, and sometimes compatriot in code Alan Cooper began putting together his seminal book, About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design (now in its fourth edition). In his work that resulted in Visual Basic and in his help with some of my products, including Tycho TableMaker, his emphasis was in more directly linking user intention with product interaction.
I’ve seen camera companies dabble at the periphery of all three things I mentioned above, so let me bring up a few of those.
Hierarchy shows up in the menu systems and controls of our cameras. Menus went from scattered (really bad) to organized (better) to, in a few cases, growing scattered again (really bad). Fujifilm went from modest and organized to sprawling and disorganized. Sony went from head-scratching to iconic (NEX) to more head-scratching sprawl to finally, a highly hierarchical organization. Nikon is somewhere in between, sometimes pushing a little more hierarchy into the added options, but sometimes—I’ll looking at you Tone mode—creating new anarchy to once settled structures.
If I were to tell you “set your camera to only take images (in focus) of when the hummingbird approached the flower” what would you do? What settings would you need to change, and where are they all located? That’s what you, as a user, want to do. That’s not something you can directly set in the camera. Nikon currently comes the closest with Auto capture, but if you ever dropped into that labyrinth, you’ll know that you’re in for a world of brain hurt. Just get the hummingbird, damn it!
In all that hierarchy we lose directness. Fujifilm recently decided that you needed to directly change Film Simulation, so created a dial for it. Okay. Not something I change much, but I guess some do. However, you can’t just bring up a new dial to directly control every function. Oh, wait, you can do what Leica did, and put a button in the middle of a dial so that you can select what the dial controls, then dial in your choice. Much more direct, and much more flexible.
Nikon goes further than Fujifilm, and just assumes you want to change the look of your image based upon subject. Thus, their Auto Picture Control tries to figure out if the camera is looking at a person, landscape, or something else, and adjusts color, tone, and more based upon that. That’s also indirect, as the camera may not be doing what you actually would have directed it to.
And I’ve hammered the camera companies on communication with other devices incessently for the last 17 years, to the point of even going to Tokyo and presenting what needed to be done to a group of camera executives back in 2011. Seven years later we saw their first attempt. It still isn’t right today, but at least they’re dabbling.
The problem is that these problems were all known a couple of decades ago. That’s long enough for another whole generation of folk to make their way out of the womb all the way to college. And that group grew up with a smartphone, had a tablet or computer at school, has been on social media from the time they could read, and is now looking around for better tools for what they do daily.
As I’ve noted several times recently, the Chinese companies are starting to understand this new generation of customers. Indeed, many of their product designers are at the head-end of that generation in age (or of the previous generation, which had their feet in both the old and new world). If the Japanese companies continue to just do boomer-friendly cameras, they’ll be pushed aside pretty quickly. They’re aware of that, as I see them posturing and again dabbling at the fringes, but they’re going to need to move faster now or else find themselves without new customers at all.
It’s time for a new approach to cameras. Not one that is bogged down in promulgating the film SLR to its extreme, but one that is image centric, direct, and communicative. This is exactly what the smartphones have been doing, and guess what, it’s working. The iPhone 16 isn’t particularly better as a phone than, say, my old iPhone X (what’s with the generation that was only a letter?). But it’s a better camera than my iPhone 15.
Yes, smartphones are more convenient as a carry everywhere camera because you’re already carrying them. But the real reason that smartphones have been collapsing the camera market is that they’re iterating better and faster for the youngest generations while the dedicated camera makers have been slowing their iteration and still targeting the oldest generation.
Tokyo needs to delib the cam and join the next gen.
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