Category Archives: Cameras

Things that go ‘Click’

Olympus fades

Cameras

Camera business sold.




The announcement.

The buyer is the same that bought Sony’s Vaio laptop business a few years ago. Ever seen one since? No, I thought not. And that will likely be the fate of Olympus cameras, too.

What is surprising is that this took a full decade after Olympus perpetrated one of the largest accounting frauds in history, hiding $1.5 billion in investment losses. Japan Inc. covered for that but could not cover for a failing sector – the stand alone camera business.

Over the years Oly has made some excellent innovative cameras, including the half-frame Pen F with the side flapping mirror and the compact OM1 in the film era.




The excellent OM1 – small, quiet and with a great selection of lenses.

But the failure of Olympus is not the result of accounting fraud. It’s the same cause that will see Pentax, Ricoh, Sigma, Panasonic and probably Nikon exit the camera business in the next few years, once corporate pride and loss of face are dealt with. The reason is a catastrophic failure to innovate. The high prices of even entry level DSLRs or mirrorless cameras, typically north of $600, puts them in square competition with the iPhone and its outstanding camera. The computational photography aspects of the cell phone’s camera moxy include variable depth of field, exceptional night imaging and the ability to instantly share images with the world. No traditional camera body, be it FF, APS-C or MFT can offer those features. And Apple is just getting started with its in-house designed Axx series of CPUs, now migrating to their laptops and desktops. And Apple’s in-house designs make it very much harder for the serial thieves at Samsung to keep up, fair reward for their crimes.

The other survivors? Canon, for whom cameras are a small revenue center and Leica, which changed its business model years ago. They now no longer make cameras, focusing on jewelry.

So goodbye, Olympus, and hullo, iPhone. It’s time to move on.

Back to the future

Cameras, iPhone

Minolta pointed the way.

Given that they have yet to have an idea not stolen from someone else – meanly mostly from Apple – I spend little time in reading about anything from Samsung.

But their most recent theft is surprising only for how long it took them to think of it, for their latest ‘high-end’ phone (there’s an oxymoron for you) steals from a 2002 inspired design by Minolta in its 2mp Dimage digital point and shoot.



The elegant Minolta Dimage of 2002.

This elegant design had one truly original feature, in addition to its neat packaging in that small square case. It used a periscope optical zoom, vertically oriented inside the case, with light rays deflected through the associated right angle with a mirrored prism. This allowed the incorporation of an otherwise lengthy optical path within the tight confines of the body, a small 3.3″ x 2.8″ x 0.8″. For comparison, my iPhone 11 Pro in its case measures 5.5″ x 3″ x 0.5″.

This cutaway view shows how it worked:



Illustration of the ‘folded’ optical path.

We can expect to see this sort of thing in a future iPhone as modern technology has made things even smaller 18 years after Minolta’s inspired design. Optical zooms beat digital zooms as there’s no pixel degredation as magnifications increase.

Now if there’s a criticism to be leveled at the iPhone 11 Pro – in addition to its poor ergonomics – it’s that there’s no lens at the long end. Sure, there’s a 10x digital zoom, but you can do that just as easily in Lightroom, with all the attendant issues. So you are stuck with ultrawide, very wide and normal, call it 12mm, 24mm and 50mm FFE, all superb but none of them long.

So if Apple can add one of those ‘periscope’ optical zooms and make the 50mm a 50-200mm optic, well, that’s going to be all she wrote for the few remaining sales of silly-priced and even sillier-sized DSLRs.

Fire sale

Cameras, Hardware, Photography

Bad omen

What do Porsches, iPhones and Leicas have in common? Luxury brands all, that’s certain. But what you will never find is these premier products selling at a 50% discount for a recently introduced and still current model.

So when I saw this yesterday, the message was clear:




Panny fire sale

Think this is a bargain? Think that parts will long be available for a camera from a maker which just sold its sensor division after years of struggle? Think the iPhone and computational photography does not rule the roost? Think that cell phone camera technology does not do 80% of what the big digital body with its clumsy lenses does? Plus another 100% which the whopper cannot do at all?

Think again.

It’s a new world for camera hardware. The Panny occupies the old world and will not be there much longer. My Panny MFT bodies and lenses? Sold the day after I bought the iPhone 11 Pro.

How to destroy a legacy

Cameras

Give your brand to the Russkies.




The unspeakable in pursuit of the unbeatable.

Great move, Leica. Have the sausage fingered Russkies cannibalize your brand, with your permission. I recall selling Zenit SLRs as a kid working holiday jobs in camera stores in the 1960s. Not only do they remain the worst made machine I have ever handled, like their makers the product literally stank, once you removed it from the box. At least, unlike this piece of detritus, they were cheap.

That Kraut Commie Mark was right. Capitalism will hang itself with its own rope. Heck, there may even be morons out there who will shell out $7,000 for this garbage. Leica, what are you thinking of? Maybe it’s time for a medical check up for the CEO?

Of current interest

Cameras, Photography

After the clearance.

I made mention, a while back, that my gear cabinet now looks like this:





The superb camera(s) in the iPhone 11 Pro had seen all my MFT and FF gear off to eBay before all that hardware became so many worthless door stops. In terms of dynamic range, versatility, image quality, night mode, Deep Fusion, tons of computational magic and compactness, nothing compares to this superb camera …. which also happens to do lots of other things when called for. Your DSLR is as sophisticated as a hammer in comparison.

I have no regrets about that decision as I am not a collector, a species which I have never understood. Why you would want a machine in the home which is never used for its intended purpose beats me, and always has. Further, all those unused shutters and gear trains will die almost as quickly as the electronic components in modern hardware, leaving you with useless junk.

So the other day I found myself thinking what of the hardware on the market holds any interest for this photographer after, that is, upcoming iPhone Pro releases.

Well, one obvious choice is the medium format Hasselblad which weds a decent sized sensor with large pixels (meaning low noise) in a compact package.




50mp and little change from $9k with the 45mm lens.

The camera is light. Weighing in at 2.6lbs with the 45mm (35mm FFE) lens – it’s a relative featherweight for this sensor format – it has no flapping mirror, a near silent shutter and auto-focus. Reviews suggest it’s not that fast to use so studio and landscape genres suggest themselves as prime subjects.

The other camera of interest is the Leica M10-D, a street snapper where Leitz has mercifully deleted the LCD screen every camera seems to come with, allowing the snapper to get on with the job of pressing the button. That’s totally in keeping with the original Leica M aesthetic and design intent back to the M3 in 1954 and earlier.




24mp and a whopping $11,290 + tax with the 35mm Summicron.

In all my years of using digital bodies I have never used the LCD screen for anything other than formatting the card. If you cannot visualize what you are photographing until after the event and need instant confirmation, well that’s fine, but not my working method. Viewfinder, focus, compose, click, move on. Check the technical details later. 2.1 lbs for the combination which is almost as much as the Hasselblad.

Think about that.

But the Leica has a disabling feature for these aging eyes. No auto focus. In this day and age paying $3k for an MF lens with a rangefinder of middling accuracy is simply not on.

As for all the rest of them, all those tedious DSLRs and mirrorless bodies with no computational intelligence and nothing to distinguish one from another …. yawn.