Category Archives: Photography

The future of ‘serious’ cameras

Cameras

Exceptional progress.


The Panasonic DMC-FZ1000. Click the image for the interactive Panny site.

This Panasonic fixed zoom lens DSLR is one of a handful of superzooms on the market (Sony’s RX10 is another) which heralds the demise not only of flapping mirror DSLRs but also the day of interchangeable lenses. It differs materially from earlier superzooms damned with small aperture and highly variable speed lenses, poor optical quality and minuscule sensors.

The sensor in this body is 1″ diagonally, and compares to the 1.80″ of FF and 1.25″ of MFT. Given that MFT (my reference is Panny’s GX7 which I use) easily prints to 18″ x 24″ the 1″ sensor in this body should be much the same, being fractionally smaller. And while the lens’s maximum aperture of f/2.8 drops to f/4 at the long end, only the churlish would complain once the realization dawns that the zoom range is a stunning 24-400mm. Early test site reports suggest the lens is excellent. All of this in a 1.2lb. package with 4K video included into the bargain for some $900. Stunning progress in machine and sensor design and construction.

Meanwhile, the duopoly of Nikon and Canon (no one can take Sony seriously as a pro FF competitor for their paucity of lenses and consumer image) insist on tinkering at the margins with their FF DSLR designs. They will milk those margins for as long as they can until one day they wake up and find their customers have left for greener pastures. By complacently avoiding ‘creative destruction’ they are sowing the seeds of their own demise.

Given the rapid advance in sensors I would expect a camera of like look and heft to sport an f/2.8 20-200mm world class lens with an EFT and 4K capability in a year or two, all at the cost of one used C or N ‘old tech’ DSLR FF body and with no more need for interchangeable lenses.

It was 7 years ago today

iPhone

Tech product of the century.


Mock ups of forthcoming iPhones.

The iPhone went on sale 7 years ago today and transformed a flailing enterprise into the world’s largest capitalization public company.

After its recent 7:1 split, the stock has risen from $20 to $90 in that time:


AAPL since the iPhone came to market. Up almost 400%.

I well recall watching Steve Jobs’s earlier product demonstration and it was breathtakingly good. I bought my iPhone on July 1, 2007 from the San Luis Obispo Apple Store – no crowds – and have never looked back. Back then there was no AppStore and what few apps there were ran over the air as widgets, slow and clunky. Look at the AppStore today. One million apps and counting and a like number of jobs created in China. Trillions in wealth have been created, whether for the manufacturers, Apple, its investors, developers, serial thieves (Samsung, Google, etc.) and the many connected factions. An event comparable in magnitude to the creation of the railroads, the automobile and air travel.

It has since leaked just how early the prototype Jobs displayed really was. Much of the presentation was faked, many functions did not work but the master showman got away with it and somehow Apple managed to bring a perfected device to market by the end of June.

That first iPhone had scant memory, no camera and cost an astounding $600, though Apple later issued $200 rebate coupons to early buyers like me, as well as to the unwashed herds of unemployed who camped out at Apple stores across the nation. AT&T (Cingular back then) was the only carrier choice for years. The telco subsidy model had not yet been crafted and, once in place, the price dropped to $200 with AT&T paying AAPL the difference of $400 and recovering the cost through inflated monthly use charges. When it comes to lack of integrity you need look no further than US telcos. When the two year subsidy contract expires do they drop their charges as they are no longer paying for the hardware? Of course not. Thus only a fool refuses to upgrade his iPhone every two years as the old one can be sold for $400 to some Russkie on eBay and the latest technology procured for $200. Apple of course loves this pricing/subsidy model for obvious reasons.

I can’t wait to get my larger iPhone this fall. Apple has been slow to market here, but you can bet the product will be every bit as perfect as was the original, 7 years ago. And in two years I’ll be selling mine.

Disclosure: Long AAPL bull call spreads.

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Photographers, Photographs, Photography

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Apple kills Aperture

Lightroom

Hardly surprising.


Or not ….

Apple has announced it has ceased development of Aperture.

Any Aperture user must have noticed how poorly supported Apple’s flagship photo processing app was – now or earlier. I migrated from Aperture to Lightroom six years ago and that was no fun. I hate to think what can go wrong today. My change to Adobe was not motivated by features but by Aperture’s simply awful speed in every task imaginable, not to mention incredible file size bloat. Unless you had the latest CPUs, GPUs and disk drives, you were going to have to watch beachballs. By contrast, LR makes very low demands on hardware – it did back then and with many great enhancements over the past few years, continues to be undemanding. The Highlight and Shadow sliders introduced in LR4 alone would have any rational user abandoning Aperture.


What passes for file structure in Aperture – a blithering mess.

The sad part of this is that Adobe loses a competitor, though if pushed I would guess that Aperture had less than 5% of the Lightroom market. With the number of PC and Mac users roughly equal and Apeture running on Macs only, that makes for a 75% LR market share if Aperture had even 50% of the Mac market. Factor in the poor product support, a lack of timely development – especially with RAW support for new cameras (how hard can that be?) – a falling feature set compared with LR and a parent more interested in selling cell phones, and the writing was plainly on the wall. I have sympathy for all those great photographers heavily invested in Aperture who will now spend aeons converting to something else, rather than spending time taking pictures. And that conversion, I am prepared to bet, will be high risk and whether overlay files for RAW images will even be properly preserved is unknown at this time.

The bigger concern is how long will LR remain with a stand-alone option? You want to trust Adobe? A company which cannot run its cloud securely and cannot even safeguard the code to Photoshop from thieves – their crown jewel? Not to mention your credit card data.

Found, at last!

Cameras

A dream come true.

I can now disclose that this is the very camera I used to take that fabulous image of White Birches in honor of Saint Ansel. For the non-English grammarians amongst us, it’s “Adams’s” not “Adam’s”, unless the real owner was one Bert Adam, in which case it should sell for $19.95. About what it’s worth, come to think of it.

As for Ms. DeCock, no idea who she is, but a name change is definitely called for.

I expect bidding to start at $1mm (the Adam, not the Cock) with the winner a LuLa subscriber ever hopeful of actually taking a good landscape snap.