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Dumb Things Camera Companies are Still Doing

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Re: Dumb Things Camera Companies are Still Doing

#121

Post by danmaz74 »

CrystalGamma wrote: post #88
bryanlarsen wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that you're often hand holding a camera, being lighter is a significant advantage, it can often be the difference between a stable or a blurred shot. And good plastics are plastic in the traditional sense of the word: if you drop them, they'll absorb the force by deforming and then spring back into place. Metals deform permanently. In a car that's an advantage, you can just hammer it back into place. With a pre…

> And good plastics are plastic in the traditional sense of the word: if you drop them, they'll absorb the force by deforming and then spring back into place. That's not what I was taught plastic meant. I was taught both plastic and elastic materials deform under force, but the elastic ones (not the plastic ones) return to their original form once the force is gone …

"Plastic" actually stands for "thermoplastic", meaning they can be easily deformed when hot. At normal temperatures, a thermoplastic material can be pretty elastic.

Re: Dumb Things Camera Companies are Still Doing

#122

Post by arghwhat »

petepete wrote: post #112
arghwhat wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. 1/4" is a common, but terrible option. The suggestion is to replace it with a builtin plate for the current status-quo, the common Arca-Swiss mount. 2. Optical remotes aren't for selfies. Smartphones on stupid sticks are for selfies. 3. Most new cameras have WiFi. It doesn't affect battery life when you're not using it. They're just usually really slow, so picture upload/sync that should take 1 min tops take 1 hou…

Duracell make a really wide range of camera batteries that all come with a 3 year warranty. http://www.duracelldirect.co.uk/

Others do too (Watson, Wasabi, ...), but they're all made by reversing the bloody DRM, and those companies state that they're having problems reverse-engineering the DRM of the newer batteries (the actual battery management/protection circuitry is entirely standardized, and costs nothing).

LP-E17 is an example of a still non-reversed battery. Duracell doesn't have one, and those that do sell third-party clones pretend to be the DC adapter battery dummy to make things work, resulting in no battery gauge.

Why would camera manufacturers do that? So they can force you into paying 60 USD for the extra batteries you need to have. Preferably multiple times, as you change camera bodies.

I would imagine that if they lowered their crazy income margin, people would buy more original batteries, even if they kept the DRM. Instead, people buy good third-party batteries for 1/6th of the price, sometimes giving up on the battery gauge to do so.

Re: Dumb Things Camera Companies are Still Doing

#123

Post by wjnc »

tpeo wrote: post #93
jamesrcole wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not choosing to compete with smartphones - smartphones are eating into their market thus forcing competition. As smartphone cameras have improved the more they've eaten into the market. Note that this argument does not require that all users of their cameras would ever consider using a smartphone instead.

What market? Smartphones and high end cameras aren't really comparable. They compete in the sense that they're both able to take pictures, but they don't compete across all possible dimensions. I mean, I could be wrong, but these don't look like substitute goods. Smartphones and crappy cameras certainly are, but not not smartphones and high-end cameras. But using cheaper parts does make cameras crappier, so doing so…

The companies historically creating cameras had a business model creating low to high end cameras. That's unravelling. Coping with quickly changing markets is hard. So even though smartphones and high end cameras aren't compatible and not substitute goods, the institution creating those cameras suffer with no good alternative as of yet. Hence the movement towards crappy high end cameras.

Re: Dumb Things Camera Companies are Still Doing

#124

Post by arghwhat »

taejo wrote: post #64
madshiva wrote: post #10

1/4" tripod socket is the best common option. I use it. No point there because the user don't use it. Don't undertand why remove a standard? Optical remotes? I don't take selfie. I press the button. Wifi? lol, no thanks. I want a camera not a phone and I don't want 1 hour of battery. Battery problem? where? just buy battery pack...

> Optical remotes? I don't take selfie. I press the button. The OP had a specific complaint about cameras not having an IR receiver at the back , i.e., for non-selfies. Remotes are useful for bulb shots, for reducing camera shake, and many other things.

I think he was mostly joking about it being for non-selfies.

Depending on exact location, the accepted angles should be slightly less than 180 degrees in front of the camera—you don't need to be anywhere near the subject, unless you got a fisheye mounted.

It's just a bit silly that the default approach wasn't RF, rather than optical, even if they put receivers on all sides of the camera. Some new cameras have BLE though, which is nice and solves most problems (although I prefer physical remotes to poorly written apps).

Re: Dumb Things Camera Companies are Still Doing

#125

Post by occultist_throw »

dom0 wrote: post #109
jorvi wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you drop an iPhone hard enough it wil dent. Drop a polycarbonate phone: no problem. Windows phone wasn't a great OS, but the Lumia line were absolute tanks.

PC is a very impact resistant material, but you can also form it cold, a bit like mild steel, actually.

So is nylon. But nylon is hydroscopic, and thus not well suited for electronics applications.

I do prefer ABS-PC or ASA for a lot of my more-adverse condition cases. They're much more heat resilient, and chemical/UV resistant in ASA's case.

Re: Dumb Things Camera Companies are Still Doing

#126

Post by sunsetandlabrea »

mysterypie wrote: post #51
tqkxzugoaupvwqr wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like an iPhone with a bigger camera chip. I don’t think Apple will venture into dedicated camera equipment. The iPhone camera is one of the big selling points and keeps people upgrading. Apple will not sacrifice their cash cow for a comparatively niche market. A dedicated device also goes against the unification that Apple seems to pursue.

> Apple will not sacrifice their cash cow for a comparatively niche market. I never understood that reasoning. As an individual, I can't simultaneously develop 10 different products, but a large company sitting on billions in cash could develop 1000 niche products simultaneously. In fact, some large companies (Procter & Gamble, 3M, General Electric) have thousands or tens of thousands of products. To use your Apple e…

I think this is slightly changing at Apple, and in my opinion will slowly make things much worse.

One of the first things Steve Jobs on returning to Apple did was to cull what he felt were unnecessary products, and product groups. You could argue that Apple is large enough now to have thousands of products, but what was clear is that Jobs had the defining vision and no single person can have a single defining vision of thousands of products.

To use your example you cannot create a camera division and not allow inter-group communication because you are then building products in exactly the same way as someone like Sony. You end up with disconnected systems, nothing integrates together well and in-fighting between the groups.

I remember looking for a 32" Sony TV a decade or so ago, and there were 5 or 6 different models all at slightly different price brackets and with different discounts everything became muddled. Sony of course were simply capturing every portion of the market they could, from the person who wanted the cheapest to the person who wants the best.

I'd like to see Apple re-focus, make single models of iPhone, iPad, MacBook, iMac and the Apple Watch. Stop trying to capture as much of the market as possible and just focus on a limited number of highly integrated devices.

Re: Dumb Things Camera Companies are Still Doing

#127

Post by madshiva »

taejo wrote: post #64
madshiva wrote: post #10

1/4" tripod socket is the best common option. I use it. No point there because the user don't use it. Don't undertand why remove a standard? Optical remotes? I don't take selfie. I press the button. Wifi? lol, no thanks. I want a camera not a phone and I don't want 1 hour of battery. Battery problem? where? just buy battery pack...

> Optical remotes? I don't take selfie. I press the button. The OP had a specific complaint about cameras not having an IR receiver at the back , i.e., for non-selfies. Remotes are useful for bulb shots, for reducing camera shake, and many other things.

Then you have see by yourself that IR receiver are for selfie if they are on front... It strange when you are right people still downvote you.

Sorry if the majority of people buy DSLR without using it correctly. It's like owning a Apple, or a Gaming computer but don't understand nothing at all or do it by trends. Same apply with camera where everybody know everything.

Majority of people in the street have DSLR and take selfie by hand. You know now why it sucks.

Re: Dumb Things Camera Companies are Still Doing

#128

Post by shezi »

Steve44 wrote: post #40
dharma1 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.red.com/learn/red-101/global-rolling-shutter

Interesting looking article, thank you & I'll read that later. An example of a different shutter mechanism producing an odd effect, this picture https://www.flickr.com/photos/sorenragsdale/3192314056/ shows that what the camera sees isn't always the truth!

There are really nice video explanations for rolling shutter effects on very fast things by Smarter Every Day[1] and standupmaths[2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNVtMmLlnoE

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP1elMR5qjc

Re: Dumb Things Camera Companies are Still Doing

#129

Post by shezi »

tolien wrote: post #25
Viper007Bond wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point and shoot did that like 5-10 years ago. Crazy that DSLRs don't.

They do (or at least, my Canon EOS 7D mark 2 does). However, leaving the GPS switched on significantly reduces battery life.

To be fair, GPS hardware is power-hungry in all devices. Even on cell-phones, GPS eats battery.

Here's a Google Engineer's word on the issue: https://www.itworld.com/article/2833266/mobile/why-gps-eats-...

Re: Dumb Things Camera Companies are Still Doing

#130

Post by agravier »

pawelk wrote: post #30
agravier wrote: post #5

Tangentially related: I find that being able to run android apps on my camera (not my phone with its tiny lens) is extremely useful. I bought the Samsung galaxy camera 2, but I don't know of any other such product.

From a cursory Google search: Nikon COOLPIX S800c, Panasonic Lumix DMC-CM10. So the big players are investing in Android. This just shows how different users have different needs. I do not want my camera to be "smart", I want it to measure the amount of light that comes trough the lens, tell me if it's too much or too little, then capture and save the data on some storage. I can take it from there. My ideal solution…

Thanks for the search Pawel, for some reason these didn't appear in my searches.

Yes, different needs. Actually the reason why I want android is mostly that I automate the upload of new photos to Amazon.

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