Dumb Things Camera Companies are Still Doing

>> Took me an hour-plus to download the timelapse app.

Oh wow. I had the same experience. In my case I just wanted to update the existing apps I had installed. Apparently you need a Sony entertainment account to install apps (it must be a new requirement as I never had one when I installed the apps in the first place).

I tried for 15 minutes to create an account using the camera.

    * My A6000 doesn't have a touch screen so I had to use the camera's wheels to operate the on-screen keyboard
    * The account creation page is non-responsive.

You would think Sony Entertainment Network's account login/creation webpage would be responsive so it would be usable within the camera OR there would be a completely different page. NO, it is the same desktop, non-responsive page including Google's painful anti-bot script which requires me to select 10 images that represent street signs using the camera wheel.

Amazingly, I could actually use the A6000 to create an account, but it kept erroring out when submitting. Finally, I realized it would be easier to just use my laptop and to my surprise it still failed because their account creation was down. About 10 attempts later it still failed with a slightly different error, but I still received the account creation success email (?) and was able to login fine after that.

Edit: Formatting.

From comments here, you can see the field of premium photography equipment is about to undergo some kind of massive disruptive consolidation and reorganization. Almost anyone who comments here is a prospective customer, yet we see so much fragmentation. Some customers just ask for a box with a great sensor, and plan to process the images elsewhere. Some ask for a retro-experience, or an open source photography platform, or an incremental improvement to existing products. Some ask for a high-end consumer experience like a Smartphone, or tighter smartphone integration. Maybe a smart equipment company would organize its products around those markets, instead of struggling to segment too finely using old concepts of cost and performance.

The traditional photography equipment business is in a world of trouble because, as others point out, software is replacing physics as well as the familiar mechanical human interface. This requires a lot of expensive software engineers and some computer science expertise, and the rate of change is only increasing now. For example consider how machine learning is affecting image processing, like this method of pixel-based image synthesis: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aayushb/pixelNN/. Having lost the low end, DSLR companies can't amortize the cost of ambitious engineering projects over any significant volume of inexpensive products. Agree with the article by Thom Hogan - if anything it doesn't go far enough to convey the extent to which top line camera companies are out of touch with how the digital world has changed.

He is talking about separate monolight on a boom or stand. Always on light rather than flash. He’s not talking about the LED on the phone

I personally wouldn't care as much about that being on the camera if there was an instant and automatic way to transfer it to my phone (e.g. via bluetooth). I'd find it to be more useful that way.

I must say, I have a small Leica camera running Android and I totally adore it (CM-1).

It meets 9.5 of the 11 features the author is requesting but those aren't why I like it. It's also why I find his argument to be flawed.

The best parts of owning it aren't any of the authors points. It's that it solves a class of problem not addressed by the market. It fits the bill for: "ultimate international travel camera". It gives me: 1] nice photos (raw, 1" sensor) 2] that I can process immediately (runs Android, Photoshop, Lightroom, Instagram) and 3] publish directly (4G connection, WiFi N) in a 4] compact form factor (bit thicker than a smartphone). I'm sad to see this category not take off but I'm glad I have one for myself. As an added benefit its great for China and Taiwan where I can still have my primary iPhone and use my camera as WiFi hotspot to get cheap data with a local sim.

It was done as a design exercise with Panasonic similar to the Hasselblad True with Motorola. It's far from perfect (design exercises usually aren't).

But. And that's a big 'B'. This camera let's me solve my photo problem (How do I take nice photos and share them while on the go) in way fewer steps and with less equipment than the mainstream camera solutions and with better quality than smartphones. (I want the photos to be "Nice" remember? Also 1" sensor! Raw! )

The author is in effect pushing for more features. That's not how you solve your users problems. What the camera industry needs to do is diff assumptions made about how camera's were used when these platforms were created (D series, EOS series) and how they are being used today - then solve for the new problem classes that emerged. Not tack on more features and higher performance as the author is suggesting. In the former case you push for the ability to run Photoshop and Instagram on the camera and publish mobiley, in the later case you push for faster bus speeds and more stable camera mounts.