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What Happened To the Photography Industry In 2014?
Iddo Genuth writes 2013 was the worst year for the photography industry in decades — but what happened in 2014 and will the upcoming blitz of cameras (including the super resolution Canon 5D S with 50MP sensor to be announced tomorrow) change everything in 2015? The official numbers published by CIPA (the Camera & Imaging Products Association) are out and they tell a story of a struggling photography industry trying to stay afloat in a sea of smartphones. Will it survive? This is the big question all of the photography manufacturers are facing over the past two years, and eventually what does it all mean for us as consumers? One thing that tiny phones lack, no matter their megapixel count, is the space for heavy glass or large sensors, which seems to leave a lot of room in the market even for small(ish) but dedicated cameras.
"The iPhone camera quality already surpasses many lower end dedicated cameras, and is so convenient it surpasses many mid range cameras too."
Care to share your iPhone photos with us?
"a smartphone is also an infinite number of possible cameras in terms of interface, with connectivity literally no camera made yet can match " :)
Because that's what matters the most!
Somehow I doubt you will share any photos
The megapixel count has already been irrelevant for 5 years or more, even on actual digital CAMERAS! Any astute consumer will note that the higher-end cameras by each manufacturer have FEWER megapixels than the entry level models in the series. For the entry-level, megapixel count is a dick-measuring contest to attract naive and ignorant shoppers.
Personally, I think the difference has just become too small between inexpensive (truly cheap gear still sounds cheap) and high end, especially in sound gear. I bought a mid-range sound system for my home setup (47" 3D TV, 32" monitor, hooked into my computer, finally able to cut the cord, thanks to Popcorn time filling my Wife's series needs, Yea!!!) and it sounds better than my old system
I have a pair of vintage B&O speakers, amp, tuner and platter from the 70's that I spent an obscene amount of money for. Outdone by a $1700 Polk audio TSX440T system. Now, I realize the speakers have degraded over time, as has my hearing (56 yo) but I think this system would of given it a run for its money had it been available back in the day. (My aging B&O system now is in the family room and still sounds great, With the resurgence of vinyl, I really wish the platter had survived, but it died 20 years ago and was prohibitively expensive to repair.)
I think you really have to go with professional flat response speakers to have any significant improvement over the midrange consumer market today.
Off to mow the lawn and chase off pesky young'uns.
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
Here you go. Albeit not my pics.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
My daughter is presently in India and was in Africa before that. She has been using her iPhone 5s to take pictures and basically it looks like she is just scanning them from NatGeo.(She isn't a natgeo photog) They are completely stunning. She also has a DLSR with her but she hasn't sent any photos because that is a pain. With the iPhone all she has to do is find Wifi and up they go.
The key test here is that she doesn't have a SIM card in that phone. So she is literally using it primarily for its camera and using it in preference to a hard core DLSR that she is very familiar with.
So while I am not a fan of stupid features in a camera(I'm looking at you sepia tone) I think that the critical thing that the camera companies need to do is to make sure that they are focusing on a few key features. One is to make it way way easier to get the pictures off the camera. I don't want this to be a dedicated software thing or some kind of crap where they have an online service where they try to have a value add but something where I can walk into a wifi hotspot and start sending them wherever the hell I want.
The next feature set I want will take advantage of the larger lenses. So night vision from hell. Maybe thermal vision would be cool. Super duper slow mo and I am talking like 200 fps minimum and ideally reaching out to 1000 frames. These are things that a tiny lens camera just can't do.
The last thing to keep in mind is that the number of professionals using almost any given camera is pretty much zero. So have a pro mode that is off by default. I will never set the ISO, I will never pretty much set anything like that. So keep those features hidden. A great example of this stupid catering to professionals with a camera that isn't professional is a Sony Cybershot that I have. It will record mov(or something common) up to around 720 but at 1080 it goes to some stupid DVD ready format. Who the hell uses DVDs? Basically it just means that to use the HD format I then have to upload the videos and convert the mess to mp4 or something from the last decade. What a pain. I would not have purchased the camera had I known that the 1080 format was stupid. On top of that I need to have a charger to charge the battery. No USB plug. It does have some uber-proprietary Sony plug for something. So basically did the Sony designers even know about the Home PC when they made this camera?
Here is a winning feature: The real camera's photographs show up on your phone's built in photo album when it is nearby so that you can then do what you want with them. Not just what the MBAs at the camera company will allow you to do. Everyone has a phone that they know how to use well. So take the awesome pictures on the camera and do the rest with the phone. Probably way better than trying to put android on the camera and just making a crappy android interface. I don't need crappy version of instagram on my camera.
We shot a lot of slides when I was a kid. When I first saw kodachrome it blew my mind. I wish there was anything today that could compare. I have a 4k monitor and view 10MP pictures on it but its not even close. I guess i'll have to wait for the 8k projectors.
Watch this and be blown away:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRzXgSMbBu0
Color gamut, contrast and gamma are better on a calibrated CRT then on a calibrated LCD.
Amen.
When you calibrate a CRT, you shift an analog envelope, and every color between the color points you adjust shift smoothly.
When you calibrate an LCD, you shift a digital value to one that already existed, and lose a boatload of the digital color nuances between the color points, making many of them the same color.
ANY calibration of an LCD means decreasing the number of colors. The "xxx% NTSC/AdobeRGB" gamut value becomes false the moment you adjust it, dropping through the floor.
Plus, there are colors that an LCD still cannot display at all, like warm yellow. You would need a negative blue value to approximate them given the temperatures of R, G and B in LCD displays.
Don't believe me? Take a paper McDonalds potato chip container. Try to match the red and yellow on it on an LCD display, comparing it to the physical colors.
Even on the best LCDs, that won't work. The best you can do is a perceptual approximation, using brain trickery by shifting other colors so the brain compensates by thinking there is more warm red than there actually is. But that only works as long as you only look at the screen. Hold up something that really is that color, and it won't match at all. Or do a printout, and the result will be truly wrong, and that's not the printer's fault.
CRTs are also limited, but not nearly as badly as LCDs.
CPU performance has pretty much plateaued since nahelem/sandy bridge, with core 2 not being that far behind that. All the gains from die shrinks are currently being thrown into the GPU half. The difference between an Intel 3000 GPU on sandy bridge and haswell's 4400 is immense and that's just two generations and not counting Iris Pro.