We seem to be in the Throwaway Kitchen Sink phase of cameras now. The notion that a higher-end camera is a high quality tool has given way to "add more features" so that the user throws away a perfectly fine camera and buys the new. Sometimes these things are disguised as useful additions, but the relevant questions are "why wasn't that feature important before?", "why are we getting it now?", and "did this really obsolete my current camera?"
This is the way the Japanese-driven consumer electronics business has always run since the early days of HiFi equipment: start with a relatively simple but well-defined product, and when the steam runs out on that add bells and whistles and convince the public that they need them so much they should give up their old one.
It's tricky, because sometimes the additions are useful (though why they weren't on the original model is a good question). Let's take the Coolpix P7100, for example. The additions are a new front control dial (useful), a tiltable LCD (useful), AE-L works in Movie mode (the P7100 is not very good at movies, so not particularly useful), and some new special effects modes. We also get (claimed, at least) better performance in basic things like focus, menus, and writing to cards.
There are a couple of ways to look at the P7000 to P7100 progression:
- New Model Year. "New" is a term that has specific legal meaning. You can't claim a product is new after a certain predefined period of time (varies a bit around the world). New is a magical marketing word, so you want to be able to say something is new even if it's not. Auto makers claim a vehicle is a 2012 "new" model even if there aren't any visible or tangible changes from the 2011 "old" model, for instance. Even one significant change makes the word new available. The P7100 has an extra control and a tiltable screen, so it must obviously be a new model.
- Iteration. With product cycles so short (12-18 months in the consumer models), some things don't get done that the company might have wanted to do. So they push them back to the next iteration of the product. The P7100 is claimed to write faster when recording raw files, focus more reliably, and respond faster in the menus. Obviously, someone worked on the P7000 firmware in the last year.
My problem is that neither of these ideas work unless the potential user can learn to rely upon them. We have to intuit from what the companies do to predict the future. Nikon's been all over the board with their high-end Coolpix in the last five years, with the P5000 to P7100 transition telling us different things with each generation. Go further back, and gyrations are even more pronounced.
Meanwhile, the user is faced with a choice: keep what I've got or buy something new? When the iteration is low between models, it makes it easier for a user to consider alternatives, and at the P7100's price point, there are a lot of alternatives. Nikon is doing nothing to establish brand satisfaction (I hope I'm wrong on this). For example, since much of the difference here is down to firmware, why not have a US$19 firmware update option for existing users? Oh, right, they didn't think about how that would work when they did the original, so they have no real way of doing it. Okay, how about a US$49 "checkup" that updates the firmware? That, plus a more predictable future for the P#### cameras would solve a lot of the dissatisfaction issues.
Meanwhile, Sony, too, is practicing the Kitchen Sink approach. Is there anything missing in the A77 (other than an optical viewfinder)? This is a top end camera, and so obviously it should have a top end level of features, but one thing that struck me in reading all the Sony marketing material was that there was a lot of emphasis on the bells and whistles and not nearly as much on the quality side. When quality was mentioned, it was obviously hyperbole ("flawless image quality"). I counted ten trademarked marketing names in their short press release and I lost track of the buzzword count because I ran out of fingers and toes to count them on, even though I had rounded up all the neighbors and their pets to use for this purpose.
The overall impression I get from Sony's marketing is "more," not "better." That's despite the fact that they use terms like "comparible to much more expensive professional-class DSLRs." Don't get me wrong, Sony's marketing is doing what they were designed to do. The geek crowd is salivating over all the acronmyms and faux combo words (e.g. TruFinder, TruBlack, TruHype). But the bottom line is whether the camera actually performs in a way that's better.
The jury is obviously still out on that one, as we only have preproduction samples floating around until October. A few people with preproduction cameras have sent me image samples to analyze, though, and what I see is a lot of noise reduction in the JPEGs, which pretty much rules out the word "flawless" in my book.
But I'll keep an open mind. Despite my cynicism over where we are in the digital camera era (again, Throwaway Kitchen Sink), on paper the A77 has a lot going for it. To switch metaphors for a moment, Sony has put more tools into their Swiss Army Knife than the competitors. My question, though, is do we need Swiss Army Knives or something else?
I had a small epiphany the other day while talking with a team working with a major camera company. I'll eventually get around to writing something about this, but suffice it to say that all this emphasis on features is missing the point of how photography works in the future. It's time to get out of the kitchen and over to where the real work needs to be done.