After getting a few comments on this morning's earlier article, I decided to do a bit of SKU snooping on B&H. Here's what I found in the compact camera range (including the latest announcements, which are already live; I took out the X100 and any B&H "kits"):
- Olympus: 37 compacts
- Canon: 54 compacts
- Fujifilm: 59 compacts (I took out the X100)
- Sony: 60 compacts
- Panasonic: 62 compacts
- Nikon: 71 compacts
Put another way, if you were looking for a compact camera you'd have a choice of 343 camera/color combinations, most of them in the US$200-400 price range. Moreover, you can find fault with any of these cameras. Oh, yeah, that one over there has a faster lens, but this one has GPS, yet that one has more focal range, and yet another one has more (or better [BSI]) pixels... The list goes on and on.
So if you asked a camera salesperson "which one is best" you're going to get a random answer at best, too. More than likely, you'll get sold on the one that's in stock ("The XYZ is the best of the bunch, but we only have it in black").
Someone suggested that all this was just a way to get rid of dealers and push everything through Amazon and a few big boxes. Maybe, but Amazon wants bigger discounts than dealers, so on top of all the other woes the compact camera makers have, they'd be getting pressed for lower product margins, too.
Yet in browsing through all these 300+ cameras I was struck by one thing: almost none of them (it might actually be none) actually do what I would want of an entry level camera. That's: let me put my image where I want it. Not on a card in the camera, but on a Web site, in an email, onto my digital picture frame, over onto my phone or tablet. Instead, they include ridiculous things like an HDMI connector, so that I can trip over expensive cords while I manually thumb through my images on my TV only to discover that the battery goes dead in the middle of showing them off. Are you kidding me? That's part of what constitutes a correct entry level design? (Go ahead, try it with yours. I'll wait for you to find the right cable [there are three possibilities], find an open HDMI In on the back of your TV, and start up your slide show. I might be waiting awhile, though ;~)
It's as if the camera makers either have no imagination about what a user might want, or are afraid to try making something that meets those wants. Maybe both. And then they wonder why compact camera sales are getting pummelled by camera phones.
How about this as a design goal: Design a US$400 product that takes far better pictures than a camera phone, has more flexible user control/options (that are photographically motivated), and offers all the programmability and workflow (communications) capabilities that make getting a picture to where you want it easy? Is it really that hard to do? Or will we get another 300+ iterated compact camera designs before someone stumbles on getting it partially right?