Disconnected Digital Photography

Smartphones continue grabbing the digital photography land. With an exception of some extreme / niche requirements (and yes, there are still many), it is very irrational today to have (or - especially - buy) a digital camera.

As I said, there are many exceptions: I want to photograph a night sky (-> buy a full frame sensor camera); I want to have the best possible image quality (-> buy a full frame or even a medium format sensor camera); I want to use specialty lens: wide angle or telephoto (-> buy an interchangeable lens camera); I want my photographs to have a shallow depth of field (-> buy a large sensor camera). Etc.

You can spot the common theme here: it is either a smartphone or a full frame camera (DSLR or mirror-less). Nothing in between (with very few but notable exceptions like the Sony RX-100V that still produces better photos than the latest iPhone and that includes the panorama mode and extremely fast autofocus). The digital photography business is being pushed to a niche of large (full frame) and extra large (medium format) sensors: they are big and heavy and require big and heavy glass. Phones will not get there. But this is the only stable niche, it seems. Everything else, less that a full frame is now under a smartphone attack.

The reason is not that phones are equal in quality of photos they produce. The reason is they are equal enough, especially considering the tedious workflow of post processing, archiving and sharing. Camera companies missed the boat. Their perspective ends on a removable storage medium, the SD card. They don't understand and don't care what happens next. And to most having a photo on an SD card is like not having it at all. How do you retouch such photo? How do you archive? How do you share? No easy answers exist.

It all could have been much different if the camera companies got together 10, or even 5 years ago, and defined a complete interoperable standard for photo sharing and exchange. Technologies supporting this exist today: wireless USB, WiFi, Bluetooth NFC. They should have been organized into a coherent system capable of a seamless content transfer, supported by all major camera  manufacturers. But no, they were all growing in a world of incompatible lens mount systems and were extending that to the connectivity domain: "my PlayMemories is better than your SnapBridge".

In a connected world global standards (up to the application layer) are fundamental. The Digital Photo landscape clearly illustrates how lack of communication standards leads to massive industry shifts.