Nikon

I love Nikon cameras. Yes I know. I am a dinosaur. I'm spending a night under stars now at the top of Babia Gora, watching (and memorizing through heavy glass on sd cards) the wonderful arch of Milky Way spanning over the Tatra mountains. I tugged here on my back two full frame DSLRs and a 15kg worth of lenses, tripods, heads and other photographic equipment. People don't do that, unless this is their bizarre hobby. "Why bother taking all those pictures if you can find better ones on Google?" asked me once a tour guide when going to the Antelope Canyon.

The problem is that just few hobbyists like me are not able to support the dying digital camera business. Some seem to be excited by the news of Sony overtaking Nikon to secure 2nd place right after Canon. But the truth is they are all dying a slow death.

The death caused by the lack of software innovation.

"Software?" you will ask... aren't they being forced to the niche corner by smartphones and drones? They are. But the smartphone is not only winning with a big body camera just because it is smaller. The smartphone is winning because it makes things easy to do.

I think the camera companies are falling now because they failed to embrace the digital normal. Which is snapping, viewing, sharing, communicating. The process of getting images from a professional digital camera is probably now more complex than it was in the days of film cameras. The digital darkroom is terrible. Complex, difficult to understand, expensive, tedious. It is only for those who really enjoy doing that (a bunch of other dinosaurs).

And even identifying myself as one of these dinosaurs, I was not able to post any of the taken photos before involving my PC. A a matter of fact the path was: remove the SD card, insert into a reader, launch Adobe Lightroom, import from SD, convert to DNG, process, export as JPG, upload to Google Photos, share. On a phone that would be one button (ok and then a second one to fine tune and add some touches).

I mentioned this already some time ago: there is no standard way of linking a camera to a phone. In a way that the phone's display could be used to display what the camera sees, manipulate the settings and the photo library, editing photos. In a nutshell: the industry failed to adopt a camera control application protocol. They though they will each do this in a proprietary way. Stupid. If there was a standard (say over Bluetooth) to control cameras, Apple and Google would have built-in apps for that. But there is no standard. A digital camera is probably the only computer-storage system that does not provide the recycle bin functionality. You accidentally delete a photo and it is gone forever.

Actually this situation was envisioned by Andy Rubin when he started working on Android. The idea at that time (before Android was acquired by Google) was to build software for digital cameras. This was the goal for Android. It might have saved Nikon Et Al, but blame google for taking it and converting into a phone system, leaving the camera makers, who specialized in micromechanics and optics, in the cold.

I wonder what will happen now? I don't think the DSLR market is big enough to support the camera companies. Will they still be around in 2030? Or by that time we will all be using just phones (with their phenomenal computational photography) even for the most demanding tasks?