Digital camera market is collapsing

[peterm1]

Its probably just that the camera market has become what is known in economics and marketing as a "mature" market. And why not? Every market for physical products, no matter what is being sold, becomes mature at some point. And there are well known strategies for participating in such markets (market segmentation, chasing niches etc) so it may not be such a bad thing overall. In any event it is inevitable at some point unless a really disruptive new product comes along and changes the rules of play.

 

[uhoh7]

That may be so, but at least for the moment it has some of the same types of limitations.

As it happens, I was chatting with one of my workmates about some photos I took at farewell drinks for a boss the other week and she commented that all the other photos (ie. the ones taken with smartphones) looked like cr*p, yet somehow mine didn't. I didn't have the heart to tell her that's because I used an actual, well, purpose-designed camera. I'll also note that nobody batted an eyelid at camera-phone photos but many were averse to having their photo taken with a "real" camera (yet many of them now want to see the "real" photos), so there appears to be some, um, cognitive dissonance there...

One of my takes is that often phone-cameras (and the small-sensor P&S cameras they're busily replacing) are used well outside their useful range (as Instamatics before them often were) but many people don't understand why they can take a good-enough photo in some circumstances (usually meaning "with good light") but produce pretty horrible results in others.

As is also typical, the lady I was chatting with asked that I delete the shots with her in them, but said the others were "good". That also seems somewhat typical of the zeitgeist: nobody wants to appear in a photo they didn't take themselves, of themselves, posed as they wish, as an exercise in "personal branding" but they do want to see photos of everyone else. (This is over and above the normal thing where no woman ever approves of any photo taken of them where they weren't deliberately posing and presenting their good side.)

Nothing I'm fussed about, but of a piece with things I seem to be noticing more and more frequently (though that could be just that I'm getting older and grumpier).

...Mike

Love the post 🙂

I can tell you this situation is in rapid flux as the youngest are far the saviest in creative use of the camera phone, and a careful search will reveal excellent photography by cell cam, but of course it's the exception.

There is huge competition to make the "coolest" shots for sharing---I know this my daughter is 14 LOL

Even a great shooter will only be truly satisfied with tiny portion of his/her work.

Another thing that's different today is the actual time spent on given image within moments after it's been shot.

With the instamatic, you shot it and rejoined the party LOL, but now they shoot it, tweak it and share it, then check the response.

A single shot can eat 10 minutes of a young life!

I really think these are the great days of photography. M9s are 3200USD, film is alive and screaming, tons of new toys, and the big DSLRs can image out a wedding in no time. And Glass??? More great glass than ever!!! Easy to find the old stuff these days as well. On top of that everybody has a camera.

It's like some sort of daguerrotypical paradise!

OMG here comes the frosting: new 5k displays to show off what images we can make today 🙂

 

[mfunnell]

Honestly I expect that as 4K video becomes more prevalent the digital stills camera will become a thing of history for many folks. If its easy to extract decent 4k stills from the video stream then one has to ask why bother shooting stills except for still life stuff.

In the same way we recall that shooting movie film displaced all film-based still photography?

Somehow I don't recall people wandering around shooting reels and reels of movie film, looking to later extract the perfect frame. OK, I know it's not a fair comparison given the costs of developing all those reels of film, compared to not much (monetary) cost at all for shooting digital video. But even so, even in circumstances (ie. movie studios) where they were (and to an extent still are) shooting reels and reels of film (and developing it on an industrial scale) I seem to recall the use of dedicated stills photographers.

Could it be that examining all that footage in search of that perfect frame is a cost of it's own in time and tedium? And while I'm not in any way a movie-maker (even for personal video which I pretty much don't ever shoot), I imagine that composing, tracking, framing etc. might be different for motion than it is for stills. It would be a bit much to sit through hours of footage only to discover nothing very usable! Not to mention the rigs needed to produce non-seasickness-inducing video:


(And that's a rather minimilast one! Convenient and inconspicious it ain't.)

If you're not shooting for motion, and you're shooting in short bursts, deliberately looking to compose etc. for stills, then can't you do that with a high frame-rate still camera already?

Somehow I'm not seeing video stills replacing dedicated cameras designed to take photos rather than (or as well as) movies. But maybe I'm just an old dinosaur, stuck in his ways...

...Mike

 

[leicapixie]

movies and stills..

movies and stills..

I remember movies done at home, my Mom a practitioner!
The Lady busy with her Canon 514 Super-8 catching our moves..
Suddenly it stopped.
It wasn't the cost, I provided the film processing included.
I met a Kodak Representative at the Pro Camera shop I visited.
He asked how many reels shot in a year, how many years?
I answered as best possible.
Well it turned out, my Mom was typical..
After a year or two, people were done!
I see on some blogs that I follow, one particular Kirk,
when he talks of his pro video work, there are seldom comments.
Obviously few are interested..
Slicing a still from minutes of shooting, a bigger pipe dream, than digital conversion kits for my army of still cameras..
Yesterday I went to look for a new compact digital for my Lady.
There was nothing simple!
Everything stupidly complex.
I know that sounds bad English!
Complex, WI-Fi, controls locked in the menus..
I see why the I-phone and Samsung so popular..
So my digital camera has been given to my Lady,
today I shoot with the basic.
A Leica M3 and 50mm Collapsible Summicron.
cheers jason

 

[David Hughes]

IMHO, that's where artificial intelligence will come into play, picking out a selection of stills from the stream, then processing them for the viewer based on known preferences. I think the really big trend is not the decline of cameras as separate devices, but the change in the role of the human, i.e., as capturing images becomes increasingly automatic, most people spend more time editing & directing.

Hmmm, so when you're arrested for photographing the girls you can blame the camera...

But, if its AI is like that used on a well known auction site, f'instance, when it makes suggestions about what you like then the result will mean a lot of editing and bigger memory needed. And a lot of innocent people arrested.

Regards, David

 

[nongfuspring]

That's linear resolution. If 4k is equivalent to 10 Mpix, 8k is equivalent to 100 Mpix -- with commensurate pressure on data and signal processing pipelines.

8K is 33.3 megapixels, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8K_resolution

Could it be that examining all that footage in search of that perfect frame is a cost of it's own in time and tedium? And while I'm not in any way a movie-maker (even for personal video which I pretty much don't ever shoot), I imagine that composing, tracking, framing etc. might be different for motion than it is for stills. It would be a bit much to sit through hours of footage only to discover nothing very usable! Not to mention the rigs needed to produce non-seasickness-inducing video:

I feel a lot of perceptions about video editing and tracking here are very outdated, now we don't have to sit through hours of footage or (as another person suggested) sift through "thousands" of frames - we're not cutting and splicing 35mm film here, editing hours of footage on an iPad for instance only takes seconds, likewise with frame selection. Also, in regards to "seasickness incuding video", it's now virtually unnecessary to have such rigs unless you are shooting with a DSLR or for particular applications, now you can buy attachable gyroscopes and m43 IBIS is pretty excellent, not to mention post production stabilisation (with the caveat of image cropping). The iPhone 6 has inbuilt gyroscopic image stabilisation.

As someone else also suggested, nobody shoots video much, which is also vastly inaccurate. My FB newsfeed is at least 50% short videos (vines seem to be replacing GIFs) and when it comes to more "serious" work I've noticed a lot of leading architectural documentation, artwork documentation, journalism, etc. is being done through moving image. In particular embedded videos that allow user interaction are really becoming more mainstream. I've seen a lot of portfolios lately with video clips embedded into the website itself and a lot more realtime interactive video.

That's important, but a bit of a side issue for dedicated stills photographers. The main benefit of shooting video for stills is software based editing. From a video file you can easily do things like edit out backgrounds, people, objects, make artificial "green screens" for 2d images, and also you can make accurate 3d models direct from video, which can also be edited and returned into a 2d image.

If you'd like to keep shooting with an M3, power to you, but I these things are important to photography. Again, if they're important to you or not is another question.

 

[mfunnell]

[...]I feel a lot of perceptions about video editing and tracking here are very outdated, now we don't have to sit through hours of footage or (as another person suggested) sift through "thousands" of frames - we're not cutting and splicing 35mm film here, editing hours of footage on an iPad for instance only takes seconds, likewise with frame selection.[...]

OK, colour me outdated!

I get the bit where I go out of a morning, switching on the gyro-stabilised 8K video recorder attached to my hat and go about my business. I get that when I arrive home I select that one perfect frame from my whole-day video stream, print it and voila! My perfect still print is ready to be framed and placed on the wall.

Wonderful. Perfect! But how do I know which frame is that perfect frame if I don't watch the video? How do I edit my hours of footage on my iPad, which it seems "only takes seconds, likewise with frame selection", to get my perfect frame, without ever watching the video? I seem to be missing a rather important step here about determining which frame is that frame. Is it the AI thing referenced earlier in the thread? Some kind of photo-Siri I instruct "find me my photo"?

While I'm sure I can fast-forward (and backward and so forth) through video footage, I'm still trying to figure out how I find that photo without, at some point or in some fashion, looking at the footage. 😕😕😕

And if some AI thing can do that for me, for video footage, why can't it go through my still shots for me and select the good ones? This doesn't seem to be a current feature in Lightroom 🙁 I'm sure I'll discover, though, what a dreadfully old-fashioned form of thinking this is.

...Mike

 

[Scrambler]

OK, colour me outdated!

I get the bit where I go out of a morning, switching on the gyro-stabilised 8K video recorder attached to my hat and go about my business. I get that when I arrive home I select that one perfect frame from my whole-day video stream, print it and voila! My perfect still print is ready to be framed and placed on the wall.

Wonderful. Perfect! But how do I know which frame is that perfect frame if I don't watch the video? How do I edit my hours of footage on my iPad, which it seems "only takes seconds, likewise with frame selection", to get my perfect frame, without ever watching the video? I seem to be missing a rather important step here about determining which frame is that frame. Is it the AI thing referenced earlier in the thread? Some kind of photo-Siri I instruct "find me my photo"?

While I'm sure I can fast-forward (and backward and so forth) through video footage, I'm still trying to figure out how I find that photo without, at some point or in some fashion, looking at the footage. 😕😕😕

And if some AI thing can do that for me, for video footage, why can't it go through my still shots for me and select the good ones? This doesn't seem to be a current feature in Lightroom 🙁 I'm sure I'll discover, though, what a dreadfully old-fashioned form of thinking this is.

...Mike

My Sony alpha/nex can be set to (a) wait until it detects a smile before taking a photo and (b) crop the resulting image to the camera's idea of perfection (it saves the original as well, in case I disagree). A nicely focussed, exposed and framed photo of a smiling face is many people's idea of photographic perfection - and my camera can do all that itself! All I have to do is carry it around (while holding the shutter release down).

A lot of cameras will detect a face to focus on and the smile trigger is by no means unique to Sony.

I'm sure it is possible to have AI either (a) run through the footage and select scenes that meet predetermined "ideal" characteristics or better yet (b) take stills or short videos when the camera detect "good" photos, in real time. As I say, there are already Ai systems in-camera to crop to "ideal" proportions.

 

[mfunnell]

Also, in regards to "seasickness incuding video", it's now virtually unnecessary to have such rigs unless you are shooting with a DSLR or for particular applications, now you can buy attachable gyroscopes and m43 IBIS is pretty excellent, not to mention post production stabilisation (with the caveat of image cropping). The iPhone 6 has inbuilt gyroscopic image stabilisation.

And yet somehow Stedicam seems to be an expanding business and releases new products, some even designed to work with small cameras and iPhones.

...Mike

 

[mfunnell]

My Sony alpha/nex can be set to (a) wait until it detects a smile before taking a photo and (b) crop the resulting image to the camera's idea of perfection (it saves the original as well, in case I disagree). A nicely focussed, exposed and framed photo of a smiling face is many people's idea of photographic perfection - and my camera can do all that itself! All I have to do is carry it around (while holding the shutter release down).

Cool! Show us the photos.

...Mike

 

[Turtle]

Could the slowing market mean we already have decent imaging tools already and should concentrate on making photos? Perish the thought! We all get GAS once in a while, but of late I have been using increasingly interested in cameras with lower pixel counts and greater simplicity. Driving the Death Star every time you take a picture has less and less appeal...

 

[nongfuspring]

OK, colour me outdated!

I get the bit where I go out of a morning, switching on the gyro-stabilised 8K video recorder attached to my hat and go about my business. I get that when I arrive home I select that one perfect frame from my whole-day video stream, print it and voila! My perfect still print is ready to be framed and placed on the wall.

Wonderful. Perfect! But how do I know which frame is that perfect frame if I don't watch the video? How do I edit my hours of footage on my iPad, which it seems "only takes seconds, likewise with frame selection", to get my perfect frame, without ever watching the video? I seem to be missing a rather important step here about determining which frame is that frame. Is it the AI thing referenced earlier in the thread? Some kind of photo-Siri I instruct "find me my photo"?

While I'm sure I can fast-forward (and backward and so forth) through video footage, I'm still trying to figure out how I find that photo without, at some point or in some fashion, looking at the footage. 😕😕😕 I'm sure I'll discover, though, what a dreadfully old-fashioned form of thinking that is.

...Mike

Tracking. Videos show up as a string of images under the main video image, and you run your finger along that line until you find a suitable frame. It's best shown by example than explained. Longer youtube videos also sort of have a low-fi this feature, you hover your mouse over the video position bar and get a preview of that frame in the video (without actually moving to that point in the video). The iphone (or Aftereffects) version of this is better since the videos are cached. Admittedly if you're trawling through a 12 hour video it'll take some time, but if you're working with a video shorter than an hour or so then it should be very doable, and if you're doing short videos of a few seconds it makes a more user friendly alternative to continuous mode (since you're not dealing with sorting through individual frames).

 

[Scrambler]

Cool! Show us the photos.

...Mike

Well, you asked ...


DSC08696 by Scrambler@4350, on Flickr


DSC08697 by Scrambler@4350, on Flickr

You can see what a distinct improvement the AI made to what was otherwise a rather banal selfie ;-)

If only it had cropped even tighter!

 

[mfunnell]

You can see what a distinct improvement the AI made to what was otherwise a rather banal selfie ;-)

If only it had cropped even tighter!

I imagine that Vanity Fair will shortly be dispensing with the services of Annie Leibovitz, after a quick trip to B&H Photo...

...Mike

 

[mfunnell]

Tracking. Videos show up as a string of images under the main video image, and you run your finger along that line until you find a suitable frame. It's best shown by example than explained. Longer youtube videos also sort of have a low-fi this feature, you hover your mouse over the video position bar and get a preview of that frame in the video (without actually moving to that point in the video). The iphone (or Aftereffects) version of this is better since the videos are cached. Admittedly if you're trawling through a 12 hour video it'll take some time, but if you're working with a video shorter than an hour or so then it should be very doable, and if you're doing short videos of a few seconds it makes a more user friendly alternative to continuous mode (since you're not dealing with sorting through individual frames).

I'm probably missing something, but it seems a rather round-about way of getting a still photo to me. Especially as I'd imagine you'd be shooting that video with the intention of producing a still (so you've got the right framing, fast-enough shutter speed etc.) rather than with the intention of producing a video sequence.

...Mike

 

[Scrambler]

I imagine that Vanity Fair will shortly be dispensing with the services of Annie Leibovitz, after a quick trip to B&H Photo...

...Mike

What were you expecting from a $300 (with lens) camera - art?

Whoops - nearly opened a can of worms there ...

 

[nongfuspring]

Well, you asked ...


DSC08696 by Scrambler@4350,

Hahaha, that's the best thing I've seen all day.

mfunnell, it's true, shooting video for a still is a somewhat roundabout way of taking a still most of the time but that depends on what you're doing (though it really is very fast and easy). As I said before the most relevant thing about this from a stills shooter perspective isn't the high FPS but the software editing possibilities a video composite can give.

 

[kuuan]

according to flickr statistics the majority of photos uploaded are taken with handphone cameras: https://www.flickr.com/cameras

I wonder if the widespread use of cameraphones eventually could again strenghten 'dedicated' camera sales: I suppose that many people who take photos with handphone will not have been that keen taking many photos before. Some, through the 'entry' to photography using their handphone, must become interested in photography. Some will come to understand the limitations of a handphone camera and will want e.g. a camera with a bigger sensor

 

[Scrambler]

I'm probably missing something, but it seems a rather round-about way of getting a still photo to me. Especially as I'd imagine you'd be shooting that video with the intention of producing a still (so you've got the right framing, fast-enough shutter speed etc.) rather than with the intention of producing a video sequence.

...Mike

You hit THE KISS to within 1/100 of a second ... the Decisive Moment (and it's thousands of indecisive buddies) are yours forever! The Power!!

Seriously, it's motor wind amped to the max. For good and ill.

And it will be Google Glass or its equivalent that will be the agent of this new paradigm, though I imagine it will be a fairly short-lived fad as it's all well and good to select one frame from among dozens but one from within millions? In reality people doing this will select short clips rather than stills. Think Harry Potter portraits.

 

[semilog]

Who is the more serious photographer? David Alan Harvey with an iPhone, or the average DP review member with a D810 and an Otus?

Right, and those are not photographers who are passionate about photography. Passionate photographers will always wants something more than the iPhone. And I'm not saying the iPhone cannot be a serious tool. Of course it can... but 98% you are talking about just are taking photos with their phone because it is a memory not because they are into photography.