The Great Digital Swindle...

Which makes it all the more curious that this activity is often referred to as "retail therapy".

You keep on taking their money , promote dissatisfaction and insecurity whilst at the same time convince them that its beneficial.

That`s what I call a swindle.

And we come full circle from the original post. 😀

What amazes me is that advertising can (and does) convince folks in the camera world that Item X is the best thing since sliced bread and that we MUST have one. And then six months later in the product develpment cycle, the same company releases the next iteration of Item X and uses the same advertising to get the people who bought the first iteration that it isn't competent and that they need to buy the next one. And the companies do it without remorse, and the consumer does it without regret. Amazing.

Now we've adapted to that marketing model for everything.
 
We are living through a period of increasingly open world markets where large companies are able to manufacture with the lowest cost pool of workers they can find, and register their tax centres in the lowest taxing port they can find. It's what capitalism does without legislative curbs, at the moment it's difficult to govern these companies as it has to happen with broad international agreement, but that surely has to be the way forward.

Getting back to the original question, if viewed ethically cameras would seem to me to be a lesser evil as far as unnecessary consumption goes, the primary costs are R&D, manufacturing infrastructure, and a highly skilled workforce with all the perks and recompense you would expect from a first world manufacturer. The actual material cost, or put another way, the carbon footprint, is probably not too high for a given purchase price.

Personally I have far more problem with shopping at Primark, for those not in the UK, Primark has been one of the fastest growing retailers in the UK of the last decade, and they specialise in reasonable quality clothing at rock bottom prices, they look like, and probably not coincidentally, a cheaper Marks & Spencer. I've only bought form the store once, a jacket and some t-shirts, but it just seemed to me wrong that I could buy a perfectly good cotton t-shirt for £3, I figured somebody must be getting screwed to be able to turn a profit at these sort of prices, I should add that the factory in India that collapsed in April with the loss of over a thousand lives, was unsurprisingly a manufacturer for Primark, but consumers don't really care, it's so cheap they view it as a throwaway product. A few days ago they announced record profits at the same time as Marks & Spencer announcing another downturn.
Exactly. Things can be TOO cheap. Partly they may be shoddy goods -- as my grandmother used to say of cheap clothes, sewn with "red hot needles and burning thread" -- and partly, if they cost nothing, they are valued at next to nothing.

You are quite right that cameras aren't as bad as that (probably -- I don't know what conditions are like in Thailand at the lower end of the camera building market, or in China at the bottom end) but that still doesn't alter the argument that except in a very few cases such as surgical gloves, "disposable" is bad for pretty much everyone as well as the environment.

Cheers,

R.
 
I also get heartily sick of the myth of the job-creating entrepreneur. The vast majority of jobs are for mature organizations run by professional managers for the benefit of professional managers (the technostructure). Shareholders are interested only in short-term returns and have little or no say in the running of the company: the concept of "ownership" of a mature company is all but meaningless.

I think it's a lot more complicated than that. I've worked in and around more than fifty different organisations in the last forty years and the one thing that I've noticed is that the bigger the organisation, the more diverse the fauna therein. Many people make niches for themselves and seem very happy in those niches.

I've met people who do twenty five hours, if that, in a working week of, allegedly, forty hours. I've met people in the same organisations who do twenty hours of unpaid overtime and seem really happy with their lives. I've met people in supposedly low status jobs who are happy and confident and highly regarded by their colleagues. I've met board members who are harried and depressed. I've been in commercial organisations that look, on the inside, like a socialist workers paradise and government departments that would think of the original Scrooge as a work shy radical.

It's all so much more complicated than some people seem to think.
 
I think it's a lot more complicated than that. I've worked in and around more than fifty different organisations in the last forty years and the one thing that I've noticed is that the bigger the organisation, the more diverse the fauna therein. Many people make niches for themselves and seem very happy in those niches.

I've met people who do twenty five hours, if that, in a working week of, allegedly, forty hours. I've met people in the same organisations who do twenty hours of unpaid overtime and seem really happy with their lives. I've met people in supposedly low status jobs who are happy and confident and highly regarded by their colleagues. I've met board members who are harried and depressed. I've been in commercial organisations that look, on the inside, like a socialist workers paradise and government departments that would think of the original Scrooge as a work shy radical.

It's all so much more complicated than some people seem to think.
Yes, it's complicated, and I agree with all you say. But you are reinforcing my point by providing more examples of why the job-creating entrepreneur as the driving force is almost invariably a myth.

Cheers,

R.
 
We are living through a period of increasingly open world markets where large companies are able to manufacture with the lowest cost pool of workers they can find, and register their tax centres in the lowest taxing port they can find. It's what capitalism does without legislative curbs, at the moment it's difficult to govern these companies as it has to happen with broad international agreement, but that surely has to be the way forward.

Getting back to the original question, if viewed ethically cameras would seem to me to be a lesser evil as far as unnecessary consumption goes, the primary costs are R&D, manufacturing infrastructure, and a highly skilled workforce with all the perks and recompense you would expect from a first world manufacturer. The actual material cost, or put another way, the carbon footprint, is probably not too high for a given purchase price.

Personally I have far more problem with shopping at Primark, for those not in the UK, Primark has been one of the fastest growing retailers in the UK of the last decade, and they specialise in reasonable quality clothing at rock bottom prices, they look like, and probably not coincidentally, a cheaper Marks & Spencer. I've only bought form the store once, a jacket and some t-shirts, but it just seemed to me wrong that I could buy a perfectly good cotton t-shirt for £3, I figured somebody must be getting screwed to be able to turn a profit at these sort of prices, I should add that the factory in India that collapsed in April with the loss of over a thousand lives, was unsurprisingly a manufacturer for Primark, but consumers don't really care, it's so cheap they view it as a throwaway product. A few days ago they announced record profits at the same time as Marks & Spencer announcing another downturn.

... have you ever considered some bright capitalist entrepreneur understood your revulsion at those £3 t-shirts and started selling you those same £3 t-shirts as £12 t-shirts from GAP?
 
... have you ever considered some bright capitalist entrepreneur understood your revulsion at those £3 t-shirts and started selling you those £3 t-shirts as £12 t-shirts from GAP?

Actually Gap and Primark quality is probably quite similar, I'm guessing a company the size of Gap will have to be a little aware of their ethical profile if for no other reason than PR, hopefully Primark will be obliged to do so in the future.
Personally I do prefer to buy quality when I can afford it, I've found buying cheap anything to be a false economy. My more expensive purchases have been of a quality that it's reasonably risk free to buy second hand, so that would be cars, hiFi and cameras/lenses.

Having said that, Canon 5d's are my work cameras and I've bought each mark of those new, and within a few months of their release. So far each has been a worthwhile upgrade and I haven't felt in the least way cheated, in fact the amazing video capability of the mark ii was a surprise thrown in extra which they could have had more leverage with had they wanted to.

I also bought some new Le Creuset pots & pans. Very good they are too.
 
I've met board members who are harried and depressed.

Perhaps an abject illustration of the Peter Principle at work?

It's all so much more complicated than some people seem to think.

Every time we try to neatly label, wrap, or box a social situation with generalities to make it easy to grasp, those pesky "individual circumstances" seem to get in the way.
 
Have only skimmed this thread but sitting here amazed at how much has been built on a post that seems to me built up around an entirely false premise.

Digital cameras are unquestionably better today than they ever have been before -- they are of much higher quality -- the horrible yellow and purple blotches I remember are gone and they capture an amount of detail that is stunning in lighting conditions that are appalling.

Sure there's been a basic adequacy for a while now -- The Canon 5D was capable of producing of good results in a wide variety of situations as were some other cameras from back then. But consider the number of cameras that have the same (and usually much better) quality and flexibility today at much lower prices. And this is a marketing swindle? Consumerist blinders?

I think there are a lot of perceptual biases floating around here. First, you see the people who speak, not those who don't. We see people who are excited about a new camera talking about their excitement about the coming release. We don't see as much the people who are delighted with their existing cameras ignoring the hoopla. We see lots of new model releases because a) There are genuine improvements -- things that make a given camera better for everyone and b) there are genuine differences in tastes and approaches to photography that make some cameras better than others for some people and camera makers are still searching out the contours of those tastes -- trying to make *the* camera for you, whoever you are. The Nikon DF is not for everyone and it isn't what a lot of people hoped it would be. But a lot of people are looking for something that isn't quite on the market yet and the DF was clearly an attempt (in my opinion an ugly, ungainly, ill-considered attempt -- to put in the hands of those people what they were looking for).

The talk surrounding the DF campaign -- or any other potential release -- was not created by the marketing campaign any more than the audiences for Howard the Duck were created by the Howard the Duck marketing campaign**. It was the excitement of a bunch of people who thought Nikon might just be making the camera they'd always hoped it would make.

Another perceptual bias is seeing things in terms of what is, not what might be. When Fuji released the X100 I was skeptical about it. Thought it was pretty & all, but not something that would really suit me. But Fuji understood things that I didn't and produced something that is much more nearly exactly the camera I needed than what I had before and, when I accidently acquired one (long complicated story) it enabled me to slough off quite a lot of accreted hardware. It was a surprise to me. It wasn't dramatically more capable than anything else available at the time or what I had, but it did eliminate a lot of frustrations that I'd just lived with before and expected I always would. I'm sure there are more surprises like that out there for me and I'm jolly glad that folks are looking for them and really don't see that the fact that they are doing so implies the sort of systemic problems people are assuming in this thread.
 
But you are reinforcing my point by providing more examples of why the job-creating entrepreneur as the driving force is almost invariably a myth.

Indeed, I wasn't taking issue with what you wrote. I've met enough of that kind of person to be every bit as cynical as you about them. However, even among such people there are huge differences.

I knew one businessman (he'd have treated you with contempt, if you called him an "entrepreneur") who made it a policy to always employ people his competitors had kicked out, in one way or another. "They just get so much fun from doing down their old boss" he once told me, "and I get people who really appreciate proper loyalty". I'm pretty sure he meant it and all his employees, who I came into contact with, seemed genuinely fond of him.

I've also meant some right black-hearted b*&^%rds, who thought that a negotiation with employees should end in their shuffling backwards, on their knees, out of the office. 🙄🙄
 
Have only skimmed this thread but sitting here amazed at how much has been built on a post that seems to me built up around an entirely false premise.

Digital cameras are unquestionably better today than they ever have been before -- they are of much higher quality -- the horrible yellow and purple blotches I remember are gone and they capture an amount of detail that is stunning in lighting conditions that are appalling.

Sure there's been a basic adequacy for a while now -- The Canon 5D was capable of producing of good results in a wide variety of situations as were some other cameras from back then. But consider the number of cameras that have the same (and usually much better) quality and flexibility today at much lower prices. And this is a marketing swindle? Consumerist blinders?

I think there are a lot of perceptual biases floating around here. First, you see the people who speak, not those who don't. We see people who are excited about a new camera talking about their excitement about the coming release. We don't see as much the people who are delighted with their existing cameras ignoring the hoopla. We see lots of new model releases because a) There are genuine improvements -- things that make a given camera better for everyone and b) there are genuine differences in tastes and approaches to photography that make some cameras better than others for some people and camera makers are still searching out the contours of those tastes -- trying to make *the* camera for you, whoever you are. The Nikon DF is not for everyone and it isn't what a lot of people hoped it would be. But a lot of people are looking for something that isn't quite on the market yet and the DF was clearly an attempt (in my opinion an ugly, ungainly, ill-considered attempt -- to put in the hands of those people what they were looking for).

...

When Fuji released the X100 I was skeptical about it. Thought it was pretty & all, but not something that would really suit me. But Fuji understood things that I didn't and produced something that is much more nearly exactly the camera I needed than what I had before

...

I had, but it did eliminate a lot of frustrations that I'd just lived with before and expected I always would. I'm sure there are more surprises like that out there for me and I'm jolly glad that folks are looking for them and really don't see that the fact that they are doing so implies the sort of systemic problems people are assuming in this thread.

Ah, but there ARE systemic problems... sociological problems actually, created by marketing in and for a consumer society that isn't sustainable.

And, ARE digital cameras really better today? Better than when? I'll concede that they're better in every way than the 480x640 first digi cam I had (and still have.) But is every iteration significantly better than the last? I would propose that the M240 is incrementally more competent in some areas than the M8. Yet, I don't feel the need to run out and trade my M8 for one. As a matter of fact, the M8 remains a pretty competent body nearly seven years after its initial release. The Olympus E1 remains a competent body from 2006. Both can still accomplish 98% of what the M240 does today. Oh I'll grant you there are additional features availalble today... but I'd also say that not all of them are useful (art filters? really?)

I haven't had an X100 but I did go for the X-Pro1. Gorgeous images... when it could focus. The camera is a nightmare for low-light use with the OVF, and it essentially defeats the user when trying to shoot manually using the OVF. And this is an improvement?

Manufacturers build and sell. That's how income is produced. They add features to try to separate you from your money, and try to induce you to buy because of their latest and greatest innovations. Back in the day, some of the innovations were revolutionary, and some evolutionary. Not all innovations make it very long but some, like autofocus, become defacto standards. Those innovations still don't make images; the photographer does, and that after all is what we buy cameras for... to make images.

Now here's the $64 question: if we measure our craft by the impact of our images, are the images from the 2013 M240 really better than the images from the 2006 M8?

"Better," you see, doesn't necessarily lie in feature sets... but that and what the lens charts purport to say are what the camera manufacturers would have us believe. And that, I believe, is the heart of the matter. Have manufacturers redefined success in photography by the pixel count of their sensors or the feature sets in their menus?

I've also meant some right black-hearted b*&^%rds, who thought that a negotiation with employees should end in their shuffling backwards, on their knees, out of the office. 🙄🙄

When I was a manager, that was my goal... to have my employees shuffling out backwards on their knees to leave the office... but only, of course, after kissing my ring. 😉
 
Actually Gap and Primark quality is probably quite similar, I'm guessing a company the size of Gap will have to be a little aware of their ethical profile if for no other reason than PR, hopefully Primark will be obliged to do so in the future.
Personally I do prefer to buy quality when I can afford it, I've found buying cheap anything to be a false economy. My more expensive purchases have been of a quality that it's reasonably risk free to buy second hand, so that would be cars, hiFi and cameras/lenses.

Having said that, Canon 5d's are my work cameras and I've bought each mark of those new, and within a few months of their release. So far each has been a worthwhile upgrade and I haven't felt in the least way cheated, in fact the amazing video capability of the mark ii was a surprise thrown in extra which they could have had more leverage with had they wanted to.

I also bought some new Le Creuset pots & pans. Very good they are too.


OK ... have you ever considered some bright capitalist entrepreneur understood your revulsion at those £3 t-shirts and started selling you those £3 t-shirts as £12 t-shirts from the vendor of your choice?
 
Name the system that is better.
What do you mean by "system"? What (capitalist) system delivers the highest standard of living? Probably (authoritarian, statist) Singapore. What (capitalist) system delivers the most general contentment along with a very high standard of equality? Scandinavian mixed economies with their high taxes. What (capitalist) system delivers the most inequality and divisiveness in already-rich countries? Clue: it's the same system that gives the lowest rates of growth (read Ha-Joon Chang's books): doctrinaire free-market capitalism.

You can believe propaganda, or you can look at the figures. Ha-Joon Chang does the latter. He's a lecturer in economics at Cambridge, so he's not exactly stupid. Unlike some economists.

Cheers,

R.
 
What do you mean by "system"? What (capitalist) system delivers the highest standard of living? Probably (authoritarian, statist) Singapore. What (capitalist) system delivers the most general contentment along with a very high standard of equality? Scandinavian mixed economies with their high taxes. What (capitalist) system delivers the most inequality and divisiveness in already-rich countries? Clue: it's the same system that gives the lowest rates of growth (read Ha-Joon Chang's books): doctrinaire free-market capitalism.

You can believe propaganda, or you can look at the figures. Ha-Joon Chang does the latter. He's a lecturer in economics at Cambridge, so he's not exactly stupid. Unlike some economists.

Cheers,

R.

I'm inclined to answer that, "We're working on it..."
 
Ah, but there ARE systemic problems... sociological problems actually, created by marketing in and for a consumer society that isn't sustainable.

And, ARE digital cameras really better today? Better than when? I'll concede that they're better in every way than the 480x640 first digi cam I had (and still have.) But is every iteration significantly better than the last? I would propose that the M240 is incrementally more competent in some areas than the M8. Yet, I don't feel the need to run out and trade my M8 for one. As a matter of fact, the M8 remains a pretty competent body nearly seven years after its initial release. The Olympus E1 remains a competent body from 2006. Both can still accomplish 98% of what the M240 does today. Oh I'll grant you there are additional features availalble today... but I'd also say that not all of them are useful (art filters? really?)

I haven't had an X100 but I did go for the X-Pro1. Gorgeous images... when it could focus. The camera is a nightmare for low-light use with the OVF, and it essentially defeats the user when trying to shoot manually using the OVF. And this is an improvement?

Manufacturers build and sell. That's how income is produced. They add features to try to separate you from your money, and try to induce you to buy because of their latest and greatest innovations. Back in the day, some of the innovations were revolutionary, and some evolutionary. Not all innovations make it very long but some, like autofocus, become defacto standards. Those innovations still don't make images; the photographer does, and that after all is what we buy cameras for... to make images.

Now here's the $64 question: if we measure our craft by the impact of our images, are the images from the 2013 M240 really better than the images from the 2006 M8?

"Better," you see, doesn't necessarily lie in feature sets... but that and what the lens charts purport to say are what the camera manufacturers would have us believe. And that, I believe, is the heart of the matter. Have manufacturers redefined success in photography by the pixel count of their sensors or the feature sets in their menus?

When I was a manager, that was my goal... to have my employees shuffling out backwards on their knees to leave the office... but only, of course, after kissing my ring. 😉


We've bought many of the same cameras it sounds like, but use them differently. I had an M8. I liked it. But much about it frustrated me. Often it simply wasn't bright enough when I wanted to take a picture, for the M8 to work without introducing additional light. That problem went away for me with the XPro1. When it got cold and windy here (which, especially when I'm up in the mountains, is pretty ****ing cold and windy) the M8 just failed -- no response from it whatsoever, even with fresh and warm batteries. That is less of a problem with the XPro1. It is true that the XPro1 optical viewfinder is not particularly useful in low light because you can't be sure about what you're focusing on. The electronic viewfinder isn't great in low light either, but it works and I can take pictures in situations -- and regularly get images that make me and other people happy -- that I couldn't with the M8. I was satisfied enough with the XPro1 that I gave my M8 away. The decision to buy the XPro1 wasn't driven by marketing hype, it was driven by things about the M8 that irritated me (including the fact that by that time its shutter was a broken tangled mess that I was not happy about having to pay Leica to fix. The guy I gave it to -- the photographer for the town paper -- did send it off and it cost him over $800 to have it fixed). The X100 I'm happier with than either the XPro1 or the M8. By a large margin.

People look at lens charts yes. And it is true that they aren't very useful. But buying a camera -- and owning a camera -- for many people involves dredging for every scrap of information they can find. They are agents making choices -- this and not that. And they want some basis to make those choices on and so look for whatever information they can and often have fun doing it. But can the advertising -- the packaging and presentation of information create some desire in people that, say, a couple of months of experience using a particular camera would not also create? I doubt it. The whole notion that marketing hype creates demand strikes me as nothing more than marketing hype for marketers. Outside the fashion industry I don't believe it happens.
 
Free market capitalism never exists because there is always someone trying to use the governmental structures to get one over on their competitors and lock out new ones. The USA, despite the myth, never had laissez-faire, it was always and ebb and flow of who was favored by those in power at the time.
 
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