Digital Cameras: Oblivious Engineers Making Boring Incremental Cameras
Little has changed for five years.
Kudos to Sony for its new Sony A9 III with 120 fps RAW capture, etc.m. No, that’s a camera definitely not stuck in a rut. OTOH, what it mainly does is offer a global shutter and faster capture, a one-time pop. While that’s no small thing, where does it go from there?
But here I’m discussing conventional photography, not the ability to capture a bullet in flight. And in that regard, camera features are stuck in a rut.
It was 2019 that the Fujifilm GFX100 popped up and that was a doozy back then. Here we are in 2024 about 4.5 years later and there is essentially no change since then—the Fujifilm GFX100S is a little smaller and cheaper, and the Fujifilm GFX100 II is a little nicer (EVF) and better IBIS… nice! Along with no fixes for the critical 5-year-old bugs and not even a usable remote release. No frame averaging, no in-camera high-res multi-shot mode like Panasonic had 3 years. Is that all Fujifilm could accomplish in almost 5 years?
Then there is Sony, whose otherwise excellent Sony A1 still does not have a lossless-compressed RAW, whose Sony A7R V cannot even play an image back without failure, cannot get focus bracketing right, etc. And the A7R V is a better camera, but fundamentally has no advantage to image quality over its predecessor.
In other words, camera vendors do not just have their thumbs up their asses on fixing serious bugs and usability problems, they actively do not deliver useful functionality in this age of computational photography. They should have eliminated all technical challenges for the user that can be eliminated—several years ago. Low-hanging fruit like frame averaging and auto-ETTR exposure and auto-best-shot modes go undone. They are stuck in a firmware rut.
Nikon and Canon are equally challenged, though the bug situation is better there. Meanwhile, Leica has never delivered a modern M-camera, choosing instead to stick with a 70-year-old rangefinder idiocy. And so on.
Video and Sony A9 III nice stuff aside, camera hardware seems to have run its course to a dead-end. The engineering departments are totally clueless on firmware bugs and useful features. Where do we go from here?