The Online Photographer: Photo industry

Photo industry

Friday, 01 July 2016

Looking Beyond the USP

Guest Post by John Kennerdell

Rosser Reeves (1910–1984), chess master, poet, novelist, political operative (he helped Eisenhower get elected), and father of the unique selling proposition. If that weren't enough, his name adorns one of the world's most famous rubies and he co-wrote a classic book on the game of pool.

From the late 1980s to the early 2000s I freelanced for two Japanese camera manufacturers, one large and conservative, the other smaller and less conventional. Even from my worm's-eye view at the bottom of a long ladder of subcontractors I could sense a clear difference in their philosophies. The big one exuded an almost paternal authority: they were confident they knew best what photographers truly needed. And to be fair, they usually did. By contrast the other one prided itself on its responsiveness to consumers, even if it sometimes led to chasing fads and fancies. I learned not to be too quick to judge one approach as superior to the other.

On one point, though, they agreed. Like almost every other company I know of in Japan, both passionately embraced the concept of the "unique selling proposition," or USP.

Born on Madison Avenue in the middle of the last century, USP is the idea that every product needs a distinguishing feature that sets it apart from all competing products. This is why even a toaster or a refrigerator in Japan cannot be merely a toaster or a refrigerator. It needs to offer "fuzzy logic," or "eco mode," or any of countless other contrivances ranging from brilliant to loony. And it's why you'll never see a camera introduced as simply "our new entry-level DSLR." It'll always be "our new entry-level DSLR with x," where "x" is some marquee feature designed to make you choose it over all others.

So here's my take on camera USPs, especially if you're a dedicated photographer: at best they should mostly be ignored. At worst, they misdirect both reviewers and potential buyers.

One variant of the Canon EOS 10. That red dimple on the lower right was where you pressed the reader to transfer settings. I'll bet most owners didn't use it more than a few dozen times, if at all.

This lesson first dawned on me back in 1990 with the introduction of Canon's EOS 10. It was a mid-level SLR promoted for a new gee-whiz function: it came with a barcode reader and a booklet of codes for 101 different shooting situations. You scanned in the code for your scene and then pressed the reader up against a sensor in the camera, transferring the appropriate settings. Voila, supposedly a perfect photo of fireworks or birthday cake candles or whatever else it was.

Ah, the Japanese love of gimmickry. Clearly any user over the age of 12 would have been better served by a booklet giving theory and practice for each type of shot, so you could learn for yourself. Right, and how many cameras would that sell?

While the barcode silliness might have put off some serious photographers, in fact the EOS 10 was a terrific camera, a real step up from the first generation of EOSs three years before. I bought a pair and they served me well for years. I don't remember if I even bothered to take the barcode reader and booklet out of their wrappers, yet even by then I was cynical enough to be grateful for them. This feature, lame as it was, couldn't have cost Canon more than a couple dollars to add to each camera, and was easily ignored if you so chose. Meanwhile it no doubt pulled in untold thousands of people who wouldn't have otherwise bought this model, essentially helping subsidize a piece of semi-professional gear at a mass-market price.

The Panasonic GF7 in full-on selfie configuration. But nothing says you can't push that screen down to the horizontal and use it to
take photos of, yes, other people.

Here's a more recent example. Last year Panasonic announced the GF7, a Micro 4/3 camera billed as "The one that loves a selfie" thanks to a rear screen that flips up 180 degrees. I'm sure it's a splendid selfie taker, but the marketing campaign—and apparently most of the market too—missed the point that it also makes a wonderfully compact and responsive street photography machine. The thing practically disappears in your palm (it's only a tad bigger than a Minox 35) and yet produces files every bit as good as the top Micro 4/3 bodies. Even the kit lens is better than you'd expect.

The GF7 has already been replaced by a GF8, a trivial update with, inevitably, a new USP: a "Beauty Retouch" feature that can slim your body and smooth your skin. Say what you will but I've never looked more fabulous...er, no, I haven't tried it and you probably needn't either except maybe for laughs. Still, if you're looking for a really tiny camera with serious image quality, don't underestimate these because of the dumbed-down product positioning.

The basic problem is that the aspects of cameras most appreciated by accomplished photographers tend to make for lousy USPs. Imagine pitching them to a tough client in the Sterling Cooper conference room. "Feels exactly right in your hands." I don't think so. "The controls fall just where you want them." Bor-ring. "It takes a picture the instant you press the button, focused and exposed just the way you wanted it." Seriously Draper, that's all you've got?

In short, don't trust the manufacturer to give you the best reason to buy one of their products. Their marketing priorities are elsewhere. Unfortunately sometimes that seems to be the case with their camera design priorities too. But you'll need someone higher up the food chain than I was to tell you about that.

John

Photographer and writer John Kennerdell writes two columns a year for TOP. His past contributions can be found under his name in the "Categories" in the right-hand sidebar.

Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Ned Bunnell: "Thanks for the great post John. Brought back many fond memories of meetings I had in Japan where we first had to agree on what the USP was and then develop a branding campaign that clearly focused everyone's attention on that single unique attribute. It was culturally very hard for my Japanese counterparts to not give all of their other important specs equal weight in a marketing campaign.

"As a joke one time (to get my point across), I made an ad for a new camera using PowerPoint. There was a tiny photograph of the camera in the lower right corner. The rest of the ad showed the specs set in a very large type size running top to bottom. Everyone laughed when I put this slide up and my big boss, with a smile on his face, said 'so, Ned-san, we need to focus on a single message, right?'"

Posted on Friday, 01 July 2016 at 09:34 PM in John Kennerdell, Photo equipment, Photo industry | Permalink | Comments (24)

Thursday, 26 May 2016

A Comprehensive Warranty / Repair Database?

Regarding warranties, repairs, and relocation issues with cameras, it would be great if somebody would build a comprehensive database synopsizing all the policies of the various camera- and lensmakers. It would help people make buying decisions based on their own situations and the very real differences between different companies.

That somebody is not going to be me, though, so don't ask! That would be too much like work. :-)

...And it would be a lot of work; there are huge numbers of variables.

One problem is that corporate policies aren't very transparent. Note that the Nikon Authorized Repair Station manager I talked to yesterday said that he didn't know Nikon's exact policies on servicing gray market merchandise. And if anybody outside of Nikon would know, you'd think he would.

The biggest problem might be something else he said: "things can change at any time." What he meant was that you can buy your equipment when one set of policies is in place, but those policies might change before you need service. (I remember an occasion when I was paging through back issues of the magazine I used to edit, in the warehouse where the old overstock was kept. I came across an advertisement that trumpeted "GUARANTEED FOR LIFE!"—from a company that had long before gone out of business. Their life, I guess was what that old promise meant—not the product's, or yours. Come to think of it, there was a mail-in card in one of those old issues promising a free somethingerother, and the Circulation Department would occasionally receive one of those yellowed old cards in the mail even though the offer had been made fifteen years prior and we had long since run out of whatever the freebie was.)

So even if you collected all the relevant information in one place, it would still only be a snapshot of one moment in time. No guarantee the data would still all be good in one year or three. You'd need to hire someone full time to keep it constantly updated.

The ARS manager noted that very new products—the D500 and the D5 in Nikon's case right now—have to be sent to Nikon for out-of-box problems when the products are very new, because the Authorized Repair Stations don't yet have what they need to service just-introduced cameras. So where you are in any given model's lifespan is another variable.

Different products have different "graphs" for their service needs, too. In the 1990s, a camera repair shop owner told me that 5% of a certain company's point-and-shoots were DOA right out of the box, but that the company had decided that that was an acceptable level. He recommended that customers get the camera store counterman to open the box, put batteries and a roll of film in the camera, and shoot a few shots before they even paid for the camera! He said "if you get one that works, it will probably keep working."

At the other end of the scale, I recall that until fairly recently, Leica had an assurance guarantee called "Passport." The company would repair or replace certain cameras for up to three years even if they were lost, stolen, or damaged in use, situations most warranties exclude. I'm not sure, but I think it might even have been actual camera insurance. I don't know if that program is still active—a search for "passport" and "warranty" on Leica's website just now came up empty. Anyway, when the program was still newish, I believe in the '90s, someone in the industry—I can't remember now who it was—confided to me that most Leica buyers baby their cameras sufficiently that the cameras are still essentially "like new" after three years, but that a certain very small percentage of Leica buyers would use the hell out of their cameras for just short of three years, run them over with a car or beat them to perdition with a sledgehammer, and send in for a new one. Leica apparently decided to tolerate this as an acceptable part of the cost of the program. But I doubt very much that there was ever one single mechanical Leica M that was completely DOA right out of the box.

Anyway I'm sure the repair and warranty issues for a D5300 are different than for a D5.

Companies change, too. For example, when I bought my Konica-Minolta 7D of sainted memory, K-M was still in business. When my 7D needed repair, K-M had exited the field and Sony had taken over its DSLR assets and was handling legacy repairs by replacing the still-warranted K-M products with equivalent Sony models, new. That wasn't what I wanted; I liked my 7D, and just wanted it to work. But nobody could repair it. My broken 7D was essentially unsalvageable, a victim of its maker disappearing out from underneath it.

The biggest variable, though, is probably that you never know if any of these policies will ever affect you. Many people buy a camera and use it for years without ever having any issues. Other people buy the exact same camera at the same time in the same country and have to return it multiple times for service. They might have long, detailed tales of woe to recount...but what has that got to do with you? No way to predict, really.

With automobiles we call the bad samples "lemons." There's a term for the opposite, but it's not nearly as commonplace and I can't remember what it is. Best car I ever had was a Ford ZX2—the thing ran like a top for 100k miles never needing anything but gas and oil. The big repair was a new tie rod after I hit a particularly nasty pothole. But I talked to other ZX2 owners and some of them were not nearly so lucky. I often wonder how long I would have used that K-M 7D if its electronics hadn't gotten senile. I liked that camera.

Well, you get the point. A data center for warranty and support policies and issues would be very tough to build and maintain (unless maybe it was crowd-sourced? Angie's List for camera repairs and warranty issues? Could work, but who would pay for it?) If you're mainly invested in one company, though, you might want to look into their warranty conditions and do a little research on how warranty problems are handled. It might be less stressful to at least minimize unpleasant surprises down the road.

You could optimize all the variables for your own protection...but if you conclude that life's kinda too short for that I wouldn't necessarily blame you.

Still, I think buying expensive products with full official warranties from authorized dealers is just good sense—whether a local bricks-'n'-mortar authorized dealer or an online authorized dealer like B&H Photo (my personal choice for my own purchases) is up to you. It makes no difference from a personal protection standpoint. It's just sensible to have that "insurance"; It doesn't cost that much more.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Eamon Hickey: "I agree that a database like this would be a helpful service to the photographic world.

"But the idea prompts me to say that in my extremely extensive experience with camera consumers, manufacturers' after-sales service and support is pretty low on the list of factors that influence buying decisions.

"And the somewhat lamentable dilemma for camera manufacturers is that by far the most important factor that influences camera buying decisions is price. It's a dilemma because the two—selling price and after sales service and support—are in direct conflict with each other. Providing exceptional after sales service and support costs much more money, and you have to collect that money by charging a higher initial sales price for your products.

"I'm over-simplifying a bit here, but this is why really good after sales service and support is so hard to find across so much of the consumer landscape. People say they want it, but most are not willing to pay for it, for most of the things they buy."

Mike replies: Hey, you're good. Have you ever considered writing about photography? ;-)

I attended a lecture by Zeiss that featured a handout listing all the design constraints faced by lens designers, from most to least important. No. 1 with a bullet was the targeted selling price. Everything else has to fit that. (No. 2 was size. Zeiss sometimes doesn't let itself be much constrained by either one!)

Oren Grad: "The best—or at least longest—warranty ever was offered was for Gitzo tripods by Karl Heitz, their long-time U.S. distributor: 'YOU ARE COVERED BY THE FULL GITZO WARRANTY BUYER PROTECTION FOR LIFE—PLUS REINCARNATIONS.'"

Michael Perini: "As Eamon Hickey pointed out, it costs real money to provide real support, and the increasing average resolution of sensors requires more precision in manufacture, which also costs money.

"Yet some manufacturers do a better job than others. We use both Nikon and Canon equipment in our business. Both produce beautiful results. Both have proven to be durable in hard professional use. But things occasionally break, and when they do the difference is stark. Nikon is slow, does not communicate well, and often do not fix it right the first time. A recent example sent a 70–200mm lens in for major repair. It took over a month, cost $600 (which was fair) but when it came back it didn't work. It couldn't focus. Sent it back, waited another 3–4 weeks. Finally fixed right. If we get a camera or lens to Canon on Tuesday it is back in our hands by Thursday or Friday. Canon offers Professional Courtesy repairs at three levels: free with a certain amount of equipment purchase, and two paid levels (which is basically like insurance, but provides Free FedEx return, Discounts on repairs, loaner equipment, etc.). That is a big deal to us."

robert e: "After reading this whole post, I think something far more useful than a database would be an actuarial table—something that takes into account all these variable risks, rather than simply taking a snapshot of policies (which aren't wholly accurate anyway as predictors of actual service). In fact, a couple of your anecdotes suggest that this is the manufacturers' approach to warranty service anyway, so we'd be fighting apples with apples rather than oranges (feel free to substitute a less mangled metaphor; I just happen to be hungry).

"Eamon Hickey's comment reminds me again that different cameras from the same manufacturer can have different warranty terms. e.g., a 1Dx body gets very different protection than a Rebel. It may be obvious to some, but it's very important for the inexperienced shopper to be aware of. Just because that pro wedding photog buddy-of-a-buddy raves about Canon service doesn't mean you'll get that service for your consumer kit. (Same goes for reliability and toughness, by the way.) That would all be accounted for in the actuarial table."

Moose (partial comment): "Might this all be a tempest in a teapot, at least for most of us? My late brother did some statistical analysis on the Consumer Reports frequency of repair data for cars. He said the the data, while accurate, had no meaning. The rates of failure were so low, that the differences between them weren't significant. He advised ignoring them."

Dennis Huteson: "I note that it's been mentioned that one rarely sees the servicing of a camera as a decision point when buying new gear. Au contraire...I was a Nikon user for 40 years and after two horrendous servicing incidents with a D5300 and Nikon UK I switched to Fuji."

Mark L. Power: "Thinking about the subject of this informative piece I astonished myself by realizing that in a lifetime of owning cameras, film and digital, some new, some antiques, a few regarded as classics but most, including those, in various stages of decrepitude as I have never been particularly kind to equipment (lenscaps were invariably lost within weeks of ownership and never replaced). I have never once had the need of a camera repair. No moral to this story; simply surprise. Now of course I have jinxed myself because my latest machine ( Sony RX10) will show only a black screen the next time I start it up."

Posted on Thursday, 26 May 2016 at 10:22 AM in Photo equipment, Photo industry | Permalink | Comments (24)

Wednesday, 25 May 2016

More on the Gray Market and Protecting Yourself

In the Comments to the previous post, Arg asked:

"So are you with this article trying to discourage all your overseas readers from using your affiliate links? If I, here in Australia, buy from B&H, it is a grey import, yes?"

No.

Here's the story:

• What actually makes an item gray market is not how you buy it, but how the retailer buys it from the manufacturer. If B&H Photo buys a camera from Canon USA, for instance, it's not gray market no matter who they sell it to or where they ship it to. It's still warranted by Canon USA.

The question then becomes, with a camera or lens you bought from the U.S. and had shipped to Australia or elsewhere, will your local authorized distributor and its warranty service providers honor your U.S. warranty? With so many companies out there, and a variety of distributors in numerous countries, it's impossible to give a blanket answer. The answer is, they should, but the original retailer can't necessarily guarantee that they will in all possible cases.

With Nikon, the situation is a little clearer, because Nikon is a bit more Draconian about its policies. Nikon prohibits authorized U.S. retailers from selling new digital SLRs and AF lenses outside the USA. So B&H Photo (and other U.S. authorized retailers) may not ship a non-import, U.S.-warranty Nikon or Nikon lens to any address outside the USA in the first place.

• Another question that came up in the Comments is, what happens if you a) move to a different country, or b) come visit the U.S. and buy a camera or lens while you're here, or c) need warranty service while you're on vacation in another country? Again, the theoretical answer is clear: as long as you bought a non-gray-market product in the first place, and can prove it (meaning, you should carry photocopies of your receipts with you*), you should enjoy reciprocity—that is, the manufacturer and its representatives should treat you the same as if you bought your camera or lens in the country that you're visiting, or that you came home to, or that you moved to.

As to whether every single customer will have that sort of seamless friction-free experience is where it gets a tad more dicey. Most will. A few might run into snags and SNAFUs. (And many of the latter will let the Internet know about it loud and clear, potentially exaggerating public perception of risks.)

Canon takes a notably lenient, customer-centric view of warranty repairs.

• Next, as we can glean from the Comments as a whole, different companies are quite different. Looking just at Canon and Nikon as examples, Nikon again seems to take a hard line—it has long been adamant that it will not perform any service, in warranty or out, on a product that was originally bought gray market. You'll send your camera to Nikon USA and if they decide your serial number is not kosher, they'll return the item to you untouched.

This causes a potential problem with equipment bought used. The status of the serial number depends on its original sale. So if you buy a used camera that the original owner bought with a full warranty, Nikon will service it. If you bought a used camera that was originally gray market, they will decline. Unless you bothered to ask the seller which it was—and trust that you got an honest answer—you might not know whether your used camera is eligible for service or not.

Canon USA, by contrast, has a longstanding tendency to lean the other way—it will treat a gray market item pretty much the same as U.S.-warranted item as long as you have a dated store receipt. Same goes for servicing an out-of-warranty product—Canon USA will charge you for parts and labor, but it will perform the servicing for you.

• Lastly, there's this little issue: as was widely reported (for instance at dpreview, nikonrumors, and PetaPixel), in 2012 Nikon stopped supplying parts to independent repair shops that do not become certified as Authorized Repair Stations. Nikon on one side and the repair shops on the other had explanations for this that were naturally at odds, and I won't get into the issues again here (it's a thorny thicket). But the upshot is that once your warranty expires, getting Nikon equipment serviced anywhere other than at a Nikon Authorized Repair Station might be problematic, depending on what needs doing.

Back around to the original point: I recommend staying away from gray market purchases. In my opinion you're better off buying equipment with full warranties from authorized retailers. It's what I do myself.

Mike
(Information provided by B&H Photo Video was used in this post; thanks also to Eamon Hickey)

UPDATE Wednesday evening: Following up on what Eamon wrote in the Comments, I spoke just now to a manager at a Nikon ARS (Authorized Repair Station), who allowed as how gray market issues with Nikon repair is (well, naturally) "a gray area." In-warranty repairs are either done by them or sent along to Nikon, but the customer needs to present a receipt and sometimes the warranty card that comes in the box. When out-of-warranty equipment comes in to them for repair, they don't make any attempt to evaluate whether it was purchased gray market or not—they repair the item for the customer if they can, and (because they are an ARS) Nikon supplies any part they order. However, he said there are some situations where the item, for any of a variety of possible reasons, can't be repaired by them and has to be sent back to Nikon. He emphasized that he does not know Nikon's policy and that he does not speak for Nikon, so he can't speak to exactly what standards Nikon applies or why, but he did say that sometimes things are sent along to Nikon and are returned without anything being done, presumably because Nikon determines that the item was originally purchased as gray market.

So to the question as to whether out-of-warranty repairs on gray-market products can be done, the answer is "sometimes." —Mike

*Which you should do anyway to avoid possible problems with Customs.

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Darlene: "The thought of buying used Nikon gear now frightens me. Lighten up Nikon!"

Mike replies: As Eamon noted, these policies go back a long way. Nothing's really changed.

Eamon Hickey (partial comment): "Just in the interests of trying to paint a full picture: Nikon USA's gray market policies are not driven by the Japanese—i.e. Nikon Japan, or Nikon Corp, as it is officially known. I don't know for sure that the policies go back to Joe Ehrenreich himself [the original importer of Nikon in the U.S. —Ed.], but I do know for a 100% certainty that they were created by Ehrenreich's people. When I joined Nikon USA in 1989, every senior executive in the company was still an inherited Ehrenreich executive, and the policies were already old by then.

"Nikon's Japanese parent company was not a big fan of Nikon USA's gray market stance when I was at Nikon USA. The gray market itself was a significant point of contention and conflict between the two entities. Why doesn't Nikon Japan just order Nikon USA to change its policy? They could. But one of the major functions of a regional subsidiary is to handle region-specific decision-making. So there's always a give-and-take—more so when the parent is a Japanese company that does not like to give explicit orders that it knows will anger the subsidiary and may hurt it financially.

"All that said (and now I'm stepping into opinion territory), both branches of Nikon have, together, inadvertently danced themselves into a very customer-unfriendly corner. It's stupid, and they should find another solution. That they have not, even after 40 years, is a significant black mark against them both. But they are not really alone—thousands of companies in hundreds of industries have big problems handling gray market issues in a smart and customer-friendly way. If this were a blog about cars, or luxury watches, or even tractors (yes, tractors!), it would have similar gray market discussions from time to time."

Posted on Wednesday, 25 May 2016 at 01:48 PM in Photo equipment, Photo industry | Permalink | Comments (28)

Tuesday, 24 May 2016

Why Buying Gray Market Cameras Is Like Driving Drunk

It's really not a good idea to buy gray market (grey is the British and Canadian spelling)—i.e., unofficially imported—cameras. You can sometimes "save" a few dozen to a few hundred dollars by buying the "International" or "Import" version. But you're not really saving—you're just getting less. Part of what you're buying when you buy a camera is the support structure behind it, provided by the authorized importer and accessed by you through the authorized dealer—warranty repairs and replacements mainly, but other kinds of support too. And often, out-of-warranty repairs as well. There's a cost to maintaining those services which the official importer builds into the initial cost of the equipment.

You might think you could just take a malfunctioning body to an independent repair shop if it breaks. That used to be truer than it is today. When cameras were all or mostly mechanical, repair wizards could work wonders right in their shops. Now that cameras are more like computers or consumer electronics devices, the shops often have to send them back to the manufacturer anyway—and the manufacturer might refuse to service yours if you have a gray market serial number.

Gray market lenses are a somewhat safer bet than gray market camera bodies, because there's less that can go wrong (and QC has gotten so good). This is reflected in the fact that B&H Photo does sell "import" (gray market) versions of lenses (with store warranty) but does not sell "import" camera bodies.

As far as store warranties are concerned, generally the bigger the store the safer you are. B&H Photo is large enough that they can afford to replace a defective lens as a store warranty. And they will...which is an important point! If you buy the same gray market lens at a tiny fly-by-night discounter that upsells you a "store warranty," it might be effectively useless despite the store's promises. You'll never know unless you need it that what that extra $160 (or whatever) bought for you was the right to be told, "that's not covered under the store warranty." Buyer beware.

Many "new" products on eBay are gray market. If the seller assures you they're Authorized Dealers, don't take their word for it. Check with the manufacturer.

Generally, the steeper the discount, the more cautious you should be. Here's what can happen as a worst case: You buy an expensive camera for $2,000 that normally sells for $2,600. You send the store a check or money order because "they can't give you that price if you pay with a credit card." (This is to prevent you from appealing to Visa or Mastercard for a refund.) After they have your money, they call you and inform you that the product you're buying is an inferior version with poorer-quality parts and construction. (This is always a lie, by the way. The camera companies don't make inferior versions of any of their products.) The store offers to sell you the "real" camera for $600 more. If you refuse, suddenly you find you can't get your $2,000 back. At least not easily. Eventually you'll probably succeed in extracting your imperiled cash from danger—they're not outright highwaymen, after all—but they try to make you anxious enough about it that you'll just give in and pay the extra amount just so you won't lose the money you've already spent.

And at that point, you've bought a camera without a manufacturer's warranty from a vendor you now know you can't trust for the same price you would have paid for the same camera with a warranty. Congratulations, Mr. or Ms. Smart Shopper.

I've written for photo magazines and on the Web since 1988. I haven't seen it all. But I've seen a lot. My advice is, make sure you're buying from an Authorized Dealer (again, contact the manufacturer if you're unsure), and make sure the product you're buying has an official warranty that covers the country you live in.

Doing anything else is like the decision to drive drunk in one way: even if you get away with it and come out unscathed—even more than once—it still doesn't mean what you did was wise or safe.

Mike

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Michael: "Having lost a good friend to a drunk driver, I can assure you that buying gray market cameras is nothing like driving drunk. I thoroughly enjoy this blog but I just can't let this poorly chosen analogy go by without expressing my disagreement."

Mike replies: Very sorry to hear of your friend, and sorry to have brought that up for you. Really the only parallel I was trying to make is that "getting away with it" doesn't make anything a good idea—an argument I have had numerous times with people who boast about driving drunk. That it is never okay is always my point. One guy I used to work with would say, "I do it all the time and I've never had a problem with it," which drove me crazy....

Stephen Gilbert: "Bought a pretty expensive camera from B&H. There was a problem with the viewfinder, so I called them (B&H has people answering phone calls!) to explain the problem. They emailed me a return UPS label, I sent the camera back, and got a credit posted to my VISA card as soon at it arrived in NY. What's that worth?"

Robert Hudyma: "In my long-gone grandiose days as a Fortune 500 executive one of our deal-making merchant bankers proffered the following advice: 'If you pay peanuts you get monkeys.' Sounds like that advice works for cameras too."

Dan MacDonald: "I work at an independent repair shop and thought I could add a on a bit here. A surprising amount of digital camera problems can be solved without parts. We find a good two-thirds of DSLR problems are caused by a bad connection between circuits rather than failed components. Cleaning these and fixing the problem requires no software or reprogramming, and if you have a reputable local repair shop you will likely get your equipment back faster than sending it in.

"I will also back up what Mike is saying here overall. The initial discount may seem hard to pass up, but all too often we have seen customers with equipment that we cannot repair (usually due to parts unavailability, an increasing problem) and the manufacturers won't fix it due to it being gray market. Also, not only is the warranty on gray market items dubious to non-existent, but out-of-warranty service down the road will also be refused by the camera makers' repair facilities. On higher-end equipment, servicing it if/when it has a problem can greatly extend its useable life, and with gray market that's often no longer an option. Having to pitch a $1,500 lens you paid $1,200 for gray market because it needs a minor $100–$200 service will erode a lot of that initial feel-good on saving a few hundred bucks on the initial purchase."

Bruno: "I have bought several new 'official' lenses, secondhand lenses, and also one single grey market lens. All of the same Japanese brand. Would you like to guess which one breaks all the time (oil spills on the aperture blades and they stick)? The first time I sent it back to the dealer because it was still under warranty and they took almost six months to repair it. The second time it was out of warranty and I brought it to the manufacturer. They repaired it in a couple of weeks for a reasonable price. It seems that I didn't get away with it."

Len Salem: "One point I have yet to see mentioned (unless I missed it) is that an authorised dealer purchased item retains a better resale value. Here in UK there are several dealers who will only buy your camera, or take it in part-exchange, if you can prove purchase source from an authorised dealer with an authentic invoice/receipt from them. I find that the prices these dealers offer for your equipment to be very close to what you would be left with from an eBay sale after the eBay/Paypal selling costs, without the uncertainty of an eBay sale. This is a really important reason for buying from an authorised dealer, at a somewhat higher price initially, as many of us want to at some stage sell what we have and buy something different.

"As with car owning, it is not only the initial price which is important, but the resale value as well."

Thom Hogan: "With Nikon, in particular, one issue with gray market is whether parts, training, and testing equipment is available to third parties. For the most recent cameras, it's not generally available, though it does tend to come available over time. And this applies to lenses: simple primes generally aren't going to be a problem. It's VR and E apertures, and the very most modern additions that will be the problem with lenses: Nikon doesn't make those parts, training, or test rigs available generally."

[Thom, of ByThom.com, is the leading independent Nikon expert on the Internet. —Ed.]

OG: "B&H does sell imported cameras, albeit selectively."

wts (partial comment): "Back in the early days of personal computers before IBM changed that world, I worked for a company that couldn't get authorized for the prominent brand that everyone wanted. We got gray market PC's from authorized dealers who couldn't make their quotas. They helped us with warranty problems, parts, etc. until they got investigated by the manufacturer. Then we had problems servicing our customers until we could dig up other sources since there were certain essential non-standard parts we couldn't get elsewhere. That's why I never bought gray market anything for myself since—I know what even conscientious non-authorized resellers go through."

Posted on Tuesday, 24 May 2016 at 11:56 AM in Photo equipment, Photo industry | Permalink | Comments (52)

Monday, 21 March 2016

The State of the Camera Industry

Year to year, LensVid seems to do the best job of briefly summarizing the state of camera and lens production. I'm just catching up to this year's post, which is more than a month old now. The video is concise and covers all the main numbers nicely:

I suspect this will interest some of you...but others not as much. After all, photographers are not in the camera industry, nor are we tied to it, really. The only question a photographer really needs to ask is, do I have what I need to do my own work? And from what I can tell (tell me if your opinion differs), we have seen no decline in the richness of what the camera industry is providing. My feeling is that we continued to be treated to a wealth of new offerings and timely updates, that development is still proceeding almost faster than it's reasonable to catch up with, and that we have, if anything, too many choices of good tools rather than too few.

No surprises here, but it's good to keep up.

Mike
(Thanks to Gert-Jan Vons)

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Andy Sheppard: "Without even starting the video, the stat that I find most shocking is the one to the right of screen—'the ENTIRE camera market in 2015 is less than 30% of what it was in 2010.' That is one hell of a dramatic decline...."

Mike replies: Yes, but you'll notice that the decline is mostly in digicams a.k.a. point-and-shoots—fixed-lens small-sensor compacts, the market for which is being obliterated by smartphones. We've known for some time that that's happening, and we foresaw it even before it started to happen. You'll notice that the change in interchangeable-lens cameras, which are what most photographers care more about, has been much less dramatic.

Bill C: "The state of the camera industry should be of interest to both the serious amateur and the professional photographer. Understanding what business drivers will influence manufacturers can help shape what we invest in, from specific models of bodies or lenses to entire systems. Take for example the exit of Samsung from the digital camera market. I've heard some exclaim surprise at this, but industry performance made it clear that at least one or two of the middle players were going to get squeezed out. One can't help but wonder about Ricoh, as well, given how far they trail the other ILC manufacturers. The major camera manufacturers are still very much catching up with the current state of the market, and I think we'll see more impact from this in the next few years. Contraction of model lineups, perhaps the exit of another manufacturer (or two), and probably a growing trend in price increases all seem likely."

Posted on Monday, 21 March 2016 at 08:41 AM in Photo industry | Permalink | Comments (11)

Sunday, 14 February 2016

Sunday Open Mike: Less Than Zero (and Other News Blips)

Winter's here!
Lovely Winter has finally (finally) arrived in Western New York. It's a crispy –9°F (–23°C) this morning, cold enough to make short-coated Lulu want to stay indoors. I'm wearing a base layer (formerly known as long underwear) and flannel-lined jeans, and I've got my HeatHolders ^TM on!

Took long enough. I enjoy a good crispy cold—it's bracing. It's that wet, chilly, hovering-around-thirty-degrees cold that feels unpleasant to me. Went outside five times yesterday. Just not for too long each time!

Bad news about the hat, though. (I asked about a warm winter hat a few weeks ago.) Based on readers' recommendations I bought six hats and have now zero-degree tested them all, and the hands-down winner is the Golightly cashmere watch cap recommended by my brother Scott, whose advice is commonly right on target. (Good thing, because he gives advice for a living—he's a Ph.D. psychologist in Rhode Island.) Sorry to recommend such a flagrantly expensive product, but it's both the most comfortable and the warmest of the hats I tried. Should last a long time at least—multiple reports (including from Scott) say they still look brand new after ten years of use. Just don't lose it.

Ah, winter.

Panasonic messes up
So you remember that looks-too-good-to-be-true deal on the Panasonic 25mm ƒ/1.7 Micro 4/3 lens last Black Friday? Ninety-nine dollars, marked down from $249?

Turns out it might indeed not be true.

Panasonic apparently let retailers fill the orders from existing stocks and said it would honor rebates on backorders, but has kept shuffling its feet about filling those backorders, delaying the ship dates multiple times. B&H Photo for one finally gave up when Panasonic delayed the shipments yet again, this time till April. B&H's Henry Posner (an old friend from CompuServe) stated the company has "no confidence" either that Panasonic will ship the lenses in April or that it would ship enough of them. So they finally pulled the plug and cancelled the backorders.

This appears to be industry-wide, not specific to B&H or any other retailer.

Panasonic has historically been intermittently plagued by problems when it comes to keeping its photographic products in stock. To name two examples, I recall a loooong wait for the Panasonic LX3 when it was a hot item eight years ago, and I watched the Panasonic 12–35mm premium zoom (a great Micro 4/3 lens) go into extended periods of limbo more than once.

Happy Birthday DDD
The redoubtable David Douglas Duncan, one of the 20th century's greatest war photographers, turned 100 last January 23rd. Duncan (a.k.a. DDD)—who, when just a college student, inadvertently photographed an incognito John Dillinger entering a hotel—is revered at Nikon for his crucial early support of the then-fledgling company, and he had a long tenure as one of the top mentors and role models for photo enthusiasts. Late in life he had a falling out with his longtime friend Henri Cartier-Bresson for publishing a book of pictures he and Henri took of each other at a café—Cartier-Bresson was notoriously averse to being photographed.

David Douglas Duncan, photo courtesy LIFE.com

One of the treasures of my photo library is a copy of David's War Without Heroes, his superb book about Viet Nam (thanks to my book dealer friend Andy Moursund for helping with that acquisition). DDD is due for a new career retrospective book, too. Happy Birthday, David.

How to buy a pool table
When we were talking about the lottery several weeks ago, a couple of people asked me what kind of pool table I'd buy if I won the lottery. As you know I never write about pool, but I'd probably pick a 9-foot Blatt New Yorker, which is a modern reproduction of the old "streamline" style Brunswick Centennial. (Streamline is a later offshoot of art deco.) Costs around $30,000, I think—I haven't actually priced it, for the obvious reason that I haven't won the lottery.

But for most people furnishing a game room, for kids, teens, parties, and weekender "ball-bashing," what you want is something like a 7-foot Brunswick Glenwood. Not cheap, but the table is pretty, it can be customized to your taste, and the pockets, as on all Brunswicks save the tournament models, are buckets—they'll suck down any ball that comes near 'em. This is not good for practice or for getting better, but it's better for having occasional fun without getting frustrated.

Long the dominant brand, Brunswick tables are no longer the best—all made offshore* now—but the famous name still holds sway, and every dollar you save buying a cheaper table you'll lose twice over when you go to sell.

The Brunswick Glenwood

Now comes the hard part: for heaven's sake, get the kids a lesson or two. In golf, the tradition of instruction is very strong—only an idiot would set kids on a golf course, hand them a few clubs, and turn them loose and let them have at it on their own. Everybody takes a few lessons. In any kind of billiards, it's the opposite. Not only is there no tradition of instruction, there is a tradition against it—hustlers were always trying to hide their "speed" (how good they were) and nobody wanted to teach anybody else what they knew for fear of giving away a competitive advantage. The result is that everybody flails away on a pool table any old which way, and nobody learns the proper stance or the proper way to stroke. (Even many pros have grooved a bad stroke, including the player widely agreed to be the most talented of the last era, the Filipino Efren Reyes. He copied his stroke from an old man who happened to be the best player in the small out-of-the-way town in the Philippines where Efren grew up. It's a poor one, loosey-goosey and too quick. Efren himself has said he has no idea how good he could have been if only he'd learned a better stroke. Sadly, there was a talented kid at my pool hall in Milwaukee who had copied his stroke from Efren's! That nameless Filipino player's untutored stroke has infected pool players across generations and across continents.) Widespread ignorance of how to play properly has adversely affected the popularity of the game.

How do you find lessons? You almost can't. Your best bet is this DVD set or this book. Good in-person instructors are very few and far between.

Free online photo course from MoMA
Last news item for this Sunday—the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has launched a free online course called "Seeing Through Photographs." Curator Sarah Meister "encourages participants to look critically at photographs through the diverse ideas, approaches, and technologies that inform their making." Haven't seen any of it yet, so this isn't necessarily an endorsement—I'm just passing the news along.

Come back tomorrow at 11 a.m. ET for a nice book offer, exclusively here on TOP! Hope you have a nice rest of your Sunday.

Mike
(Thanks to Scott Johnston, Richard Newman, Ctein, and Ken Tanaka)

"Open Mike" is the Editorial Page of TOP. It often strays off-topic and usually comes along on Sundays.

*American-made tables include Connelly in Texas; A.E. Schmidt in St. Louis, Missouri, a company I like; Golden West in Oregon; and, in Indiana, Diamond, the prevailing manufacturer of tables used at professional tournaments. (And Olhausen, but stay away from Olhausens. In my opinion they play horribly.) There's a brand of table called American Heritage. Now where do you suppose those are made? Asia, of course. With a name like that, how could they be made anywhere else?

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

R. Edelman: "In lieu of a new David Douglas Duncan career retrospective, I would suggest Photo Nomad, published in 2003. As DDD wrote, the book was 'my birthday gift to myself.' Happy birthday, Mr. Duncan!"

Mike replies: Whoops, forgot about that one. I've skimmed but not perused it.

Moose: "Yup, got my cancellation notice for the Panny 25mm ƒ/1.7 a couple of days ago, and a nice, if frustrated, reply when I asked what was going on:

We accepted your order with every intention of filling it. We could not have anticipated that Panasonic would become unable (or otherwise decline) to fill the orders we had placed with them for this lens. We share your disappointment and surprise at their decision.

"But as I live where I don't have to buy a $155 hat, I now feel better about popping for an Oly refurb. I think that the lens I wanted anyway, and was blinded by the deal. I looked at the reviews again, and at Robin Wong's practical examples that the Oly, in spite of similar specs, can get much closer/magnify more, which is a big deal to me."

Ken James: "Another good post, you are on a winning streak (usually are). I was apparently one of the lucky ones to get the Panasonic lens, I have kept it on my OM-D E-M10 since it arrived. I was surprised at how much more I like the camera with this lens on the front. I love it."

sara j: "In 1968, I skipped out of school with a friend and we went to the The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. I came upon an exhibit of David Douglas Duncan photos and stayed there for several hours, mesmerized. The next day, I walked into the journalism room and said that I needed to learn photography."

Posted on Sunday, 14 February 2016 at 09:49 AM in Books, News and Occasions, Photo industry, Photographers, current | Permalink | Comments (26)

Monday, 25 January 2016

A Visit to the Treasure Vaults

...So anyway, to continue my post from Friday: Last Thursday, after seeing the fine A. L. Coburn exhibit at George Eastman Museum (GEM), Geoff's and my day wasn't over. Thanks to my new friend Robyn, we had an introduction to her friend and colleague Todd Gustavson. Todd is the Curator of Technology at the Museum...a.k.a. the camera guy. You might know of Todd from such best-selling camera books as Camera: A History of Photography from Daguerreotype to Digital. After saying hello he kindly took time out of his day and led the way down to the catacombs for a tour behind the scenes.

That might not make you catch your breath, but I knew we were about to see the world's biggest camera closet. GEM has one of the most significant camera collections in the world, with around 16,000 significant pieces, many priceless (or very valuable) and many one-of-a-kind. They range from the Alphonse Giroux whole-plate Daguerreotype camera of 1839, to a Leica O-Series from 1923 in very fine condition (serial number 109), to the second Deardorff ever made (serial number: 2, written in pencil), to the camera payload from the Lunar Orbiter that first mapped the moon, to the "earliest known surviving" DSLR (we'll get to that story). And those are only a few high points. For photo nuts, there are treasures on every shelf. The deeper you delve the more there is to find.

Curator of Technology Todd Gustavson reaches for a "dime bank" on one aisle of the world's largest camera closet

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Todd led us down into a room the size of an airplane hangar filled with shelving from the floor to higher than you could reach. Of course we saw the original Kodak, the box camera that inspired the slogan "You Push the Button, We Do the Rest." And Todd wound it and actually pressed the famous button—and, obligingly, the shutter fired, with a little snick. Later he showed us a whimsical little accessory, a "dime bank," that was marketed with one of those very early Kodaks. It consisted of a metal cylinder a customer could fill with dimes, and it was marked on the side with the names of the cameras you could afford if you had enough dimes to reach the mark! Cool beans. It was to help people save up for a camera purchase.

Three old cameras?

Here's an example of what we're dealing with here. Just three old cameras, right? Left to right: Alfred Stieglitz's camera, a camera from Mathew Brady's portrait gallery, and the camera that took the flag-raising picture at Iwo Jima*.

Celebrities
Two of the fun things I saw: I was walking down one aisle when I spied an old camera with a masking tape label on it. Scrawled on the tape was "Property of Beaumont Newhall." I claim not to be a child (or a fan) of celebrity culture, but that's only because all my celebrities are photo-related. (Well, and snooker players, but let's not go there.) John Travolta has a house on my lake and I couldn't care less, but touching something Beaumont Newhall touched? Wow.

Another was seeing the Hasselblad 1000F, the company's second model—with a Kodak lens. It turns out Victor Hasselblad had the Kodak concession in Sweden, and in his day, Kodak's various optical subsidies still had the world's best lens technologies. (No longer the case, of course. When I asked the famous Kodak lens designer and optical polymath Rudolf Kingslake if he would write some articles on lenses for Photo Techniques, the then-93-year-old Mr. Kingslake told me, "I don't know anything any more."(!)).

Victor Hasselblad wanted Kodak lenses for his new cameras, but soon switched to Zeiss...they were cheaper.

Most of our tour concentrated on digital. Here's an interesting camera—developed by Jim McGarvey's Federal Systems Division (FDS) at Kodak, it's the "earliest known surviving" DSLR in the world. The reason for the tortuous descriptors is that the world's very first DSLR, also developed by FDS, was the so-called E-O, or Electro-Optic, of 1988. That one was a one-of-a-kind that was built for what Jim McGarvey calls "a U.S. government customer." Kodak still isn't allowed to say (I'd think three initials and a reflexive culture of high secrecy—could be one of several). So does the E-O, the world's first DSLR, still exist? Might; might not**. The agency that paid for it might still have it, or might not—but they aren't saying, and you can't ask!

Shown is the Tactical Camera of 1989, the world's, yes, earliest known surviving DSLR. Built with an off-the-shelf Canon New F-1 body. The oblong extruded-aluminum box next to it holds the electronics and the memory. FDS built two of these essentially as salesman's models to show to various government agencies.

The 1.2-megapixel NC2000e of 1994 was the newsroom standard

In fact, Kodak, which wrote most of the history of early digital (and was still causing a sensation with its cameras as late as the 2002 Photokina), had some problems. The first was that, where digital was concerned, they were doing R&D and weren't really thinking in terms of marketing. The first time out of the gate they didn't realize that if a digital SLR said "Nikon" on it up top—because it was built using an ordinary off-the-shelf Nikon body and lenses—the public would naturally give Nikon credit for the camera, even though everything that made it digital came from Kodak.

As you might remember, newsroom purchases drove the first penetration of DSLRs into the marketplace. The NC2000e shown above was the standard newsroom camera in 1994—at $17,500, it was too expensive for anyone else. Because of that name on the prism housing, people assumed that the camera was the result of cooperation between Kodak and Nikon. Not so. The first time Canon or Nikon learned of DSLRs earlier than this was the same time the public did—when they came to market. That changed in 1994 when Kodak entered into a cooperative agreement with Canon—they never had a similar agreement with Nikon. [Note: An earlier version of this post had this backwards. Sorry for the error. —Mike the Ed.]

Second, although it was a manufacturing company possessing considerable expertise, Kodak didn't make a pro SLR body.

A third problem, and the one that's kinda touchy now, was that Kodak had nourished a culture so protective of the sanctity of its film business that, in the late '80s, the pre-production, pre-DSC prototypes weren't even called "cameras." They were termed "imaging accessories." Cameras used film.

The common perception is that Kodak was late to adjust to digital. Not the case. Actually, more often it was the opposite: it was too early with too many of its developments—products were made before the demand for them had developed. It happened again and again—too far ahead of the curve, not too far behind it. Just as bad, really, for business success, but quite different from the common assumption.

The biggest problem, though, was in the business model that George Eastman established starting in 1888. Cameras weren't where the money was; it was in film. The profitability of film just couldn't be approached by selling digital cameras, sensors, or reusable media. The infrastructure of Kodak Park had been developed at great cost to manufacture film efficiently—and it would have been hugely difficult to turn on a dime to manufacture anything else. As Todd remarked, "'Making the elephant dance' would not be an easy task."

Here's another interesting artifact. Many of you will remember the clamoring for "digital film" in the middle 2000s—a module that you could pop into a film body to instantly convert it to a digital camera. Here it is, in a prototype from around 2000. (The thing on the right is not a camera, just a case—if you think about it for a second, you'll realize that the distance between the cassette well and the film gate is non-standard, so a physically different design would have to be made to fit every different camera.) The product existed, and worked. But the project never got capital funding to get it to market.

A certain sadness
Although George Eastman Museum is not a corporate arm of Kodak—it's a separate entity, independently funded, and doing well—there is a sense of both trauma and tragedy that lingers in the air here. Kodak was a proud American achievement—a brand of huge prestige and a vastly profitable company that was a blue-chip success for well over a century, something few businesses of any kind ever achieve. (Imagine Apple still being around 88 years from now and you'll get a sense of this. Kodak is 15 years older than Ford Motor Company.) It long outlived its founder, George Eastman. (Depressed by severe chronic pain from a degenerative condition and with no hope of getting better, Eastman took his own life in 1932.) That's something not many companies based on innovations and ideas achieve either. It not very long ago employed 60,000 people in Rochester, spanning generations.

Todd emphasized to us that Kodak was well prepared for the end of film—it had the start point and the end point accurately predicted on the graph. It just expected the decline in between to be gradual. It wasn't. It was much more abrupt—things went along better than expected for a while, and then the graph line fell off a cliff. (To give you an idea, in a recent dpreview interview, Toru Takahashi of Fujifilm said that demand for its film products today is less than 1% of what it was in 2000.) Kodak was prepared to adapt. Just not that fast.

The bigger the company, the more in danger it is from disruption. The jumble of severe disruption resulting from the nosedive of the demand for film and the carnage it caused within Kodak was harsh and shocking to those whose lives were entwined with the company and its work, and for the city it helped to both build and define. From a distance it's just the Darwinism of big business; from up close there are human lives and emotions deeply involved. Rochesterians had to witness the proud old "Great Yellow Father" go down like a stricken ocean liner hit by a torpedo.

The last Kodak pro digital camera was the Professional DCS Pro SLR/c of 2004, built by Sigma with a Canon mount. Fewer than 2,000 people work for Kodak today, and the majority of the old Kodak Park is rented out to other tenants. Kodak's Professional Camera Division never turned a profit.

Plus-X! I shot thousands of rolls of that. I could play
Plus-X like Perlman plays the fiddle, once upon a time.

Curiously, a little yellow film box, modest as can be, embodies one of the great consumer products of all time, the result of decades of intensive scientific research, tremendous manufacturing know-how, matchless expertise in quality control, and tens of billions of dollars of R&D—yet the film in the box cost less than the packaging around it! The profit margin from film sales was ungodly high, decade after decade. In digital, by contrast, everywhere Kodak looked it had to ask, "...but where will the money come from?"

So what does Todd Gustavson himself shoot with? None of the cameras in the collection. "That would be a conflict of interest," he says softly. He showed us his own black Nikon Dƒ, saying, sardonically, "I'm one of the two guys who bought one of these."*** He prefers the AIS Micro-Nikkor 55mm ƒ/2.8 (which you can still buy new! I did not know that), a lens John Loengard of LIFE magazine fame also favors.

I hope this won't be TOP's last visit to the treasure vaults. There's a lot down there, really.

Mike

[Note: This article has been revised several times since first published. —Mike the Ed.]

Todd Gustavson, whose latest book is Curious Cameras: 183 Cool Cameras from the Strange to the Spectacular (a serious book, despite its flip and kid-friendly cover and title—I admit I thought it was a book for children when I first saw it online) was extremely gracious to take so much time out of his day to give us all a peek into the underground grotto of cameraphile delights. It was a wonderful tour—and the vast store of knowledge in Todd's head is an appropriate counterpart to the physical collection. Many thanks to Robyn, to all the kind, friendly people at George Eastman Museum, and especially Todd. Indirect thanks as well to Jim McGarvey for his PDF "The DCS Story."

*Probably. Todd thinks so, but the provenance isn't ironclad from a strict scholarly point of view.

**Could have been sold as government surplus, even...to some scrounger who didn't know what it was. Ew. Let's not go there either.

***Of course he exaggerates. At least 29 guys bought Dƒ's. And don't think I haven't been tempted.

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Hugh Smith: "What a wonderful article, Mike. When I started in photography, working in a camera shop, we genuflected 3X daily to Rochester. When the Kodak sales rep visited the store, we all dropped our collective jaws just to be near the guy. It was the best of times and the worst of times as we all know now. I never made the 'pilgrimage' to Rochester and George Eastman House and this article is just awesome. Thank you."

Ctein: "Curiously, I just acquired Camera: A History of Photography from Daguerreotype to Digital in December when I encountered it on the bargain table at Barnes & Noble. I picked it up expecting a cheapo reference book, at an appropriately cheapo price, flipped through it, and daaaayum, it was really good! Well worth acquiring at any price.

"Overall, Todd and I are in agreement about Kodak's relationship to and history with digital. This, of course, means we're both right. The point about Kodak being too far ahead of the curve is a valuable lesson. There are multiple examples of that. PhotoCD is one. It would have been a much bigger success if it had been released 2–3 years later. Nobody had anything remotely close to it coming down the pike, and when it was released it was simply too immature and the cost/performance ratio was too unfavorable. The home players needed about three times the performance to be acceptable, which was impossible at the time without the price being unacceptable. And Kodak's representatives flat-out lied to photography labs about what it would cost them (and what they'd have to charge) to run PhotoCD services, by about a factor of three.

"In addition, some of the standards around PhotoCD and its color management were still in flux, so early discs had real compatibility problems with later software.

"But the concept and the overall technical execution? Excellent! Just too early.

"I bet hardly anyone reading this remembers the Kodak Premier System. It was a dedicated digital darkroom for photography labs that came out in the early '90s. It was brilliant, and it was a joy to use. Imagine if Photoshop actually worked the way a darkroom photographer would expect it to work! A custom printer (I mean the human kind) could use Premier with half an hour's training and become proficient on it in a day. It was that much like working in a dark room…except you worked in the light, seated at a console, with a big screen in front of you. The results looked like the way you would expect a photograph to look if you were manipulating it in the darkroom—color correction, dodging and burning-in, and more sophisticated controls produced results that looked 'photographic' not 'Photoshopped.'

"There was just one problem. It was 2–3 years too early. To make the system run well and fast, it needed custom hardware and code needed to be written to intimately mate with the computer. Unfortunately, it all made the system so expensive that it was impossible for a lab to ever amortize the purchase cost.

"For several years after Premier stopped shipping, I bugged the techies at Kodak to release the software as a standalone package, because it would have eaten Photoshop's lunch. That's how I found out about the code. They couldn't, not without rewriting it from the ground up. It was very customized. A shame.

"Kodak really did understand all this stuff before almost anybody else. Probably too far before anybody else.

"And, yeah, the very sudden collapse of the film business in less than two years in the mid-'Naughties' caught everyone by surprise, and it totally clobbered Kodak's long-term plans."

gary bliss: "I think that you have the economics of Kodak about right: Fuji's arrival in the '70sand '80s cut their margins close to half but they were still un-gawdly high; easily 40+% of sales, net. But these are margins that, short of pharma or cosmetics, are simply not generally available in the economy. So yes, how would any Kodak manager succeed by facilitating users, broadly speaking, to get off that horse?

"But there is another, and somewhat more subtle, institutional implication that the margins had. It is something that you may recognize from back-in-the-day. The culmulative effect of decades of sky high margins was the creation of a remarkably ossified and remote Kodak middle-management infrastructure, some of it 'R&D' (that did little for the bottom line) and some 'marketing' that was tone deaf to consumers' needs (witness APS). Kodak's remoteness was a open secret in the industry, to be highlighted every five years or so with yet-another Kodak 'openness' initiative.

"I am in the defense sector and we were, frankly, free riders on Kodak's research. We got, for example, adaptive optics decades early due to that and, frankly, didn't pay much for it; gosh darn it was useful for reading license plates on the tundra...."

Frank P: "I did some of the ads and collateral for Kodak's digital and film products through the '90s, also lots of ancillary involvement with other brands. One of Kodak's most important contributions was to envision and develop our current workflow using raw files and conversion software, along with reliable color profiling. As well as the basis for inkjet printing. Imagine digital photography left in the hands of Canikon and Sony...nothing but JPEGs and Microsoft Power Point hyper-saturated colors."

Peter: "I don't know anything about this place, but why the hell is all that stuff not on display for the public, rather than be locked in a cellar?"

Mike replies: It's often on display. Large collections like this are resources that are drawn on for exhibits, as needed. Same as with collections of art. Most art museums have only a small fraction of their holdings on display at any given time. The rest is in storage. When a curator gets an idea for a show, they might draw from their museum's own collection, and they might pull in other pieces on loan from other museums' collections.

Todd has curated 10 museum shows from the GEM camera collection; plus, selected items are on rotating permanent display; plus, selected items are brought out to augment specific shows. Plus, his four books are ongoing "virtual displays" with pictures and writeups of many of the items.

When we visited, there were a number of "Pre-Kodak" items (i.e., before 1888) out on a table, being gathered together for a new permanent exhibit, one that will give people an idea of what photography was all about before George Eastman came along. Todd mentioned that his next task was to take all the stuff he'd gathered together up to the room where it would be shown to see how it all fits in the cases, to figure out what there's room to show.

kevin willoughby: "Re '...the camera payload from the Lunar Orbiter that first mapped the moon...' Can you double-check this? Perhaps it was a prototype or a spare...to the best of my knowledge, every Lunar Orbiter that actually orbited the Moon was deliberately crashed into the Moon. The only man-made lunar artifact recovered from the moon was the camera of Surveyor 3."

Todd Gustavson replies: I wrote about this in all three books as it’s such a special piece. The pictures/descriptions vary: the first Camera book has a two-page spread showing Lunar Orbiter payload, a couple detail images of it, a LO image of Kepler crater on the moon taken by LO Feb. 1967, an image of the complete satellite as it would have looked in Lunar orbit, and an image of the Kodak technicians working on it; 500 Cameras has an additional piece written by Pete Schultz, a physicist from Brown University who also does some work for NASA; and Curious Cameras has an image of the Lunar Orbiter payload and the Earth from the near moon orbit.

[Note: Profits from the linked books go to the George Eastman Museum. —Mike the Ed.]

Tom Kwas (partial comment): "I ran across a few sites on-line where people were saying that they knew somebody with both the Ektar 80mm for Hasselblad, and the Zeiss 80mm, and the Ektar blew the Zeiss out of the water...."

Michael Perini: "Mike, thanks for this, all of it, but especially the Kodak story. Few companies ever get as good at what they do as Kodak was, and fewer still for as long. They certainly made some critical mistakes, but I'm not sure anyone could have turned that battleship fast enough. Film was just too profitable. I still have a collection of Commercial, and Wide Field Ektars, and Deardorffs on which to mount them. They were just wonderful. Thank you again. +1 for Todd's first book; I haven't seen the second one."

Mark Sampson: "Thanks for the intelligent analysis about Kodak's being just too far ahead of the curve. We were indeed; I was there, and using a software suite called 'KIEWS' in the early '90s that pre-dated Photoshop...it ran on a Sun SparcStation II computer since no PC/Mac at that time was powerful enough to handle it. I took the original documentary photos of Mr. McGarvey's 'Tactical Camera' and the other DSLR prototypes; they can be seen on his site. And yes, I shot them on 4x5 color negative film, using a Kodak Commercial Ektar lens."

Posted on Monday, 25 January 2016 at 11:19 AM in Cameras, old, Photo equipment, Photo industry | Permalink | Comments (41)

Wednesday, 20 January 2016

Will Fujifilm Produce a Medium Format Camera?

One of my favorite, but also one of the most frustrating, film cameras I ever owned was the Fuji GS645s, a mostly plastic 645 with a fixed 60mm ƒ/4 lens. The 645 format was nominally 60x45mm on 120 and 220 medium-format film—the actual image size of 645 was somewhat smaller, usually around 56mm in the longer dimension for most manufacturers. The lens focal length of 60mm was moderately wide-angle on the format. When I was testing one for a magazine, I dropped it and it shattered, which of course (being me) I duly recounted in the magazine even though it made me look like a dolt. Hey, as David Vestal said, we're in the disclosure business*. Gotta be honest, even when it makes you look bad.

My GS645s was frustrating because when it was good, it was very, very good. But the lens was super-slow. Its widest aperture was ƒ/4, and it was so poor wide open that the first good aperture was ƒ/5.6. Of course you could put it on a tripod—I often did—but this fought against the gestalt of the camera, which was configured as if it were designed to be portable and hand-held.

The film manufacturer had a long history of making medium-format cameras as a sort of "hobby business" alongside its real business, making film. Now Fuji has moved into diversified businesses, which again dwarf the business significance of its cameras. The more things change the more they stay the same.

Fuji has said it's looking into a medium-format digital camera, and there are two ways to look at that. First, that it might be a pretty foolish and foolhardy thing to do—market demand for digital cameras with sensors larger than 24x36mm (135 or "full frame") drops off like the face of El Capitan. On the other hand, it would make perfect sense as a sensible complement to Fuji's existing APS-C-sized X system. Full-frame is too close to APS-C to make enough of a difference; with a medium-format system, Fujifilm could offer a real alternative, one with significant differentiation. After all, Leica's S system has probably been as popular as it can possibly be given its price.

And that's another plus for Fuji, as it was for the Pentax digital 645—it's not hard to undercut the main competition on price.

Attack!
The idea of the two-part strategy, with a larger format that's better than "full-frame," reminds me of an open letter I wrote as Editor of Photo Techniques to Kodak and the other members of the Advanced Photo System (APS) consortium when APS came out in 1996. I made a closely-reasoned argument that enthusiasts were not going to get behind the new format (as indeed they did not) unless the APS consortium (mainly Kodak, which was the tail that wagged that dog) were to throw them a bone. I also argued that APS would not succeed in taking over the market for consumer snapshooting unless Kodak made a concerted effort to kill 35mm. (That was radical talk back then.) That problem was simply that APS had been comprehensively optimized, but mainly for the convenience of the manufacturers. From the consumer's perspective, there was nothing wrong with 135 cassettes and one-hour photo developing with double 3R prints. As a system, APS offered film manufacturers and processors plenty of benefits, but the benefits for the consumer were harder to detect. And people don't buy things unless there's something in it for them.

My idea was that the only way to kill 35mm—and, at the same time, provide that "bone" to serious photographers—would be something that had been sorely needed for a long time—a thorough rethink of the existing medium-format film format. We were all used to 120, but it had originally been designed for studio use and gave deep meaning to the term "fussy." I proposed a cassette-loaded, non-paper-backed filmstrip 40mm wide with sprocket holes on only one edge for counting and positioning purposes (much as APS had—for still photography there was never any need for all those sprocket holes on both sides of the film. That, in turn, was a legacy of 35mm's origins as movie film). I suggested calling it "APS Pro." Finally, instead of the ancient and decidedly non-optimal 120 arrangement, with film and paper wound together around an open spool, photographers would have a sensible, through-designed, better-than-35mm alternative. By moving enthusiasts and pros to an APS Pro, they could have both provided APS with status and cachet, and also cut off an important part of the support for 35mm. (35mm had been tenacious up till that point, having survived several assaults meant to "improve" on it.) With a "pincer movement" reminiscent of Civil War battles, attacking it from both sides, mighty 35mm could be defeated and APS would triumph.

I still think I was right, but, of course, only in the context of the ecology of film. Those two formats, operating in tandem, could have helped kill 35mm, which in turn would have driven consumers into the waiting arms of APS. If film had continued to be the medium for photography. That turned out to be a pretty big "if." Paradigm change was on the horizon in 1996. Digital was coming. As it ended up evolving (nobody really knew how it would, in 1996), it would have made film melt away—APS along with it—regardless of how sensible the formats and the marketing for them had been. APS was doomed even if it had been managed more carefully. Its only lasting legacy is the name we use for certain reduced-size digital chips.

There's medium format and then there's medium format
As to whether Fujifilm should offer a medium-format digital system to complement the APS-C-sized X system...wow, I have no idea. It partly depends how you read the relative success of the Pentax medium-format cameras, the digital 645's. Or does it? I really have no idea, either what the 645Z means or what it would portend for another Leica S competitor. As I said yesterday, I don't think that's the way things will eventually go. I think FF is an evolutionary tributary that will eventually dead-end as smaller sensors get better and better.

A late-model "Texas Leica" Fuji 6x9 fixed-lens film
camera, currently for sale on eBay

I would suggest, though, a new version of the famous "Texas Leica," with a fixed lens, a kind of X-Pro2 on steroids. Then, if the first one is successful, Fujifilm could market variants with different lenses. That would be more likely to succeed in the market, I think, than a super-serious (and super expensive to develop) "system." I don't know—would you buy an X-Pro2 with a 30x45mm or 40x60mm sensor and a fixed lens**? I might not, but I'll bet it would make me salivate and give me GAS.

So should Fujifilm produce a medium-format digital camera? I guess the big advantage Fuji has is that cameras are still a small part of its business, and hardly crucial to its overall bottom line. Maybe, with minimal danger to its overall financial health, Fujifilm has the resources to test the waters, and find out. I guess we'll see.

Mike

*When asked why he refused to sign non-disclosure agreements, David said, "I'm in the disclosure business." I have to think he made an exception, though, when Ilford responded to his suggestion for making a fiber-base variable-contrast printing paper (previously, variable-contrast papers had been resin-coated (RC). David was consulted on the development of Multigrade FB, and was featured in early ads for the paper.

**Better yet, make the sensor square. We know how to crop.

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Mark Roberts: "Your plan for killing 35mm film is almost exactly what Kodak did to kill 8mm movie film when they invented Super-8 movie film: Keep the width the same, put sprocket holes down only one edge, make the exposed area larger, put it all in a convenient cartridge. It worked with Super-8. It might have worked to kill off 35mm if it had been done about 20 years before APS was invented."

Mike replies: Just so. It was a good system. As my father says, "timing is everything."

Michael Perini: "Let us not forget that Fuji has expertise in every configuration of medium format, has made superb Large format and medium format lenses, and I believe still produce all the AF Hasselblad H lenses.

"Add to that, the size and resources of the company which would make a low volume 'statement camera' a possibility, and it seems possible. While Fjii has tons of experience with fixed lens cameras in different configurations, I'm not so sure that works for digital. Film bodies were boxes, making different shapes was easy and relatively cheap.

"If the (expensive) sensor is going to be of the non-removeable variety, I would think interchangeable lenses would give it broader appeal. They do already make superb MF zooms, but they are very slow.

"Although a digital 6x17 might be fun, or a (slightly) more realistic digital X-Pan (not sure if Fuji made that or not).

"I hope they go for it, because as Leica has Already showed, you can get superb quality from a 'cropped' medium-format size."

Tom Duffy: "Given the probable costs of a medium format digital camera, I think it best that Fuji offer an interchangeable lens camera. I would think you would too, given your recent post about a good lens being forever tied to an obsolete digital sensor as technological progress continues to be made.

"Secondly, I would hope Fuji would us a 2:3 format ratio, as with 35mm instead of square. I think it's natural to compose for the format you're shooting. I agree with a statement I once read, 'If you shoot square, you'll compose square.'"

CF Salicath: "I worked part time in a photo store through my period in university (2009–2012), and was surprised to find quite a few benefits with APS for the average amateur 'holiday snapper.'

"For the customers, usually older ladies still clinging on to their compact camera, APS was far simpler to handle. Shifting through piles of 35mm strips, bending back to see it through the ceiling lamp, making notes of the tiny numbers? They could now match the number on the back of the print with the cassette, and hand it in for enlargements. It was easier for the store as well, finding the right frame from a set of notes. Storage was also simpler, and easier to avoid dust and crumbles. Even inserting a new film was easy, and you could see if a film was exposed by looking at the cassette.

"For the store it was a bit more fiddly, as we had to spool the film into temporary cassettes and back into the original after processing. This was done with two dedicated machines. But it was still easier than trying to get a 35mm roll out of its cassette.

"Being born in '89 I am sort of a bridge generation having grown up with film but learnt photography digitally (and then going partly analogue in later years). From my experience with the 'consumers,' APS was a great idea and would have been a success. If digital hadn't come along that is....

"P.S. While working in the store the last suppliers of APS ran out of stock (after doubling the prices of course), and I had to watch those old ladies going glum at the idea of learning how a new camera worked."

Ctein (partial comment): "Ahhh, the GS645. I loved that camera! My 'pocketable' medium format camera. Also, the only camera I ever got for free. Funny story. Fuji lent me one for extended testing. When I finally got around to saying to them, 'Hey, I'd like to buy this, how much?' they told me to just keep it. They weren't trying to bribe me. What happened was Fuji Japan hadn't told Fuji USA that this was a discontinued camera that they were dumping on the US market. They never expected it to catch on here. Fuji USA only found that out when they sold out their stock and asked Japan for more.

"By the time I got around to inquiring about the purchase price, it'd been officially pulled off their books. Consequently, Fuji USA informed me that trying to collect money for it would cause them more bookkeeping and accounting problems than the money was worth, as would returning it at such a late date, and I should just keep my mouth shut and keep the camera.

"Interestingly, the one I had was very sharp wide open, at ƒ/4. I'm thinking possibly lens variation, but more likely mechanical alignment? Those folding scissors bellows designs are notoriously hard to build and keep square—another reason for it not having a faster lens. (Which also goes to the claim of some photographers that the camera body doesn't really matter, it's all about the lenses. Sure, in a universe of ideal engineering.)

"I gave up the GS645 when the bellows developed too many pinholes to be patchable, just about the time the GA645 came along. Which, in my always objective view, was the most wonderful camera anyone ever made. Ever! I state that as a matter of fact, not opinion! [TiC]

"So, yes, bring on a digital Fuji medium format camera! (Then you can hear me whine that it's too big and too heavy and that I'm going to stick with my Olympus.)"

Mike replies: Ctein, you had the GS645, the folder with the bellows. That had a 75mm ƒ/3.4 lens. The one I had was the GS645s, the so-called "Wide 60" variant, which was a different camera—no bellows, didn't fold. It had a 60mm ƒ/4 lens. So that explains the disparity between our experience of the lenses.

Here is a page with a picture of both cameras side-by-side.

By the way the folder was the cult camera of the two—much pricier and more rare for a long time on the used market.

Posted on Wednesday, 20 January 2016 at 11:35 AM in Cameras, new, Cameras, old, Photo industry | Permalink | Comments (74)

Thursday, 03 December 2015

Two Most Popular Nikons Buck Declining Sales (and Other Industry News)

Phase One's glorious Schneider-Kreuznach lenses

Nikon
According to financial information found in Nikon Investor Relations, Nikon's sales of digital cameras dropped more than 11% in July, August and September of this year. Lens sales declined more than 10% in the same period.

Of course, that's good news in a sense, because Nikon's dropoff in sales was less than that of other major manufacturers, and Nikon still sold 960,000 cameras and 1.33 million lenses in that period. That's still an awful lot of cameras and lenses to shift in three months.

And Nikon confirmed to amateurphotographer.co.uk that sales of the sweet-spot D750 full-frame camera and D7200 APS-C (DX) camera bucked the trend. Both saw increased sales in the same period.

(I get it. I still have an itch for one of those Nikons, because of their ungodly high dynamic range. There is just something about what those cameras can do. I think I've suffered from low-level but permanent gear lust for the mainstream Nikons ever since my fling with The Big Dragoon. Shut up, Josh.)

Samsung
In other indsutry news, Samsung has a new software-centric mobile chief (that's not really relevant, I just wanted to use the term "mobile chief"), and Samsung is shutting down its digital camera and camcorder business in the UK. Samsung said in a press release, "We quickly adapt to market needs and demands. In the UK, we have seen a gradual and sustained decline in demand for standalone digital cameras and camcorders and related accessories. For this reason, we have taken the decision to phase out the sales and marketing of these products. This is a local decision, based on local market conditions."

In other words, the Korean giant doesn't want you to believe the rumors that it's considering leaving the camera business altogether. It's just those tightfisted Brits that are the problem, that's all.

...Except that this news follows earlier news that Samsung will be letting stocks of its flagship NX1 camera (now down to $1,100) dwindle to extinction in Germany. And, as dpreview reports, the language in that press release was almost identical to the UK press release...just responding to local conditions, nothing to see here, move along, move along.

Mamiya
Finally, hot of the presses, Phase One, the maker of medium-format digital backs for professionals, issued a press release yesterday saying that it has acquired the assets of Mamiya Japan. This is not entirely a surprise; medium-format cameramaker Mamiya's presence in the camera market has been pretty vestigial except for its collaborations with digital back makers, and Phase One (or rather its parent, Silverfleet Capital) already owned 45% of Mamiya stock. The lock-stock-and-barrel move will allow Phase One even greater control of the manufacture of its high-end digital cameras.

For film fans with fond memories of Mamiyas past, however, this probably puts a penultimate period on the Mamiya they once knew—and thus, even though Mamiya will continue from today more or less as it has been doing up until today, this marks another quiet sic transit landmark of sorts, in the march from film to digital imaging.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2015 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

Posted on Thursday, 03 December 2015 at 10:18 AM in Photo industry | Permalink | Comments (13)

Tuesday, 27 October 2015

Notes from PhotoPlus Expo 2015

The entrance to the exhibit halls at PhotoPlus Expo '15 at the Javits Center in Manhattan. This is about an hour before the show opened; those are
exhibitors arriving for the day.

I mentioned that I met Gordon Lewis, late of the popular Shutterfinger blogsite, at PhotoPlus Expo* in New York. Gordon and I have been colleagues for decades, since we were both Contributing Editors of the old Darkroom Photography magazine, but had never actually met in person. I drove down to Ramsey NJ from the Fortress of Solitude in the Finger Lakes, then took the train into the city, and Gordon took the train to Penn Station from his home in Philadelphia. We geeked out together at the show all day last Thursday, and had the kind of fun that only photo-dawgs think of as fun.

Here I am with the new Leica SL, which, turns out, is not as big as it looks. I can't see any reason why the camera should be especially popular, but I can't see any reason why it would be unpopular either. (Don't say price; some people find high price appealing, because it promises quality, and delivers, at the least, exclusivity.) I thought the SL had a nice viewfinder, good hand-feel, and crisply responsive action. Note that the visible portion in this picture looks like a whole reasonably-sized camera, then consider that I'm holding on to the grip end, which extends quite a bit farther.

And of course, like many mirrorless cameras, it's usable with a wide variety of lenses. I think it would be a fun camera to get to know. I would love to try it with some of my favorite R lenses, for one thing. Sort of low in the pixel department for the $$, though. Not that I'd personally want more.

That's TOP reader Leilani Suguitan, who we met at the Leica booth, in profile on the right. Her recent exhibit at the Leica Store in SoHo was on view from August 2nd to September 12th. Wish I could have seen it.

While the SL doesn't read as "too big" to me, it probably is the single biggest mirrorless camera extant. Can anyone think of a bigger one?

Photo of me and the SL by Gordon.

This is Eddie Murphy (really) of Epson, demonstrating the new Epson P800, which replaces the 3880 as Epson's mainstream enthusiast/semipro desktop printer. Eddie is so animated it was tough to get an exposure of him that didn't have motion blur; after listening to him for a little while, you think, okay, okay, I'll buy three.

The black-and-white samples looked especially nice.

And by the way, Epson is indeed sending me a P600 to review.

Speaking of big, the Zeiss Otus 28mm we were discussing recently, here proudly displayed by Nicole Balle of Zeiss, is even bigger than it looks. About as large as a cat or a baby, and heavier than a cat. Okay, I'm exaggerating. As big as a pitcher of beer. No, I'm still exaggerating. As big as a brick; but heavier than a brick. Okay, never mind, I can't do this. Ignore me.

It is magnificent. There—that is true. I asked Nicole if it was the biggest 28mm prime ever made, and she answered, "probably!"

Trends
The "relief" of the comparison between 2000 and now will soon fade with familiarity, so I just want to quickly list a few changes I noticed between then and now:

The show seems to be thriving. Lots of exhibitors, lots of attendees. My impression is that the show is smaller in size overall, but if so it's well disguised.
The relative health of companies is reflected in the size of their booths, and that landscape always shifts. There were some new companies (Canson was not at the last show I attended, I don't think); some old ones still thriving (Nikon and Canon); some former big players greatly reduced in role; some former stalwarts gone with the wind.
There were lots more pictures on display than in years of old. I know because I reflexively look for pictures, can't help it.
Several companies had on-site kiosks highlighting their repair and/or service departments.
Make-your-own photo book companies were numerous.
No darkroom companies, of course; far fewer lighting companies. Maybe I was just aware of view cameras in the old days, but it seemed like view cameras used to be displayed here and there for people to admire, and now they're not.
There seemed to be less emphasis on the profession.
The mood seemed lighter and the people seemed younger. About fifteen years younger on average, if I had to put a number on it. Whoops, wait, that's just me!

A few random products
Speaking of no. 5. above, one product both Gordon and I liked was "The Layflat Album" from a new company called Artifact Uprising. The product is sort of a cross between the upload-it-yourself photobook and a child's board book—each page is a flat card, and when you open it up, true to the name it lays flat and there's no gutter apart from the line of the crease. It's a nice variation, we thought, and dresses pictures up nicely. Might be a useful option to know about for you wedding photogs out there, among others. Gordon also noted that the company's example photos were a cut above.

We skipped the Canson booth somehow (I still strongly recommend getting your own Discovery Pack if you haven't yet—just a tactile, nearly sensual pleasure to see and handle those beautiful papers in person), but a couple of papers I liked were Moab Juniper Baryta Rag and a paper called "Fine Etching" from a company I know little about called—can I find it? Oh yeah, here it is—Durico.

Durico Fine Etching 310g

One thing to look for when you're evaluating papers if shadow separation. Note that this example picture is a photograph that doesn't need shadow separation, and in fact probably looks better without it; so that would be one thing to be on the alert for if you give Durico Fine Etching a try.

Nice surface, though. Elegant.

Durico is a South Korean company that manufactures many materials and also imports into South Korea several German and Japanese papers. Durico Fine Etching 310g might be the same as Hahnemuhle German Etching 310g, or it may be something similar; Durico imports Hahnemuhle into South Korea—does it then export it under its own name? Stranger things have happened in the paper world, which is internecine and constantly shifting. I can't figure it out from the various websites. Maybe some paper maven with weigh in with the deep demystification.

Happenings

Shows and presentations were all over the place, of course. Here's a film being made at the Manfrotto/Gitzo booth, probably by one of the big digital camera sites. I don't recognize the interviewer, but maybe you do.

I love my carbon fiber Gitzo, so power to 'em. It's one of the few photographic products I own that I have no desire to upgrade.

There was a big informational show going on at the Nikon spread when we passed by, but I didn't stop to see what products they were talking about. A fair number of show attendees are professionals keeping their edge by staying current on the latest technologies.

Nikon also maintains this crow's nest so Nikonians can see the view through the company's long telephoto glass—one of the big assets of Canikon that even Sony doesn't compete with.

Speaking of which, we missed the Sony booth. Rats! Just so much to see.

By the way, I'm not trying to diss Canon. Gordon shoots Canon, but we got shooed off from Canon not once but twice! Gordon did get a big hug from his friendly contact, but said contact's boss then told us that they had work to do and we were in the way. Happens at these shows—you can't always get to see what, or who, you want to see.

Here and there there are models you can shoot with your own equipment, same as it ever was. I asked this model to please pantomime a bored expression, which she did. But she turned out to be friendly and thoughtful and told me she wasn't actually bored, that she was having a nice, restful day meeting photographers. She said she would like it if I took a better shot of her. So I did, despite my ludicrously wide lens. This is that one, not the "bored" one.

You can get your own picture taken, too. Here I am in an Instax print holding my Fuji like a proper geek at the Fuji Instax display—old-fashioned instant photography lives at PhotoPlus 2015!—and with a pretty model at the Focus Camera booth.

Best of show
I'm sure I'm leaving some things out that I meant to mention, but I'll leave you with a mention of the best show at the show—

—Namely, the PDN "Faces" Contest winners display, which featured reasonably-sized unframed prints by many photographers, and was a delight. (Actually there might have been more than one show at the display, which featured what looked like well over a hundred pictures—I didn't parse it out.)

Since I have a special interest in photographs of photographers, I especially appreciated the portrait of Mary Ellen Mark you can see at the bottom left in this shot. (Although I would have moved the camera up or down so the lintel of the door frame doesn't appear to be balancing on the crown of her head. Sorry, always the critic.) It's by Joshua Kogan and here's a bigger version. [UPDATE: the link isn't displaying properly. You'll have to find it yourself at the PDN contest winners' site. Click on Sean Penn and then use the right arrows. Sorry! —MJ]

Another photographer whose picture I liked in the show was Santosh Kumar Korthiwada, who showed a photograph of two jump-roping girls he took in a village in India. I looked through the PDN site several times but couldn't find it, which is what leads me to believe there was actually more than one show grouped together. There's a small B&W version on his Facebook page. Santosh is currently pursuing Masters of Fine Arts in Photography at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. (My shot of his picture was motion-blurred, which means I need an A7sII, right? No? Rats.)

Mike

*"The PDN PhotoPlus International Conference + Expo is the largest photography and imaging show in North America, attended by over 21,000 professional photographers, photography enthusiasts, filmmakers, students and educators from around the world. PhotoPlus features over 100 educational seminars, Photo Walks and Master Classes, and over 225 exhibitors displaying thousands of the latest products and services for you to touch, try and compare."

Gordon Lewis comments: I'd like to add an observation, which I honestly don't intend to be snarky:

PhotoPlus 2015 for me was in many ways similar to attending an auto show: There was lots of shiny stuff to look at and a few minor spectacles here and there, but at the end of the day I didn't see anything that made me want to rush out to buy something new. Sure, it's fun to dream about owning the 2015 model, but if you've already got the 2012 model and it gets you where you want to go in relative comfort, you have no compelling reason to "upgrade."

That said, what I enjoyed most was the opportunity to see everything I might want to see, all in one place. Fully stocked photo retailers are rare these days, especially if you live in a smaller city, so for many attendees this was their one and only opportunity to actually handle equipment rather than just stare at screen images of it.

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Mark: "First time in years that I have not had to either attend or work PhotoPlus. Sorry I missed a chance to meet you Mike. The show certainly has come quite a long way from its beginnings as the NY Photo Guild show out at JFK airport but it still somehow maintains that small show feel. I have always liked this show for just that reason along with the wonderful diversity of the attendees. See you at some other show!"

Colin K Work: "Funny, I'm 'suddenly seeing wide' too. After many many years of 'longer is better,' I'm finding my Olympus 9–18mm is becoming my most-used lens. Not sure why, but I think it's something about putting subjects in context rather than isolating them. Might be because its more challenging—the more elements in the image, the easier it is to get it wrong! Might also be that with age comes more confidence and less self-consciousness. Not afraid to get close."

Posted on Tuesday, 27 October 2015 at 08:19 PM in Photo equipment, Photo industry | Permalink | Comments (33)

Monday, 19 October 2015

Two book reviews: The Long Shadow of Kodak's Fall

Reviewed by Geoff Wittig

When I attended college in Rochester, New York, in the late 1970s, working at Kodak was by common consent the second best summer job for students staying in town. (The best? Working at the Genesee Brewery, where free beer was the standout perk.) Kodak paid well, working on the colossal film coating lines was interesting, and it gave you a foot in the door for a ‘real job’ down the road. At the time it was obvious that Kodak would be around forever; it was a force of nature.

Ahem. That was then…and things have changed a bit. Rochester as a community has weathered the collapse of Kodak more gracefully than other rust belt cities suffering similar industrial declines, but there have certainly been consequences. The neighborhoods surrounding Kodak Park in northwest Rochester and adjacent Greece NY have slid from solidly blue collar to a somewhat shabbier state, yet they have maintained a certain local pride and community integrity.

Two recent photobooks examine the post-collapse Kodak neighborhoods and yield distinctly different impressions despite some striking superficial similarities. First up is Swiss photographer Catherine Leutenegger’s Kodak City (Kehrer Verlag, 160 pages). A modest 9.8x8.1 inches, it’s a very nicely made clothbound book with a partial dust jacket. The foreword, by the redoubtable A.D. Coleman, presents an erudite, footnoted take on George Eastman and Kodak’s rise and fall. Following are brief essays by Swiss critics Jörg Bader and Urs Stahel, and by the author, who initially spent six months around Rochester in 2007, then returned to finish her project in 2012.

Leutenegger’s color photographs document Kodak Park and the surrounding neighborhoods with an unsentimental but not unsympathetic eye. The color palette is subdued without being completely drab, sort of like an endless November day. Kodak headquarters, weathered working class homes, downtown storefronts, empty streets and the occasional person all get the same deadpan treatment. The images have a distinct formal beauty; if you like Stephen Shore’s work, then you will love these photographs. They are printed on matte paper that nicely complements their subdued appeal. Some are printed full-bleed, some cross the gutter (boo! hiss!) and others are left with varying margins. The overall impression is to my eye an accurate, unsparing, but oddly affectionate take on this community.

Next up is Memory City, by husband and wife Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb (Radius Books, 172 pages). A larger book at 12.1x10.2 inches, it is self-consciously "arty." It comes adorned with affectations that include small tipped-in photos on front and rear covers framed with faux-"tape," occasional gate-fold contact sheet images with penciled notes on the back, and a large gate-fold inside the back cover with a highly selective time-line of the Rochester community’s history. The photographs are all over the map, from images of teenage girls with their favorite dresses (RNW) to gritty black-and-white photos of scowling pedestrians or gravestones (AW). Also included are dark color images of street life, multiple pictures of grimy windows, and a sarcastic photo of celebrants at the jazz festival at the Eastman Theater that looks like a classic Martin Parr. The photograph that probably best sums up the book is of a stuffed bird at the Rochester Museum and Science Center. In case readers don’t get the point, the caption helpfully identifies it as the "EXTINCT PASSENGER PIGEON DIORAMA."

The handling of color is lovely in many of the photos, and Alex Webb is justly renowned for his photographic composition. But I know this community very well, and the book presents such a relentlessly dour view of it that it’s scarcely recognizable to me.

Geoff-

TOP Contributing Editor Geoff Wittig is a rural family physician with interests ranging from health care quality improvement, medical informatics, and integration of health care delivery to photography and landscape painting. Photo books are a particular area of interest; he admits he has far too many for his own good.

Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Mark Sampson: "I was born and raised less than a mile from the shopping plaza shown on the cover of Kodak City. And I worked for Kodak as an industrial photographer for 20 years, and every day went to work through the door at the lower right of the other photo shown (it's the Hawk-Eye plant, likely empty by now). So I can claim a real connection.

"I'll take a good look at Catherine Leutnegger's book; it's a subject worthy of attention. Now that I've moved away I can imagine it as a project; I was too close to it when it was my life (for example, my own illustrations of Hawk-Eye, and there were quite a few, were assignment-driven, and any real personal vision was subordinated to the needs of the assignment.)

"And I remember when the Magnum folks came to town a few years back; there was a group show at the George Eastman House afterwards. Seeing the show, It was fairly obvious that they parachuted in, did their thing, and parachuted out. Any real understanding of the city, and its situation, would take more time and effort than any of them had to give, and the results showed in the generally mediocre pictures."

Lindsay Bach: "As a native Rochestarian with a family steeped in Kodak over multiple generations—for example, my father worked in Roll Coating Chemical for 41 years and my brother worked in the same department for 31—I had similar misgivings with Alex and Rebecca Webb's book. While the Webb's images are great as photographs, they fail as a message about the demise of Kodak and the effect on the greater community, which has actually been surprisingly minimal. The truth is that much of urban Rochester and many of the neighborhoods around Kodak Park were in decline 40 and 50 years ago during Kodak's peak, as the generous salaries of Kodak employees made it possible for earlier generations of Kodak workers to move to the burgeoning Rochester suburbs during the post-war period, leaving their former neighborhoods to the vagaries of urban blight and a growing underclass. This is a story of "white flight" that played out in countless other cities across the country and is a larger story than Eastman Kodak. The company employed 65,000 people at the high water mark during the 1980s and most of the employees lived in the suburbs.

"In the wake of the race riots that rocked Rochester in 1965 (and later in 1968), there was, in fact, a huge effort by a Black activist organization called FIGHT to force Kodak to hire and spread its largesse to a greater number of 'inner city" (read black) workers and thereby, it was hoped, improve the lot of Rochester's poorer residents. Kodak yielded but the intractable urban blight continued, as it did in many other cities. This is what the Webbs appear to have captured. The present poverty in urban Rochester was not caused by the demise of Kodak, though it is fair to say that Kodak's hiring policies in the years prior to the 1970s may have ultimately contributed to its increase."

Posted on Monday, 19 October 2015 at 11:00 AM in Books, Geoff Wittig, Photo industry | Permalink | Comments (17)

Tuesday, 13 October 2015

Mike at PhotoPlus Expo

Looks like Gordon Lewis and I will be wandering the aisles at the PDN PhotoPlus Expo at the Jacob K. Javits Center in New York City on Thursday the 22nd. If you see us and want to come up and say hello, please do. (But we're booked for lunch.)

I promise to go to the Canon booth and take a look at the new Canon Powershot G5X. (See previous post.) I will also be standing in line with the rest of the world to see all the cool Sony A7's. And at the Epson booth checking out the SureColor P600 and P800. And....

Mike

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

Posted on Tuesday, 13 October 2015 at 03:23 PM in News and Occasions, Photo industry | Permalink | Comments (7)

Sunday, 12 July 2015

Kodak News

Kodak news now sits firmly in the category of "nostalgia." Kodak—which I heard described as "the bluest of American blue chips" once when I was young—is one of the spectacular American business-failure stories of the third millennium. To put you in context, I read recently that GoPro, the California-based maker of action videocams such as the Hero3+ (GoPro was founded in 2001, is listed on NASDAQ, and is currently trading at $52.51) is now valued at eight times greater than Kodak (founded 1888, New York Stock Exchange, $16.25).

[UPDATE: It's now 10X, according to RohithT. See Featured Comment below. —Ed.]

If you think that had to be inevitable, consider Fuji.

Anyway, two items. First, Building 53 at Kodak Park, historically used for acetate film base manufacturing, will be imploded next Saturday at 8:00 a.m. It follows the demolition of many other Kodak Park buildings that began in 2007.

Second, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) has designated the Eastman Collection in Rochester as an Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark.

From Eastman House: "The technology collection is one of the world's largest collections of photographic and cinematographic equipment. It contains nineteenth- and twentieth-century objects of photographic technology, including cameras, processing equipment, motion picture devices, and a broad range of early historical accessories. Many of the objects are unique, representing distinguished historical ownership and significant scientific achievement.

"This collection is the most comprehensive held by any institution in North America and equaled in overall quality by only three other major holdings worldwide."

(The website didn't say what the other three are. I'll try to find out.)

The conservatory at Eastman House, where George Eastman ate his breakfast every morning serenaded by classical organ music from a pipe organ

And if I may just venture a guess, I would say that after TOP relocates to its sprawling rural HQ in New Yawk a month from now, proximity to Eastman House is going to be a rich resource for TOP. (As will greater proximity to New York City.)

Mike
(Thanks to David Ralph and John Beal)

P.S.:

(I'll be about 10 minutes south of Penn Yan on the eastern side of that Y-shaped lake.)

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

MarkR: "Funny—just returned from an outing there to read this! They currently have some very nice exhibits regarding garden photos—everything from autochromes to digital, and the main house and garden are looking as dapper as ever. The most interesting thing about the house is that after it was built, Eastman decided he didn't like the proportions. He was a huge music aficionado, and supposedly the acoustics weren't right. So he had the house cut in half, moved one side from the other, and had the interior rebuilt. The original hi-fi snob, I guess."

RohithT: "GoPro is valued at over 10 times Kodak, actually, based on market close on July 10th, $7.07B to $681M. I'm surprised Kodak is even worth that much nowadays."

R. Edelman: "Although Kodak did develop imaging sensors at one time, it seems that that part of the company has been sold off. This is an irony, as sensors are the new film. Seeing how successful Sony has been lately with its sensor division, and the growth potential with imaging sensors being used in increasingly more applications, one wonders how Kodak would have fared if its goal had been to become the imaging sensor leader."

Posted on Sunday, 12 July 2015 at 02:09 PM in Photo industry | Permalink | Comments (25)

Sunday, 24 May 2015

Camera Stores and Unicorns

CameraMall, Ann Arbor

Guest Post written by Steve Rosenblum

The other day I was driving north on US23 towards Ann Arbor and home. On the right a large billboard flashed by advertising CameraMall, a new camera store in downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan. I blinked my eyes, turned down the music, and thought that perhaps I had just hallucinated. A new camera store in Ann Arbor? No way! Yesterday I parked my car and walked up Washington Street, behind the legendary Michigan Theater, and, sure enough, there it was—a camera store. I could not have been more surprised if I had seen a knight of the realm riding a unicorn up the street.

Ann Arbor is a medium-sized Midwestern city that is home to the University of Michigan and its >40,000 students as well as a highly educated and diverse population and a complement of businesses. It’s about as sophisticated as a Midwestern town gets short of places like Chicago. It has a highly regarded Arts school, a vibrant arts community, and lots of photographers. Yet our last real camera store closed years ago. The closest we've had to a camera store for the last decade is Best Buy.

I entered and, indeed, this was not a hallucination. Behind the main counter there was a wall display of all the major flavors of cameras and lenses—Canon, Nikon, Fujifilm, Olympus, Panasonic, Sigma and others. To the left was a wall display of old film cameras for sale. The display case was full of a wide variety of new lenses. The countertop has a newly placed line of Ona bags. Tripods occupy the center of the floor. And, on the side is an entire wall of film…yes, film, of many varieties.

I was greeted by Desmond Kolean-Burley, one of the co-founders of the store. I asked him (in so many words), "have you stopped taking your meds? Have you been reading Don Quixote obsessively? How is that you have opened a new camera store when everyone else has closed?" It turns out that CameraMall started a few years ago as an Internet camera business selling as an independent merchant through Amazon. The success of that business provided Desmond and associates with the seed money to start the bricks and mortar store. He has wanted to open a store in Ann Arbor for a few years, but retail space here is in very short supply and rents are expensive. The location of the store is a block from campus and the main commercial district, but is not on one of the main commercial streets, likely making the space more attainable.

Desmond Kolean-Burley. Photo by Amy Blatt.

Desmond told me that having the ongoing internet business established and successful provides a measure of protection for the store, as he has a means of easily selling off merchandise that is either not selling well in the store or is near the end of its model cycle. He also believes that there is a real unfulfilled demand for photographic goods and services here, especially if it is coupled with excellent service and competitive prices. The prices at the store are the same as Amazon and other online retailers. So, the customer gets the same price, and can actually get the camera in their hands, and get expert advice at the same time. I know…what a concept. I felt as though I had stepped back in time to 1990! Desmond tells me the initial sales at the store have exceeded his expectations.

They initially carried a small selection of film, but demand has been brisk and so an extensive selection is now offered. They have purchased a large format Epson printer, and a C-41 film processor, which they hope to have up and running very soon. Depending upon demand he is considering adding 35mm B&W film processing. Scanning, photo restoration, and video digitizing services are planned in the near future. Charles Samuels, a recent University of Michigan art school graduate, has been hired to help out. He tells me he is a dedicated film shooter and darkroom printer. He asked me where he could get his M3 focus mechanism adjusted! I walked out of that store with a huge grin on my face, and I’m still grinning!

Of interest, last year, Literati, a new retail bookstore, also successfully launched in downtown Ann Arbor, rising from the ashes of failed hometown book giant Borders. Their opening seemed equally implausible, but they seem to be doing quite well. A café has been added upstairs. Perhaps the obituary on service-oriented small hometown businesses was written prematurely? I certainly hope so….

Steve

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Earl Dunbar: "Wow, this is such good news! I heard part of a news piece on the radio (remember that?) the other day about how savvy, major online sellers are establishing local bricks and mortar stores. Yes, there are certain goods that people want to touch, feel and try before making a purchase. As a smaller but fairly artistic community, I'm hoping such an establishment comes to Rochester (NY)—we have a grand total of one smallish camera store left."

Pat Trent: "A big thumbs up for the film display! Next should be darkroom supplies, etc. More power to Desmond."

Kenneth Wajda: "I always seek out camera stores in my business travels. Once, in Madison, Wisconsin, I said to Siri, 'Find me a camera store' She replied, 'What's wrong with the camera you're holding' But little does she know how wonderful it is to see high-end gear and a delicious used case!"

Posted on Sunday, 24 May 2015 at 09:32 AM in Photo industry | Permalink | Comments (32)

Sunday, 10 May 2015

Olympus a 'Hobby Business'?

"Hobby business" is a term that derives from the U.S. Small Business Administration, which distinguishes between hobbies and businesses for tax requirements (says one site, "If the IRS decides that you are indulging a hobby rather than trying to earn a profit, it won't allow you to deduct your business losses.")

(There's one other kind of Hobby business [sic] that photographers probably know about. But this isn't about that.)

"Hobby business" has come to mean, more generally (and as a put-down), a business that's subsidized by other profits or by exogenous wealth and doesn't necessarily have to pay its own way in the normal fashion.

Thom Hogan has just posted a typically trenchant analysis of Olympus Corporation's fiscal year-end report over at his site Sans Mirror.

He says the company keeps making optimistic predictions...and not really coming anywhere close. "Olympus has been repeating the same chant for years now: 'yes, we did poorly, but we’ll hit breakeven soon, maybe even next year.' This year is no different. They did poorly, they expect to manage break even during the year. The problem is that there's nothing in the actual financial information they’ve posted that would give that any credibility."

On the other hand, this situation, dire on the surface, might not be as bad as it sounds...because Olympus's camera division might essentially be a hobby business, in the derogatory sense of the term. "...The bottom line" writes Thom, "is still that the main medical business is subsidizing the imaging business at Olympus, as it has for all of this decade."

The situation isn't unknown. At Brunswick Corporation, for instance, now mainly a maker of recreational watercraft and fitness equipment, the pool table business (a single-digit percentage of the company's business) is kept alive because it's the "legacy" business. Billiards was company's core historical product, the product most closely associated with the famous name. Like cameras are at Olympus. Brunswick tables are made in China now, and the division might or might not return a profit. But it's kept going for global image...

...For pride, in a word. Which might not be the worst reason to keep going...even in a business sense.

Mike
(Thanks to Michael J. Perini)

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Ned Bunnell: "No comment on Thom's typical authoritative opinion. His implication that 'hobby businesses' should be viewed negatively might drive traffic to his site, but it's a fairly common practice for many companies.

"For example, Ricoh ran their camera business as a hobby for many years. This allowed the group to act as an incubator for new ideas in cameras and optics without pressure to meet any hard and fast sales goals. It's very similar to an R&D lab whose funding is measured by development goals for a range of projects each year.

"Being a hobby business allowed Ricoh's camera group to develop some critically acclaimed products that were never intended for mass distribution, such as the original GR film camera series and special lenses like the stellar 21mm lens designed for Leica thread mount cameras. Sales of these products in limited quantities helped offset some of the development costs, and gave them time to evolve and refine their concepts.

"Another benefit of a hobby business is applying expertise that you've gained in the lab to enter new emerging markets. Not widely known, but I'm sure some of the optics knowledge developed by the Ricoh camera group has been leveraged in the new automobile visual navigation systems that Ricoh quietly OEM's to major car companies in Europe.

"By purchasing Pentax, it's evident Ricoh has started to shift their camera business from a hobby to a profit center as they assimilate all of Pentax's products and future cameras into a more typical business model.

"Another positive example of a company using a hobby business model is how Apple is handling their work in both the TV space as well as automotive design.

"While Thom intended his comment that Olympus' main medical business was subsidizing the imaging business as criticism, I'm sure there are benefits to this structure that he, in his infinite wisdom, can't see. Smart companies will always invest profits from their core business to fund research in technologies that spawn products we can't even contemplate today."

[Ned was formerly President of Pentax USA. —Ed.]

sneye: "Thom Hogan insists on looking at business from the American point of view, where long-term losses are not sustainable. Japanese business culture is quite different though. It values tradition, good engineering and innovation at the same level it values profit. Olympus justifies the existence of the imaging branch by stressing its role in medical R&D, but I suspect that it's pride and brand recognition that fuel it. Oly's Japanese shareholders would hate it if the company stopped making cameras even though this business erodes the overall profitability by 10–15%. Olympus has been known to the public as a camera manufacturer, not as a producer of endoscopes.

"As for myself, I like buying stuff made by hobby businesses. Feels like a larger proportion of my money is invested in innovation and a smaller one in corporate administration."

Thom Hogan replies to Ned and sneye: "Actually, I insist on looking at business from an economic perspective. In Olympus' case, we have 72b yen in just the last five years that have left the building. That's a lot of money for which the rest of the company must get a significant benefit for in order to justify. Ned says we can't see what that benefit is, and he's right, we can't. Olympus has been asked many times about what the benefit is, and their answer is extremely vague, at best.

"Large companies often mislead themselves on this 'cross benefit' thing, too. To admit that there isn't much of a cross benefit means they'd have to admit that they are making mistakes and bleeding money intentionally.

"Which brings me to the 'Japan is different' thing. Well, yes and no. Japan as a country is far more in debt than any other G10 entity, and their demographics make it nearly impossible to get out of that problem. The consumer electronics business in Japan is somewhat of a mirror of that. A lot of the money that is sustaining the remaining CE industry in Japan is coming from low-interest debt. Nikon is even using low-interest debt to try to get into a new business (medical), which wouldn't be necessary if their CE side were entirely healthy.

"Implied in sneye's comment is that 'Japanese business culture' is the correct one. I, and I suspect a lot of economics professors as well, would disagree with that. Yes, it is what it is and shows no real sign of changing any time soon, but that doesn't make it right. Nor is it sustainable. ROI is ROI.

"I should also point out that negative ROI is what Olympus tried to hide when they committed their US$1.5b fraud against shareholders. Again, just because things are 'done that way in Japan' doesn't mean it is the right way to do it."

Ned replies to Thom: "Valid points on the Japanese business culture supporting somewhat non-transparent hobby businesses. Fortunately, I'm retired and don't have to worry about the business anymore, and am simply enjoying photography. My only observation is that the way things are going, the entire photo industry is starting to look like a hobby business :-) ."

Christian Beck: "Ah, so on what other site would you read an informed comment on an informed article, discussed by informed people, the former President of Pentax USA and the author himself?

"(Homer Simpson voice) Must...buy...something...on Amazon.

"(Well, actually, Amazon.de, as I'm from Germany ;-) ."

Eamon Hickey: "As this thread shows, issues like this have a lot of nuances—and every company and situation is unique. That said, if you're heavily invested in one camera brand's future (I am not), I think it's worth being careful not to overestimate how 'different' Japanese companies really are, or how impervious to market forces a particular company or management team can afford to be. (Note that I am talking here about how the world is, not how it should be.)

"So, first, several Japanese companies have pulled the plug on legendary camera divisions that were consistently losing money. Here's a random assortment:

Konica (Now a copier company, this was Japan's oldest camera maker, in the business since 1902, decades before the other Japanese brands we know)
Yashica/Contax (closed by Kyocera after 50+ years of camera-making)
Topcon (now strictly an opthalmic and surveying company)
(Perhaps Minolta [now the copier company, Konica/Minolta], depending on how you count—the Maxxum/A-mount lives on at Sony but for how long, now that Sony is clearly concentrating on the FE/E-mount?)
Even Olympus themselves recently dropped its money-losing regular 4/3rds mount E system, to much gnashing of teeth among dedicated users.

"In other words, yes, the Japanese often close money-losing businesses, too, just like the rest of the world.

"Then secondly, the forces of capitalism—for better or worse—are what they are. In other words, Thom Hogan is not a voice in the wilderness—Olympus management has been under pressure from factions among its own shareholders to fix or drop the camera division for many years. This is why they are at pains to offer so many rationales for continuing it. Olympus management doesn't have to listen to Thom, but large shareholders are a different matter.

"Also, while I don't have a dog in this fight (and generally really like Olympus cameras, past and present), I share what I think is Thom's concern about (scorn for?) the repeated significant inaccuracies, to use a carefully chosen neutral word, of Olympus's projections for the camera division over the past few years. If I owned Olympus shares (as opposed to cameras), that would give me great pause."

[A former Nikon rep, Eamon has written for The British Journal of Photography among other publications. —Ed.]

Posted on Sunday, 10 May 2015 at 11:55 AM in Photo industry | Permalink | Comments (35)

Saturday, 25 April 2015

Eli the Mysterious

Coming back from my cousin Liz's funeral yesterday I flew from Indianapolis to Detroit in the company of a Delta Captain and a man named Eli. The three of us had an animated conversation from takeoff to landing, one I was particularly interested in because Eli said he worked for the Chinese OEM company that builds 40% of the world's component music loudspeakers—nothing under its own name, all OEM. During the hour-long conversation I gleaned various bits of information about Eli's career. He said he was 62 or 64 years old and that he'd working in audio-related fields for 43 years. But I didn't quite get his name, so I asked him as we landed, and he began to spell, "H-a-r..." and I repeated that, and then he said "ends with '-rari,' just like 'Ferrari.'"

So, back at base camp, I Googled "Eli Harari" and up came multiple pictures of the guy next to me on the plane...or so I think. But the pictures and websites identified him as the now-retired founder and former Chairman of SanDisk, who is essentially the principal inventor of "digital film," i.e., system flash memory.

However, I'm at a loss as to how to reconcile the various disparities between the online information I've found and what my seatmate told me about himself. Did I just get the name wrong? Quite possibly. Sure looks like the same guy, although I guess couldn't swear to it in court.

Second career? Mistaken identification? An imposter!? I guess I'll never know. Should have gotten his card.

But in any case, as I researched the actual Dr. Harari trying to unravel my little mystery, I found a 2011 "oral history" at the Computer History Museum, which I read. In it I found this anecdote (I've cleaned up the punctuation a bit):

[At the 2010] Consumer Electronics Show, I was walking through the booth, and—with another guy, a SanDisk guy—so when we were going into the Kodak booth, he kind of whispers to me, kind of in jest, he says, "You know, you better not let them know who you are."

And I said, I was a little puzzled, I said, "Well, what do you mean?"

He said, "Well, you are the man who killed Kodak."

And I thought about it, and actually, no, really Kodak killed Kodak. I didn't kill Kodak, nobody killed Kodak. They killed themselves. We worked with Kodak Japan on this compact flash, parts of Kodak understood the value and the power of this technology, and were very strong partners of ours. But the hubris that you get, at some of these companies that have a monopoly...Kodak had 70 percent market share in film. They were 65 percent, or so, gross margin, so they were just milking it, and they just wanted this thing [digital] to go away. And they had the technology, Kodak had the CCD technology, they had the digital imaging, they had everything they needed to displace themselves, but they didn't have the guts to do it, and it was done for them.

I mean, we were part of that, we enabled digital photography, but it was not—we never dreamed that we would—what had happened. The dramatic—because silver halide is such a good technology, really, I mean, you have 30-megapixel resolution, you know, perfect images, for $2.99, $3.99, for 24, so—but you kind of see the extent of the devastation to Kodak. Their market cap today is about one tenth of SanDisk's market cap, and I think that we are undervalued. So this is a very unforgiving field.

A quote from Eli Harari of SanDisk, who I might or might not have sat next to on the plane. Or maybe I sat next to a guy who looked like him whose name I got wrong.

The most telling phrase of that quote: "[Kodak] had everything they needed to displace themselves, but they didn't have the guts to do it, and it was done for them." That's what I've always believed, although I know some others don't agree.

Mike
(Thanks to the mysterious Eli)

P.S. A couple of tidbits to pass along—the Delta pilot, Tom, very nice guy, said that in his opinion the Indianapolis airport is the nicest airport in the U.S., and LaGuardia is the worst. And Eli the Mysterious, who said he works for the Far Eastern speaker manufacturer that builds loudspeakers sold under dozens of different name brands, said that Revel speakers, designed by Kevin Voeks (pronounced "vakes"), are the best.

P.P.S. Sorry for the poor reporting in this piece...I did my best under the circumstances!

[UPDATE: Two regular readers/contributors quickly zeroed in on the solution to my mystery. John Camp (a.k.a. John Sandford) immediately realized that Eli Harari of SanDisk is "like the 157th wealthiest individual in the world," and that billionaires only seldom travel coach class on commercial carriers. But it was writer and researcher primus inter pares Jim Hughes who first identified my seatmate as Eli Harary—a "y," not an "i"—who is indeed a longtime stalwart of the audio industry.

Eli Harary

Eli Harari

I still haven't figured out what the company is that Eli Harary works for...companies are really guarded about sharing the identities of their OEM suppliers, or even that they have OEM suppliers at all, and, hence, OEM suppliers themselves keep a remarkably low profile.

UPDATE to the UPDATE: beuler discovered that "Meiloon is the name of the company. From Eli's public LinkedIn profile: 'Meiloon Industrial is the worlds leading ODM/OEM of premium audio products.'"

Thanks to everyone who corresponded with me about this, and to those who figured it out. I need to hire better reporters! :-) —Mike the Ed.]

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Mark Sampson: "I worked as an industrial photographer at Kodak from 1984 until 2004, so I was there for all that. Mr. Harari's assessment is spot on."

Posted on Saturday, 25 April 2015 at 03:06 PM in Photo industry | Permalink | Comments (28)

Wednesday, 14 January 2015

Would You Work for $13.70 an Hour?

That was the median pay for the 136,300 professional photographers in the United States in 2012, according to the Occupational Outlook Handbook of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's $28,490 annually.

Of course they don't say whether that number is gross or net (although it must be net—right?), or whether it only includes salaried employees getting a W-2 or if it includes freelancers and the self-employed as well.

According to survey conducted by Eposure, a UK site that says its mission is "bringing commercial photographers and businesses closer," 60% of UK photographers in 2012 charged day rates of between £300 and £700 (~$460–$1,070), while in the U.S., 56% of photographers charged day rates between $900 and $2,000 (£590–£1,310). And another 10% charged more than $2,000.

Of course photographers might bill their day rate for anywhere from zero to seven days in any given week, and those numbers don't specify whether expenses are billed extra (that's customary) or are included, or whether the photographers are actually getting their day rate or are offering discounts. Seems to me I heard of one guy years ago who offered a special 50% discount off his day rate—to every single client.

Part-time photography for pay is almost certainly on the rise, whereas advertising photography is on the wane—the New York Times reported in a 2010 article that, according to the trade group Publishers Information Bureau, magazine ad pages declined from 286,932 pages to 169,218—more than 40%—in the decade of 2000s. According to MediaFinder.com, 428 magazines closed just in 2009. Newspaper photography is declining, too.

All in all it's very hard to get a read on what photographers actually earn, and still less on what prospective earnings might be for a newcomer. The best advice may be something I heard years ago: "Being a photographer is a great job. Just don't ever sit down and analyze exactly how much you're taking home, because if you do, you'll quit and go find some other way to make a living."

Mike

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Aldo Altamirano: "I work for a top retouching agency in Manhattan and we release ads for top brands and magazines, and let me tell you something...there is no money in photography. I've been saying this for years. Sometimes a known photographer will get a campaign for good money, and after that he'll have to go for the rest of the year doing nothing, or very little for little money. A known photographer will likely get more money giving courses than taking pictures...it's a fact, and the reason why you'll see so many workshops....

"In the advertising industry, an art director, a copy writer or an editor will likely have a bigger salary than a professional photographer within the same agency, and also, regardless the size of an agency, most only have a single photographer, sometimes freelancing, while employing many art directors, editors, copywriters, etc."

Herman: "You can earn money from photography??"

Glenn Brown: "Wow, this is a can of worms. For what it is worth I charge per job. I learned 30 years ago that clients do not like half and day rates plus plus plus; quadrupled my income in three months. I charge $200 per hour pro rated, and files at $65 each. I do a quarter of a million in work every year. Day rates are a killer—it makes people look for another way or not do the job."

Gordon Cahill: "Hmmm. I'm in the middle of my best year in a decade. I'm busy enough that the only thing I'm behind on is invoicing. And I don't even pretend I can shoot video. Stills only. I wonder what I'm doing that others aren't. I'm not even trying that hard."

Greg Wostrel (partial comment): "A survey like the one mentioned is almost useless with out some sort of breakdown. Using this data to come to a conclusion about what 'photographers' make is like doing the same for 'writers' and including people with a tumblr, professional bloggers, technical writers, and Stephen King.

"I just recently hired pros (my day job is as a Designer/Art Director/Photographer and I had a conflict) for two projects. The first one we hired someone in Washington State and another in Austin TX. They were both solid corporate/editorial shooters. Right about $2500/day for each of them. I think thats pretty solid pay. Bill three full days plus expenses per month, work out of a small office, or your home, and thats a reasonable income for a job that can be a lot of fun—lots more fun than the cubicle farm for certain. The other one was a corporate event in NYC. We paid about $250/hr. I'm thinking that, if you ask folks who are all-in trying to make a living as a photographer, they are doing OK. Its hard, but do-able."

Gato: "There are millions of people all over the US working for $13 per hour or less. Most of the 'cheap' part-time photographers I know have day jobs that pay in the $8 to $12 range. If they can pick up an $85 photo job on their day off that's a big boost to their weekly income."

NancyP: "Serious reporting is in the same boat. The 'instant' news cycle means that minor details such as routine fact checking go out the window. Readers and viewers don't demand accuracy anymore. Reporting has gone from 'the first draft of history' to stream-of-consciousness mode. The generally low standard of news reporting is connected to low standard of citizenship and low standards in many fields, including photography and film/video. It's true. One does get grumpy past the half-century mark."

Mike replies: I don't mean to be argumentative, but regarding your last comment, I was just reading (The Atlantic's cover story, a month or two ago) that recent research shows that people consistently become more happy after age 50. It's been true for me.

Julian Love: "I'm a commercial photographer in London, shooting for advertising and design agencies and have a very healthy business. Day rates are between £2k and £4k depending on the job, plus extra fees for equipment, editing, and retouching. I bill around 80 days a year. The rest of the time we spend on test shoots, personal projects, and marketing. I'm very happy with my career."

Mark: "High end weddings are providing many with better income in my experience, and that's the market I switched to. Lets me shoot film on the job too! I am much happier than I was in the relative rat race and popularity contest that was NYC commercial photography. I make real money with my Rolleiflex 2.8E, Nikon F100, Pentax 67II and Nikon Df—something I thought was no longer possible in 2007 when I graduated from the Southern Illinois University photo program. If you're talented and know how to market yourself you can hit the 50k a year mark, and if you're really good (at marketing) you can make a lot more than that.

"Couple that with the fact that my peers in weddings have been generally humble and friendly, as opposed to the commercial scenes that I ran in, which largely had friendships based on a what-can-you-do-for-me-now mentality. Since it's not 'cool' to shoot weddings, we also get less of the hip and trendy picking up Rebels and taking work away from us, possibly.

"Love is all you need...to stay in business as a wedding photographer!"

Posted on Wednesday, 14 January 2015 at 10:31 AM in Photo industry | Permalink | Comments (51)

Tuesday, 02 December 2014

The Golden Age (an Analysis of Sony's Sensor Markets)

By Kevin Purcell

I pointed Mike to this slide in the Sony investors report that was posted on Image Sensors World.

The graphic both shows (and tries to hide by using area comparisons) the major changes in the market for Sony's image sensors over four years, fiscal year (FY) 2013 to FY 2017.

The first thing you notice is all the growth is in "non-traditional" camera markets: smartphone and tablet cameras, automotive cameras and Internet enabled security cameras. Ordinary still cameras are in decline.

The volume of compact digicam (DSC) sensors Sony will ship will drop from 51 million to 13 million pieces over the four years; that is, the FY 2017 market will be about a quarter of the size of the 2013 market for Sony. But the total market for DSC sensors will drop from 92 million (i.e. using Sony's volume and current share 92 = 51 * (1/0.55)) to 13 million (= 13 * 1.00) so the total DSC sensor market will be 15% of the FY 2013 market.

Compact digicams really are going away. I suspect the remaining will all be long zoom digicams or large sensor compacts—the two areas where smartphone cameras can't compete.

Perhaps more important for the TOP readership are the numbers for interchangeable lens (ILC) sensors, from type 1-inch to 36x24mm ("full frame"), from FY 2013 to FY 2017. The FY 2017 market for Sony ILC sensors will be about 55% the size of the 2013 market. The total market for ILC sensors will drop by about half from 60 million (60 = 18 * (1/0.3)) to 29 million (13 * (1/0.45)) so the total ILC market will be 50% of the FY 2013 market.

So Sony expects half the volume of ILC cameras in the market in FY 2017.

That means fewer cameras and fewer redundant product iterations, but perhaps less choice too. On the other hand it might mean more narrow niches in the market will be served. Camera company makers are going to move to where the largest margin is.

Sony Semiconductor is helping that by pushing 4/3, APS-C, "full frame" and now "645D" sensors to any camera company that wants them.

Sony (the camera making part) is in a scramble to get their camera systems into position before the market sets in concrete again (rather like the old SLR film camera market with two major protagonists). That means other companies are going to have to do the same. This would explain Sony's rapid iteration in the market with "mark 1" rapidly followed by "mark 2" the next year to gain traction in particular niche markets. This sense of urgency would also explain Sony's aggressive pricing strategy on A7 "full frame" mirrorless cameras.

I'd expect to see "full frame" (or larger) cameras from Fuji, Ricoh/Pentax and perhaps Olympus in the next year or so. Not because of "sensor-size fanboyism" but because the business is driving them in the direction of higher margins. All three of these companies have "hobby camera" businesses—the business is not a real income generator, and in most cases makes losses, but seems to appeal to Japanese traditionalism ("we used to make good cameras and film and we still do even if there is not much of a market because we're Ricoh/Fujifilm/Olympus").

It's also possible that it may mean fewer ILC camera companies as some of the traditional camera companies in a loss-making business get squeezed and decide to exit the market. You can see parallels with previous market turndowns in the 1970s, 80s and 90s and the trail of missing companies they left. Nikon and Canon may have already seen this direction and have decided that they'll come out ahead after yet another market transition if they keep a steady path. I don't think that's guaranteed this time. It would also explain Nikon's strategy of pushing "full frame" DSLRs now. I still can't understand why Canon is lagging in sensor performance. Perhaps they'll start buying Sony sensors too but if they haven't started by now one starts to wonder what their sensor strategy is.

In the meantime this may be a golden age for camera purchasers. The quality and variety are high. Competition is keeping up pressure on the manufacturers to keep prices down. It can't last.

Perhaps this is indicating a future camera market that looks more like the film camera market of old. People will upgrade their cameras every five to 10 years just like in the old days (but they no longer need film in the meantime).

Kevin

Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Christmas is an orgy of commercialism! Sorry, I meant an interlude of holy reflection

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Ken: "For my tastes, this article sounds too much like a knock off of the Thom Hogan article that other commenters apparently already linked to. I am not saying there was any plagiarism involved but just seems to make mostly the same points, coming right after (as far as I can tell) Thom's article."

Kevin Purcell replies: No plagiarism, Ken.

I emailed a note to Thom Hogan on Saturday, Nov. 29 pointing to that slide in the Sony presentation and said what it implied. We exchange emails sometimes. He emailed back saying he'd seen the Image Sensor World article and was thinking about writing about it.

I also sent the same hint in an email to Mike on Saturday, Nov. 29 which he sort of used in this article on Sunday, Nov. 30. Note the thanks to Kevin Purcell at the end of the article—that thanks was for the Sony information.

I corrected one problem with Mike's interpretation on Sunday in email but also felt he missed the big implication of the chart. So I wrote a long comment to that article (the text above). I submitted it as a comment and also sent it in a text file to Mike in email and said he could use it as a blog post if he wished.

Mike was on the road over the weekend so he didn't post it until today.

Thom Hogan published his article on Monday, Dec. 1.

Mike published my text (from Sunday) on Tuesday, Dec. 2.

Both Thom and I came to the same conclusions independently.

Thom does make a very good additional point about the impact of the reduced number of camera sales on funding of blogs in the future. That's an interesting point for TOP and its readership...."

Richard Newman: "This analysis may well be correct, but I would caution not to consider it definitive, for three reasons:

The data was presented by a company to its shareholders—not a disinterested party. This means that there is considerable doubt as to why it was presented as it was.
It doesn't address new technology which may be developed and implemented in the next few years and affect the market. For example the 'selectable focus' technology may become widely available, which could change the market.
The effect of increased interest in video may also skew buyer spending.

"All of which doesn't say this analysis is wrong, but just that it needs to be considered less than definitive."

Posted on Tuesday, 02 December 2014 at 11:35 AM in Photo industry | Permalink | Comments (11)

The Big Difference Between Sony and Fuji

...Fuji is a lensmaker.

Sony isn't.

Fuji makes a fairly complete, fairly well-thought-out, fairly sensible line of lenses for its X-mount, some of which are astoundingly beautiful. And you can have a fair amount of confidence that it will keep adding to that lineup in a sober, sensible fashion.

Sony...um, doesn't. And you can't.

Of course you might find all the lenses you need for any given Sony camera. But...let's just say it's likely to be more of an adventure.

I'm just sayin'.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

You ain't gonna make me beg, are ya?

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

M. Guarini: "It is quite strange. Sony bought Minolta to push their own camera business, and Minolta was a pretty good and sensible lens maker. They even pioneered the autofocus. Where did these experience and skills got lost in the fusion? Anyway, I was recently thinking about, maybe, switching from Micro 4/3 to Fuji because of their lenses, but Olympus does pretty good lenses too, although in a more random fashion.

"And then I played with a friend's Sony A7 with my old set of film lenses (Leica M and Zuikos). The output from these lenses on the A7 is just outstanding. Aside from the Summicrons which, as somebody had said, are magical, I'm quite impressed with the quality of the 21 ƒ/2, 35–80 ƒ/2.8, 50 ƒ/2 macro and 100 ƒ/2 Zuikos [you have very good taste in Zuikos —M. the Ed.], they are simply excellent, even by today's standards. So, now I'm in the list for an A7II which will be used only with manual-focus lenses. That is not a problem for me since I'm 63. These two systems, Micro 4/3 and A7II, will be all my photographic happiness. For a while."

Mike replies: I'm glad you added those last three words. [g]

Tom Kwas (partial comment): "We have a 'pro' shop camera store in the city I live in now, one of the few cities this size to still have one; and I was talking to one of the people there the other day, and telling her how I was digging the multi-format aspects of Micro 4/3 and was thinking about switching over; and she said they've had more professionals coming in and switching from both Canon and Nikon to the Fuji system, and it's been all about the lenses, and especially the reasonably priced and sized prime lenses!"

[See Tom's entire comment—and the rest of any "partial comment"—in the Comments section —Ed.]

Posted on Tuesday, 02 December 2014 at 10:05 AM in Photo equipment, Photo industry | Permalink | Comments (31)

Sunday, 21 September 2014

Sunday Open Mike: Miscellaneous Thoughts

Money utility: Several months ago when I last met Ctein in Madison—May, it was—he had with him a Panasonic 12–35mm lens that John Camp had loaned him. I put it on my OM-D E-M1 and was instantly smitten: it seemed just the right lens for that camera to me. I love the optical look of that lens, too. (Or at least I think I do. It could be that I'm just falling prey to suggestibility, looking at online samples and letting my imagination fill in what I want to be seeing.)

I intended to get one. But shortly thereafter, stocks of that lens ran out. It's been back-ordered at B&H Photo for months. (We forget, but Panasonic does this regularly with various products.)

Then reader B.R. George pointed out something very interesting yesterday, which is that the entire Panasonic LX100 costs $100 less than the Panasonic 12–35mm zoom lens alone...and the lens on the LX100 is slightly faster and has slightly greater range than the standalone lens to boot. So it's like they're throwing in the entire camera for free, and then some.

And that's from the same company.

Between different companies, the contrast is even greater. A similar thought occurred to me when Jack MacDonough brought his Leica T by the house recently—much as I liked the T, in comparison with my utilitarian Sony NEX-6 it reminded me of that super lightweight Porsche which they took a lot of and then charged more for. Slick as the T is (and it's beautiful, a work of art), it omits a number of features that I want, and that I like—and that I get to have on the Sony. And yet the Leica costs fives times what the Sony (admittedly, on closeout) is currently going for. The value equation is...disparate.

Digital can be enormously expensive...but it can also be remarkably cheap. All you have to do is be willing to buy a less popular camera once it reaches end-of-lifecycle closeout. You can't be too picky if you're looking for the best deal, but the argument could be made that you don't need to be, because so many cameras are so competent these days. As B.R. George and the curious case of the LX100 vs. 12–35mm zoom reminds us, the money utility equation with this stuff is all over the place.

For another case in point, consider that the Leica T's initial lens offering, the Summicron-T 23mm ƒ/2 ASPH, is being manufactured by a no-name Pacific-rim OEM optical supplier. (Something Leica admits while also declining to name names.) It's ideally spec'd by my lights, and a better size than my Zeiss equivalent, but, considering that provenance, and its ~$2k pricetag, that lens also comes with a very thick built-in padding of profit margin. No, not for you.

Canon hates Canon: A while back I was trying to get an answer to a question out of Hewlett-Packard, and I doggedly put in a number of calls to a number of different HP employees. One development that amused me was the way some of those people talked about the company they worked for...as though it were monolithic, and as though it had independent will. "HP might want you to do this, or HP might want you to do that," one of them told me (I paraphrase of course). "I'm not really sure what HP would want. You'd have to talk to HP."

And I thought, wait a minute here...I am talking to HP. Right now. To me, you're HP.

Camera hobbyists make the same mistake in talking about camera companies. Canon this and Nikon that. As if companies speak with one united voice and have completely harmonious unanimity of intent. Actually, what impresses me whenenver I hear stories from the other side of the curtain is how bitter and extreme the infighting between divisions and even within divisions of the same company can be. Recently I heard a rumor that the camera division of a certain CWSNBN (company which shall not be named) developed a whole different technology to do something that the same company's video division had already developed the leading tech for doing. Why go to the trouble? The camera division didn't want the video division to get credit for the feature within the company.

I always got that same impression when I dealt with the old Kodak during its swan song days, too. Internal corporate culture was far more important to people at Kodak in those days than external relations between Kodak and other companies or the outside world. The same is true within camera companies, too. We should remind ourselves from time to time that when we talk about these entities like they're unified and speak with a single voice, we're taking liberties, using shorthand.

Gaaaaaah scary: I realized four years ago that if I ever wanted to buy a house, I was just going to have to save up a lot of money. I don't have a regular job with a regular company and banks were looking at me like I was a fly-by-night hippie artist type with no visible means of support (well...). So I saved up for more than three years to make this move. It was the only way I could do it.

Since the move started happening, though, it's been like I punched a hole in the bucket of my bank account and the money has been gushing merrily out. The former owners of this house took their washer and dryer with them...it was in the contract, of course, but I'd missed it. What are you going to do? You have to be able to wash your clothes. I bought the fourth tier down in the Samsung line, but it still cost a frightening $1,450 by the time all was said and done. Every time I turn around it's another four hundred dollars for this, another thousand dollars for that.

Currently, I own, and am paying for, two houses...and until I get the old one safely sold I am not out of the woods financially. But the old house needs to be fixed up before it can be sold. Not only are we weeks away from finishing that project, but it's proving to be another sizeable leak in the money-bucket. Painting, new closet doors, new light fixtures, the pool table mechanic for the pool table move, new flooring throughout the house...can you hear me say "ouch"? When Zander first started carrying a house key, at age 14 or 15, he'd forget it sometimes, and he used to climb in though a kitchen window when he locked himself out. We (not he, I can't blame him) ended up leaving the screens and storm windows off that window, so now it needs to be replaced. It never ends!

Scary. I benefitted from that on this end—the former owners fixed up this house splendidly. On the other end—well, now it's my turn.

It's a guy thing: I kinda have to laugh at myself, because, at the old house, I kept up very well with the guy stuff: the mechanicals, the utilitarian things, and all the various machines a house needs. New water heater, radon abatement system, new water softener, new electrial box, all new faucets and toilets, new roofs on the house and garage, rebuilding of the garage overhead door, new furance, new air conditioner, all new appliances, and so on. But did I do any decorating at all? No. The former owner slathered one color of white paint over the entire interior of the house prior to the sale, and it stayed that same color for the 14 years I was there. I never replaced the hideous toxic carpet. The same drapes are there today that were there when I moved in—only they've got a visible coating of dust now. The same wallpaper is in the bathroom, only now it's peeling.

And by the way, what the heck is up with that? I don't know if it's like this in other areas of the cournty, but in my area, anyway, the local custom seems to be that the bathrooms of any given house will be wallpapered, and it's just as likely that nowhere else in the house will there be any wallpaper. Why in the world would we put wallpaper, which peels if the humidity changes too much, in the one room of the house where the humidity changes all the time? That really makes no sense at all. And yet it's the local custom. I am completely neutral on the question of wallpaper—neither pro nor con—but it makes no sense at all in bathrooms.

Fix 'er up: That's not the only thing that makes no sense about real estate norms. As I mentioned, I'm fixing up my old home for sale. For decorating decisions, I got staging advice (staging is the current term for fixing up a house to sell) from real estate and decorating professionals (thanks, Stephanie and Karen!) as to what appeals to the widest range of buyers. The entire house is being painted neutrally, basically in adroit and complementary selections from the Universe of beige, and the carpet has also been selected to be as inoffensive as possible to the broadest range of potential buyers as possible. It's kind of a light-medium beige-brown with flecks to hide dirt and stains.I absolutely don't care what the paint colors or the carpet look like—I want the house to move, and whatever the pros think will sell best is fine with me.

But when you think of it, I'm picking out the paint and the carpet that someone else is going to have to live with for a long time. How does that make any sense? Wouldn't those people rather pick out their own carpet?

Actually, it makes sense in one way and one way only: which is that after buying a house, most people are cash-poor, and don't have any money for decorating. So they need to move into a place that's ready to live in.

But really, if we thought about it, we'd work out some way for people to spend the fix-'er-up money on their own new houses...the house they're moving into, not the one they're moving out of. I got to paint the walls of my new house (long story), and I'm very pleased I got to do that. Because I picked colors I liked. Rather than the Universe-of-beige varients that were there before. But that makes too much sense; it's definitely not the way things are done.

Community property: That does illustrate another of my theories, though, which is that a society's housing stock is essentially shared, communal property. Yes, it's private property...for a while, for as long as each owner owns it. But over its lifetime it belongs to many people, and so it's communal in a way as well. And that has a way of enforcing community norms, not only in building codes, but in architectural styles, the types and arrangements of rooms, and interior decorating styles.

Case in point, my kitchen counters. As you might know, granite countertops are all the rage now and have been for some time. Personally, I'm not a fan. They're too brittle-hard, and so is china—and when two brittle-hard surfaces meet, the more frangible of the two is more likely to break. I like laminate countertops. As with stainless steel for eating utensils, it seems like the ideal material for the job. Besides, the more fashionable something is, the more likely I am to want to do something else.

Beautiful! ...According to community standards!

I'm not complaining, mind you—my new kitchen is beautiful and I'm appreciating and enjoying it—even going so far as keeping it neat and clean. (What can I say, I'm inspired.) But guess who now has stylish granite countertops? That's right. Me. Because my new house is mine, but it hasn't always been mine, and it won't always be mine. Broadly speaking, the housing stock belongs to the community as whole, serially at least, and the community as a whole currently likes granite countertops.

And so it goes. I hope the people who buy my old house like the new carpet we just picked out for them. Me, I just have to figure out how I'm going to pay for their new carpet!

Mike

"Open Mike," which appears on Sunday, is when we let the TOP dog off the leash and let him wander. Arf!

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

B.R. George: "Of course, the other side of the LX100 vs. 12–35mm equation is that in theory you get to keep the 12–35mm when you replace or upgrade your camera, so it probably has a somewhat longer life cycle. [Although as Wes Walker pointed out, the LX100 will go on closeout at the end of its lifecycle whereas the 12–35mm probably will not. —Ed.]

"And, relatedly, if you don't like the decisions they made about what camera they chose to throw in with the LX100 lens, you're stuck. My reaction when the G1X mark II (with basically the same image circle as Micro 4/3) was announced was that if that lens were available on its own as a Micro 4/3 lens, it would probably cost at least $800 by itself. But there might be some serious advantages to having a hypothetical stand-alone version lens to pair with one's preferred Micro 4/3 body—reading the G1X mark II reviews, I got the impression that some non-lens-related aspects of the camera compared unfavorably to some of the Micro 4/3 options, and might be holding the lens back.

"And of course there are other differences or potential differences in the present Panasonic comparison: LX100 lens has a serious compactness advantage, but 12–35mm is weather-sealed. And as far as I know we don't yet have much on which to make a direct comparison of optical performance (measurable or subjective).

"So it's complicated, depending on what you're looking for, and the LX100 announcement doesn't make me suddenly regret my Olympus 12–40mm (Mike, is there a reason you're not considering that for your E-M1?), but, as you say, the money-utility equation is really all over the place."

Nicholas Condon: "Wow, lots to comment on today! I'll try to be brief: 1) Another way to save big money on cameras (and lots of other things, as you learned with your washer and dryer) is to skip the top of the line. One can buy two Oly E-M10s for the cost of one E-M1; if you don't really and truly need the weather sealing, you can save the cost of a very nice lens by buying the cheaper model. 2) I love love love the idea of housing stock as community property. I am going to be pondering the consequences of that mode of thinking for days. 3) I hate granite countertops, too, and for exactly the reason you describe. I am clumsy, and I fear that I would become a mass murderer of crockery if I had them in my kitchen. And you are literally the first person I've ever read who has said the same thing; everyone else loves their pretty, pretty dishbreaker counters."

Carl Root: "I suspect several readers have recently bought and sold houses and, like me, will offer some helpful advice. Or at least, commiserate. I put new carpet in several rooms, only to have the buyer pull them up and install wood floors. Spent hours cleaning up the master bath (don't ask), only to find out that they didn't like the arrangement and gutted it.

"Now for the good part. I'm convinced that my photos are the reason it sold within twenty-four hours. He loved the photos online and wanted to be first in line to buy it. I don't consider myself a pro photographer, but I do know that some shots look better in the morning, others in the evening, and you can do a lot in Lightroom when the light doesn't cooperate. I wonder how much interest there would be in an article entitled 'Why photo enthusiasts should do their own home marketing photos.'"

Aaron Britton: "I would like to take your community as a whole towards residential buildings thought a little further. What you need to ponder further is it the community at large influencing these decisions on finishes, or the real estate / developer community pushing those decisions on the community at large. Here is my argument: the real estate agents and developers are creating residences with safe design features and finishes that sell a house per their market research. But like you commented, you as a person wanted different paint colors in your house and were happy that you had the opportunity to choose them.

"To draw an analogy from the camera industry, you have Canon and Nikon. Developing the same safe-selling cameras, but not developing anything innovative. Same with the real estate / developers, they create a safe house that will sell, but has nothing innovative about it. If anything it is constructed to the cheapest denomination possible that will make the highest profit possible.

"One other influence on the residential market that plays a bigger part in making these decisions (finishes, design and size of a house) is the house appraiser. The appraiser, who most of the time does not have any experience with design, concepts, and/or how a house functions, tells you the owner or the bank what a house is worth. All based on market research. And all of this influences the finishes at large as well as other decisions (from the size of the house, bigger is better, the amount of bathrooms, minimum three these days, and other items) in a residential building.

"I believe the problem lies in the industry (here residential buildings, but can apply to many other industries) becoming myopic or focused on one element, in this case money. It is not necessarily the community at large influencing decisions."

Mike replies: Good point. As a fer-instance, I tried to get flash water heaters installed in my old house. The plumber basically refused, saying nobody in the area is doing that. He used as an argument that it would hurt resale because potential buyers wouldn't understand it, but from his perspective he didn't want to do it because he didn't have the expertise with the new systems. And I'm sure he's telling people—and maybe himself—that he doesn't acquire the expertise because he doesn't get calls for the technology. But my case indicates that he does get calls for the technology—I can prove at least one—but that, when he does, he talks people out of wanting what they want. This is an indication of what tends to make the trades and the building codes slow to respond to new technology and innovation.

Posted on Sunday, 21 September 2014 at 01:59 PM in Open Mike, Photo equipment, Photo industry | Permalink | Comments (34)

Recent Posts

+ Sponsors

Resources

Photo industry

Friday, 01 July 2016

Thursday, 26 May 2016

Wednesday, 25 May 2016

Tuesday, 24 May 2016

Monday, 21 March 2016

Sunday, 14 February 2016

Monday, 25 January 2016

Wednesday, 20 January 2016

Thursday, 03 December 2015

Tuesday, 27 October 2015

Monday, 19 October 2015

Tuesday, 13 October 2015

Sunday, 12 July 2015

Sunday, 24 May 2015

Sunday, 10 May 2015

Saturday, 25 April 2015

Wednesday, 14 January 2015

Tuesday, 02 December 2014

Sunday, 21 September 2014

Portals

Search

Stats