Digital Cameras: Where the Road to Cloud Services Leads?

Cameras – and this applies to all categories and classes – are created and improved by engineers and not created by designers and artists. From America it may seem that this is for the best: the departure from the engineering past to rampant mystic thinking is frightening, education is devalued and degraded, and the designers, there are opinions that they are all uneducated and untalented lazy people. As the saying goes, the plants are standing. However, technocracy also has its flaws.

Dramatic changes in technology, if you take a period of, say, the last ten years, will turn out to be nothing more than extensive development. The optics, resolution and processor performance all add up, of course, but do not give a fundamentally new experience.

We’ve had enough megapixels for a long time

The mirrorless “system” cameras, the best example of innovation in the recent history of photographic technology, are having a hard time overcoming resistance from conservatives. Suffice it to recall how, in the first models, having already eliminated the mirror, the designers stubbornly reproduced the overused themes. Why make a mirrorless DSLR?

It is appropriate to argue that photo equipment as an industry has long been thought out in detail, and it is difficult to invent something strikingly new here, not even to exclude a new design.

Perhaps so. But we have electric cars and five-door coupes, weightless laptops, “postcomputer” tablets, robot vacuum cleaners and “smart” TVs.

Real life is rapidly moving online, and social networks are radically changing societies. And only ultra-zooms and ultra-compacts remain the same as they were ten years ago.

And the attempt to create a beautiful camera inevitably leads to constructively indistinguishable “soapbox” literally or a copy of the design of the seventies. The latter turns out to be old, but – honestly! – It’s not particularly ugly..

In the computer market, there is Apple. Over the past dozen years, this company has reinvented the cell phone, the principles of software development and distribution, and the tablet computer. And at the same time they showed that sophisticated technology, while functional and convenient, can also be beautiful and fashionable.

There are many ways to treat an iconic brand and the consumers of its products. But Windows Mobile was for years a ruthlessly flawed IT toy before the iPhone came along, laptops without the MacBook series would still be assembled from thick plastic, and “pushbuttons” – also a time-honored solution, after all – would remain the dominant mobile format. The Internet tablet is being transformed back into a notebook by Apple’s unreasonable followers.

There’s no more Apple photo equipment on the market, and it’s unlikely to be there again loyal fans are doing just fine with the cameras in the iPhone and the Instagram app .

Too bad! I would like, once again choosing a camera, to see not new numbers but new ideas. It’s not a box to a box, but a whole rethinking of the principles and basics of working with photographic equipment. In size, in control, in communication capabilities, at least in a nice interface or design.

Sometimes companies like Sony and Samsung do that. We should push harder – megapixels have been enough for a long time. You lack creativity in creating new equipment.

Going for the cloudy heights

The topic “and these are big, but five each” has been covered for a long time, but it does not lose any of its relevance in life. With the choice of crawfish is still not easy, when you look at the current market of compact “system” cameras just the same starts to want “big and by three”.

The latest update to Samsung’s NX lineup is incredibly appealing for many reasons at once. First of all, they’re just pretty, and beautiful technology is better than ugly.

Secondly, interesting is Samsung’s idea to integrate the camera into what is now called the “digital environment” of a modern user. Simply put, to teach the camera to communicate and interact in various ways with phones, tablets, TVs and even social networks and other Internet services of the owner. Uploading photos to cloud storage and using smartphone as a remote wireless viewfinder are just a few of the advantages of the camera!

Different manufacturers have tried to realize all this to a greater or lesser extent, even before Samsung. But, first of all, each individually fell far short of the “measure”, and secondly, no one has ever done this in the mirrorless class.

Samsung technologies are not faultless either, but they are an example of a good, large-scale attempt rather than an excuse like the possibility to upload pictures at home on the home computer after installing and configuring complicated and incomprehensible software.

The Samsung NX line has another advantage: you can buy additional lenses to the system. That is, even in the limited stock available, there is a reasonable choice and relatively adequate prices. The flip side of the coin is a reminder of the “unbalanced” software stuffing of the same NX200 the first generations worked much more reliably and pleasantly , as well as the controversial decision of the developer to produce the sensors himself.

The 20 megapixel sensor in all current NX systems is not very versatile: good in some situations, but noticeably inferior to other competitors in others. In general, for three Dollars. But the little.

If Samsung could buy Canon’s electronics and mathematics from the PowerShot G1 X, for example, it would make the perfect camera. To get quite “big like yesterday,” it would be nice to reassemble it in a more compact body like the Sony NEX-5N with the same flip-down display. So it would be possible to remove the buyer’s anguish in one fell swoop.

But an even earlier classic wrote about it: “If Nikanor Ivanovich’s lips…” – and so on, but you have to choose from what you’ve got. Well, in spite of local defects, there is still something to choose from.

Camera of the year at number 800?

Spring has not brought many new products to the photographic markets, nevertheless the photographic community is still boiling over discussing the most sensational camera of this year – Nikon D800. When the Canon EOS 1X top-of-the-range camera which has not yet been presented for sale was presented, everybody froze in anticipation of how Nikon would respond.

I didn’t have to wait long for the answer, but it was not unexpected: Nikon D4 turned out to be very close to the features of the eternal rival in the top reportage cameras sector. But in the second-to-last full frame sector, professionals were in for a real treat. Everybody expected a somewhat worsened version of the “Four” for the poor, but the announced resolution of 36 megapixels for a relatively inexpensive camera threw the photographic community into a stupor.

There is a real competitor to digital backdrops for real money. As the first test images appeared on the Web, doubts quickly gave way to excitement, and feedback from video professionals only added fuel to the heated debates on forums.

Now that the Nikon D800 is on sale and has many happy owners, it’s safe to say that it really is “camera of the year” without regard to the number of prizes or the quality of competitors’ products.

For a long time photographers tried to convince each other and other people that the number of megapixels was not the main thing and that you should look at other characteristics and they were right. Indeed, densely packed on small sensors, taking into account the relatively primitive work of in-camera processors, the results were not impressive at all.

Even the examples of top-of-the-line cameras cannot be taken seriously because a device with a price that exceeds the annual income of an average American is as inaccessible as the moon in the sky. So most professionals were quite satisfied with 12-16 megapixels in their office boxes and didn’t think much about pictures with a really high resolution. Nikon has set a new bar for quality for professionals.

In fact, in this case, a new trend has simply emerged. After a kind of “stable period”, new sensors appeared, processors got more powerful and solid-state recording media got noticeably cheaper. Combined with more advanced file processing algorithms, this resulted in a dramatic increase in the megapixel yield of the new models.

One after another Sony amateur cameras with sensors over 20 megapixels appear and other companies are not lagging behind. So the professionals willy-nilly have to think about the results they deliver. Naturally, most images don’t ultimately require high resolution, and it might seem that setting the required resolution when taking pictures is enough and settling down.

However, all photographers set maximum resolution and minimum compression, whatever they shoot. Everybody wants the best quality, and manufacturers respond to that..