A Plea to Camera Makers

Dear camera makers,

Canon’s 1Ds Mark III is 21 megapixels. Please, acknowledge that Canon has won on the megapixel front, and move on. My camera’s resolution is 6 megapixels, and I have a flawless 20×30″ print from it. 21 megapixels is too many for most uses. Going further is wasteful.

Nikon has the right idea, though: improve things other than resolution. My camera maxes out at ISO3200, and the pictures are very bad there. Sometimes, though, ISO3200 isn’t enough. In a dimly-lit room, there are times when ISO3200 still gives me 1/8 of a second or slower shutter speeds. My lens is pretty slow, with f/3.5 as its widest, but even using something like Canon’s 50mm f/1.2 lens, I might not be able to get a useful shutter speed.

Nikon’s D3 goes up to ISO25,600. The images are practically useless at that point. But at least they’re trying. To you camera makers, I present a challenge: top them. I want to be able to shoot at ISO25600 (“25K?”) and get clean images. Can you do it? I bet you can, especially if you quit trying to one-up unnecessarily large resolutions.

Oh, and give us innovative new features, too. Or let us write our own apps! Why isn’t there “aperture bracketing?” Say I’m not sure whether f/4 is enough depth of field. Why can’t I take the picture at f/4, f/5.6, and f/8 and decide afterwards?

Why, on a camera body that cost $2,000 new, is there no “intervalometer” to let me, say, automatically take a picture every 5 seconds? I can buy a $150 accessory to do it, but is it really that hard to make it a software feature?

HDR photography is all the rage. Why not have an “HDR Composite” feature, that will meter for the darkest region, meter for the brightest region, and automatically bracket across the whole range? (Bracketing is not at all new, but it’s “dumb” bracketing — I can do +1/-1 or +2/-2. What if I want to go from +3 to -5 in 16 steps?)

Why do no cameras have an embedded GPS? It’s not the most useful feature, sure, but it’s cool. Make it a “module” people can upgrade to. I’d be awfully tempted to buy it.

It’s slowly becoming a reality, but why not have a USB2 port and let me plug in accessories? Currently USB2 ports are just for copying images to your computer. Why can’t I stick my thumb drive in and record to that? Or my external hard drive? And why can’t I just copy pictures over to my external hard drive right from the camera? Why do I need a computer?

Why are the LCDs on back such low-resolution? Play with an iPhone for a while, at 160ppi, and then look at any camera’s LCD. It looks like comparative crap. That LCD is important, too: I’m trying to see how my image out. Why would you give me a piece of crap for that? I’m yet to see a camera with an interface that doesn’t look like it predates Y2K, either. Again, play with the iPhone. It just looks cool. Don’t overdo it, but would it kill you to at least make the interface on your cameras look nice?

Some really high-end lenses have an IS/OS feature — basically, the lenses compensate for minor shake through the use of a gyro. This feature gets rave reviews from anyone able to afford the $2,000 lenses. Why not build an IS sensor into your camera instead, so that, regardless of lens, your sensor stabilizes for minor shake?

Please, camera makers of the world, quit it with megapixels. Let’s go for some innovation.

One thought on “A Plea to Camera Makers

  1. Oh, some more!

    – You can shoot Shutter priority or Aperture priority, where you shutter speed or aperture, and the camera automatically selects the other. But there’s a third variable — ISO. No camera makers treat it as a third variable, but there’s really no good reason. Ditch the aperture priority and shutter priority, and instead have a ‘triangle’ with Aperture, Shutter speed, and ISO sensitivity. Let the camera user set as many (or as few) as they want, and have the camera do the rest. A novice could do Auto ISO + Auto Shutter + Auto Aperture. A pro might want ISO100 and f/2.8, or maybe 1/60th of a second at f/4, and leave the ISO up to the camera.

    – A “safety” / lock mode. Every digital camera I’ve ever used has a “Protect” feature that lets you protect images one at a time, but also a “Delete All” option that lets you delete all the pictures. Is it some sort of cruel joke that there’s no “Protect All?” But what I’d really rather is a button I can press that will disable deletion / formatting / any irreversible changes until I enter a password or something. In Ghana, the kids loved playing with our cameras. One poor traveler had the kids try out the “Format” picture, and lost a lot of pictures that hadn’t been backed up.

    Taking it one step further, I’ve read a few stories about people who had the police confront them and demand that they delete pictures. (This is illegal, but I digress!) Let a quick double-tap of the “Lock” button enter a mode with “faux delete,” where the images disappear but actually just have a “Hidden” bit set until you later unlock the camera.

    – What about low ISOs? Film started off at things like ISO 6. You’d need a LOT of light to get good pictures. (Or really long exposures, hence the calling it “slow” film.) For me, ISO100 is plenty slow, but once in a blue moon, I wish I could go lower. Neutral Density filters are popular: they’re basically a piece of smoked glass, with the sole purpose of letting less light in. Why is ISO 50 a “special feature”?

    – Why do you put filters, like a polarizing filter, in front of the lens? People who own lots of lenses need lots of filters in various sizes. Why not have a filter slot inside the camera? (I suppose it could let in a lot of dust?)

    – Put a ‘level’ in the camera. Not entirely new, but show a “Camera is 0.36 degrees slanted to the right,” or, “Camera is pitched downwards by 1.6 degrees” warning? It’d also be interesting to embed it as EXIF data. Super bonus points for indicating this in the viewfinder.

    – Speaking of which, why are viewfinders so small? Make them bigger. Much bigger.

    – I’m rethinking my opinion on the “LiveView” on digital SLRs. I initially opposed it, because, well, it’s not SLR-like. But the more I think about it, why do you need a complex set of mirrors when the sensor lets you look directly through the lens? Just please, if you’re going to keep a viewfinder, keep it as a real one. (And make it bigger.) Or ditch it altogether and use the LCD.

    – What is the purpose of a shutter? No, really. Can’t you just record data from the sensor for 1/1,000th of a second of 13 seconds or whatever exposure you select? I’m not sure what the purpose of a shutter is in a camera that doesn’t use film. (I seem to recall that Canon’s initial 1D, I think, didn’t use one? Or maybe I dreamed that? But it was capable of crazy things like a 1/500 second flash sync because of it, wasn’t it?)

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