Comment by wjnc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wjnc | Hacker News Reader

As an economist: isn't this 'just' an example of software eating the world?

One the one hand, quality camera's should keep upgrading the periferal hardware to keep match with modern IT-supplies and on the other hand keep a focus on durable products. Why wouldn't producers do this? Cost savings and probably price competition.

The competition (smart phones) have a whole different market. They have a product that people (regretably?) replace every 2-3 years. The market dictates the newest techniques. Pictures are sensors + software. Software has a much shorter improvement cycle. Hence, I would expect a continuously larger part of the camera market to 'fall' for the smartphone camera. Heck, the 'official' advice from my preferred reviewers is not to buy a small camera anymore, but use the savings for a better smartphone.

And then you have large old-camera corporations struggling because their highest margin products (just a guess that that was the little cameras in the former days, not the professionaly product) are falling away. So they don't have the money to keep their high-end products up quality wise nor the institutional awareness to quickly adapt. Cycle a few times... Read OP.

> The competition (smart phones) have a whole different market. They have a product that people (regretably?) replace every 2-3 years. The market dictates the newest techniques. Pictures are sensors + software. Software has a much shorter improvement cycle. Hence, I would expect a continuously larger part of the camera market to 'fall' for the smartphone camera. Heck, the 'official' advice from my preferred reviewers is not to buy a small camera anymore, but use the savings for a better smartphone.

The old corporations in the field (Canon, Nikon, Sony) should make you pay for better firmwares (i.e. plugins or at least revisions) so that they have an incentive to keep improving their existing DLSRs. I think on my previous body there was only ONE update in x years and that did not bring anything new on the table.

Thanksfully nowadays we have MagicLantern for Canon DSLRs at least, which brings a ton of additional features for photo and video. It's still not at a parity level with the software available on phones and the like, but it's a big jump vs the base firmware nonetheless.

Good point. That would be a camera as a platform-model. We're half-way there in re-assembling a market structure that can withstand the 'new' pressures. The only way for a truely decent product, would be a decoupling of 1. camera as high quality parts for making great pictures, 2. camera as a communications device, 3. software.

Alas, I can think of exactly no digital examples of that market structure to work. Perhaps the old-school PC hit that mark. How many of those are still around? Perhaps we can see cloud computing as hitting that mark (separating 1,2,3), but still we need a complete device (1+2+3) to interact with the cloud.

At least Fuji and Olympus have realised the new model cycle is getting longer so they are releasing new firmware features until the replacing model is launched.

Canikon aren't doing new features in firmwares, seems more like bug fixes and Sony is somewhere inbetween at least with the A7-series...

Sony A7 series have also some kind of small apps you can buy and download from their store to your camera. Haven't seen that many apps there =(

Finding, downloading, and using those apps is a whole exercise in pain tolerance. Took me an hour-plus to download the timelapse app.

>> Took me an hour-plus to download the timelapse app.

Oh wow. I had the same experience. In my case I just wanted to update the existing apps I had installed. Apparently you need a Sony entertainment account to install apps (it must be a new requirement as I never had one when I installed the apps in the first place).

I tried for 15 minutes to create an account using the camera.

    * My A6000 doesn't have a touch screen so I had to use the camera's wheels to operate the on-screen keyboard
    * The account creation page is non-responsive.

You would think Sony Entertainment Network's account login/creation webpage would be responsive so it would be usable within the camera OR there would be a completely different page. NO, it is the same desktop, non-responsive page including Google's painful anti-bot script which requires me to select 10 images that represent street signs using the camera wheel.

Amazingly, I could actually use the A6000 to create an account, but it kept erroring out when submitting. Finally, I realized it would be easier to just use my laptop and to my surprise it still failed because their account creation was down. About 10 attempts later it still failed with a slightly different error, but I still received the account creation success email (?) and was able to login fine after that.

Edit: Formatting.

Why would they try to compete with smartphones? Dropping product differentiation when the competition comes from "a whole different market" doesn't really make sense.

This seems more like an issue of quality control.

They're not choosing to compete with smartphones - smartphones are eating into their market thus forcing competition. As smartphone cameras have improved the more they've eaten into the market. Note that this argument does not require that all users of their cameras would ever consider using a smartphone instead.

Indeed. 'Big corp' would find it very hard to react when a profitable segment of their portfolio drops out (smartphone vs. simple camera / so you're struggling financially), while competition or complexity ramps up in another part of their portfolio (high end camera / I figure a new market structure is needed, but never before tried out).

Snarky: It's just not thaught that way in business schools. Lookup Nikons financial trouble. Canon has no financial trouble, but seems to be quickly moving to other markets that are profitable (medical supplies). So perhaps they will just drop out of this market in a few years.

What market? Smartphones and high end cameras aren't really comparable. They compete in the sense that they're both able to take pictures, but they don't compete across all possible dimensions. I mean, I could be wrong, but these don't look like substitute goods. Smartphones and crappy cameras certainly are, but not not smartphones and high-end cameras. But using cheaper parts does make cameras crappier, so doing so in order to engage in price competition is choosing to compete with smartphones.

Which is what I don't understand. Because, as far as I know, firms should engage in product differentiation as long as it's possible.

> What market?

It's a great question and I don't know.

What I do know is that I have not bought/used a dedicated camera since about the time smartphones came along. Nor have any of my family members - they all used to have dedicated cameras used to take holiday photos, photos of their children, birthdays and so on. Now they just use their phone.

This must have an effect on the camera manufacturers.

Camera makers do or have produced cameras with lesser or comparable qualities (for at least certain classes of use, such as for everyday users). These compete against smartphones. Another case is the users who might buy a higher end camera but now find that decision hard to justify when for their purposes smartphones are at least adequate. A third case is there being less of a demand for professional photographers these days, in part because of smartphones, which also is a kind of competition that higher end cameras have to deal with.

The bar of what smartphone cameras are capable of doing keeps rising, keeps eating into the territory of what previously required a standalone camera.

All these things are competition that eat into profits, which in turn may affect those companies' abilities to produce high end cameras. Eg they may only be able to use cheaper components compared with what they could afford in the past.

but these don't look like substitute goods

I know lots of people who used to carry DSLRs everywhere but who now only carry their iPhone.

As I wrote the other day in a different context, when prices got low enough, a lot of people bought DSLRs with cheapo kit lenses, turned the control dial to Auto, and lugged them around to take snapshots for posting to Facebook. For the most part, smartphones have gotten good enough that, if that's how you use a DSLR, you should mostly leave it at home.

Many people do have a number of lenses and use DSLRs for creative control but they may not even be a minority. Heck, I'm a relatively serious amateur photographer and I often don't bother carrying a dedicated camera today if I know I'll just be doing some occasional casual shooting.

I'm mostly one of those people, but I still often lug the DSLR because even the best smartphone cameras still suck at shooting distant subjects. They may have a lot of megapixels, but the lenses and sensors are so small that once I crop the shot down I end up with something I would be ashamed to even post on Facebook. Even the cheapest DSLR kit zoom lens produces dramatically better images.

On a recent vacation I found myself leaving my 70-300mm on my dslr for times I need reach, and using my iPhone7+ for other shots. Worked out pretty well.

I know about two of those people, but I attribute their change of heart more to a passing fad.

I'm actively trying to become one of those people. The weight alone is a pain while traveling/hiking.

The companies historically creating cameras had a business model creating low to high end cameras. That's unravelling. Coping with quickly changing markets is hard. So even though smartphones and high end cameras aren't compatible and not substitute goods, the institution creating those cameras suffer with no good alternative as of yet. Hence the movement towards crappy high end cameras.

Yeah, I see it now. But then it ceases to be an issue of direct competition between high end cameras and smartphones and becomes an issue of shrinking economies of scale and scope e.g. raw material orders become smaller and lose previous supplier discounts and crappy camera designs which were "subproducts" of better designs are no longer feasible and thus all the cost falls on high-end designs instead of being split among several models.

The point is that as software improves, phone cameras are starting to compete in the traditional dslr arena. On my last vacation I took a roughly 50/50 split in pictures between my dslr and iphone7+.

Of course the dslr can do more, but the ease that a phone + software can make a wide range of really nice pics is eating into the consumer level dslr market. I like taking pictures, so I don't mind fidgeting on my dslr for the perfect shot. Meanwhile my wife has taken multiple great looking pics on her phone is wondering what I'm doing ;)

>I mean, I could be wrong, but these don't look like substitute goods.

Smartphones have destroyed the compact consumer camera market. There is no hyperbole there. Professional cameras? Sales of those are going down also, depending on how you define them of course (SLR is probably appropriate to call "professional")

Sales of prosumer and up SLRs are going down primarily because newer models don't add enough useful features to justify the price. The new Nikon D850 looks like a great camera, but if you have a D810 that's working just fine the minor improvements that the D850 bring could be hard to justify for the price tag ($3.3k US).

People who buy that level of camera understand, moreso than the general public, that, for example, an increase from a 36 to a 45 megapixel sensor may be nice, but in the end the photos both cameras produce are still great and whoever sees them in print or exported for the internet would never be able to tell the difference.

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