Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

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For the bigger players, they miss out on market segmentation. An EOS M with Magic Lantern has a number of features that are featured on Canon's cinema line, for example. The M is perhaps no longer competitive in key ways, but had ML been available with today's level of polish in 2012, it would have eaten into higher-margin products.

Fuji is perhaps best poised to enable open development -- their pricing structure is more around hardware variations on a common sensor/processing than strict differentiation in capability.

The far future of camera development probably does look like open-source (or, at a minimum, common-versioned closed-source) software/firmware riding on commercially-manufactured hardware platforms (just like computers today). We're not there yet, but the technical success of Magic Lantern shows that the door is open.

A dark-horse entrant like Sigma could, in addition to Fuji, be a hardware vendor that could crack open a "commoditize your competition" market.

In the meantime, everyone except professionals and image-quality obsessives has moved to phone cameras, for which Google and Apple have developed incredible software. It's been obvious for at least ten years that camera makers need to improve their software, and they've not done so, or very minimally done so.

I fully agree with this.

Maybe they're working on something big, but Canon, et al. to me appear to be headed the way of Kodak, at least in the consumer market.

They would have a hard enough time with casual users just because the camera on their phone is "free" (included in the price and perhaps more importantly, the form factor). But I don't even see any attempt to compete with Apple or Android cameras.

I use a full-frame SLR, and love my lenses. But I put it at even money whether I will ever buy another.

My experience is that the phone can do just as well as the real camera for shots which are easy to take. I still go for the real camera in situations where it's not so easy. (High zoom, need to focus on something other than the foreground (say, an animal with vegetation in the way), slow shutter speed to compensate for inadequate light etc.)

I don’t think that Canon and similar could offer anything to compete with smart phones. While smart phone cameras have gotten much better, the real secret sauce is that everyone already has a smart phone. It’s not that smart phones beat DSLRs, its that they got sufficiently good and everyone got them for other reasons. Not having to buy and carry a second device is quite the market advantage, it turns out.

Frankly, no dedicated camera is ever going to win back users with software features, and it is extremely unlikely that Canon or Nikon could out compete Apple and Google in this area. It makes much more sense for Canon to continue to serve hobbyists and pros with features that phones cannot offer, rather than trying to complete on software.

For me it is not a matter of obsession, I just enjoy using the equipment. I also take loads of photographies with an iPhone and an Android phone and, invariably, they fall short of the full frame or APS images. Specially when you print them on anything larger than A4. I agree that for screen only, phones are enough.

Raw video on M magic lantern looks absolutely stunning unless you explicitly need 4K to my eye and manipulation beats hands down droll quality of compressed video.

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