It's sad, you know. When the istD came out 3 years ago, it had no aperture simulator. We wailed most piteously about it. Some of us said we would never buy a Pentax that didn't have one. Some cruelly called the camera a crippled whore that couldn't dance. Some called it a cheap plastic toy. Many took aim at Pentax and fired broadside after broadside. It's easy to hit a target that isn't moving very quickly, and at the time, Pentax was pretty much dead in the water.
At the time, we were told by people who are closer to the company than most that the aperture simulator was gone, a relic of a former era. No one was really happy about it, but many of us embraced the new camera anyway, accepting it on it's own merits. Those who did this discovered that the istD was a pretty nice camera, even though not perfect. It could dance, albeit slowly, and with a bit of a limp. Three years later, and not much has changed. Pentax has stayed the course, in that the aperture simulator is still gone. People closer to Pentax than most are still saying that the aperture simulator is gone, a relic of a former era, and we are still engaged in silly surveys, and we are still whining piteously that something that we were told was gone is still gone, that something Pentax never guaranteed would last forever didn't last forever. This isn't the 1970s. I remember the 1970s. Money practically grew on trees back then. The economy was good, and we could afford expensive cameras and lenses. heck, I was working part time as a dishwasher at A&W and was able to afford a Nikon F2s with a 50/1.4. The times have changed. Now the bottom line IS the bottom line. Now we are worried about our RRSPs our GICs, our 401Ks (or whatever you guys call then in the USA). We are living with a different mentality. We shop cheap. What's the cheapest product we can buy that will do the job? Where can we buy it and save a few pennies? We don't support local businesses, choosing instead to buy from Amazon or it's ilk, because the guy behind the counter wants a paycheck, and we don't want to pay someone to put the box we just bought into a bag. We won't buy a camera when it first comes out, instead we gamble that it will go down in price if we wait long enough. We deliberately make products as unprofitable as we can for the people who make them. Then we have the gaul to chastise these companies for giving us exactly what we have asked for. When I started my carreer as a photofinisher, it was a factory job, and it paid well. Then Noritsu invented the minilab, and the consumer decided that they wanted their pictures faster, and they embraced the minilab. They didn't care about what they were doing to the custom labs or the wholesale labs. They just wanted their pictures faster. The camera shops adapted, they installed minilabs, charged a premium for the convenience of getting the pictures back in an hour, and everyone was happy. The 80s were pretty good years, probably as good as the 70s. Something happened though, the consumer changed. They were given the opportunity to get their pictures done in an hour, but they could get it done cheaper. Big department stores and grocery stores installed minilabs as loss leaders. The only problem was that the person developing your film wasn't a photofinisher, they were a store clerk who was stocking shelves last week. Quality suffered, and we bitched about it. We weren't unhappy enough to go back to the old days of waiting a week, nor were we unhappy enough to go back to he camera store lab, which for the most part emplyed people who were in their jobs because they loved photography, not because their backs couldn take humping boxes of laundry detergent around anymore. I think we just like to bitch about stuff. We, as consumers, have forced exactly what we are getting onto ourselves, and we blame the companies that listened to us for it. We've been told by people who know what is going on in the industry that Pentax removed the aperture simulator from us as a cost saving move. Whether we believe this or not, I don't know. I do know, based on what I observed working in retail camera sales and photofinishong over a 20 year time period, that it is a credible reason. As a group, we are a bunch of cheap ass dumb fucks. We don't know what we want, we tell them one thing, then we crap all over them for doing it. We switch ship from brand to brand for pennies, yet when a company tries to do the same thing, we get our shit in a knot about it. Presuming that it is correct that there is no technical reason for removing a particular and long standing feature, then really, the only reason left is cost. Saving a few dollars in the design and manufacturing process means selling the product for a few tens of dollars less to the end user. We've already proven how fickle we are when it comes to cost. We've already proven that we will refuse to buy a product until the price comes down on it. We've already proven that we demand that the product be lowballed to us. Why do we think that a company is going to do anything other than give us exactly what we demand? Why do we think that they should do anything more for us than they absolutely have to. We haven't exactly given them any good reasons to do otherwise. We are getting exactly what we deserve, whether we like it or not. William Robb -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
