On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 11:53:30PM -0600, steve harley wrote: > on 2012-05-10 14:25 John Francis wrote > >On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 12:13:20PM -0600, steve harley wrote: > >> > >>* advances in electronic viewfinders > > > >Also only of interest to the niche market > > i'm surprised you'd say that; i expect optical viewfinders to be in > the minority fairly soon, especially as the enhancements EVFs can > offer really start to shine; and EVFs separate from the camera body > will add to the appeal
That's still a pretty small niche. Let's face it - by now, the camera in a mobile phone seems to be good enough for most people. Only a small fraction of the market want anything better than that. And only a small fraction of those want anything better than a compact point-and-shoot. Most don't care about a viewfinder at all; the rear screen on the camera is good enough, and the extra size of any viewfinder limits potential sales (not to mention the cost). While having a viewfinder separate from the camera might sound like a cool feature, it's not really of much use for everyday purposes. You've still got to hold the camera body and the viewfinder; it's a lot easier to do that if they are together in one unit. Where are the operating controls going to go? There's no good answer. *I'd* like a way to use my tablet as a wireless remote viewfinder and controller for my camera, but I'm also prepared to buy camera bodies that cost over $1000. That puts me in a pretty small minority. The low end of the market continues creep upwards in performance. That means there's a shrinking potenmtial market for anything better; each increase in low-end image quality takes another bite out of the customer base for better systems. This, in turn, means the development costs for such systems have to be recouped from a smaller number of sales, which pushes up the price even higher. So a few more of those potential sales are lost because the price premium doesn't deliver enough perceived benefi, which further reduces the market size .... In any case, I fear still photography is rapidly becoming obsolete; I wonder how long it will be before still photographers will be as uncommon as film (or B&W) is today. If people are shooting video, it will be displayed on television screens. It will be some time before anything capable of better than HD resolution is affordable. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
