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0 pointsSuppafly1y ago0 comments

What the market wants and what manufacturers provide isn't 100% aligned though. You make a good point about people wanting better cameras on their phones, but that doesn't totally eliminate the market for better portable cameras. Even if manufacturers would rather put their r&d money in areas that would be more profitable, that doesn't necessarily mean that there is no profit in other areas.

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6 comments · 1 top-level

afavour1y ago· 5 in thread

I think it’s a scale thing. The market for those devices exists but it’s not big enough to justify the investment.

kjkjadksj1y ago

Its really a physics thing at a certain point. Smartphones are always worse than their contemporary purpose built camera counterparts because smartphone cameras have to be so small. Meanwhile a pro camera could weigh 10 pounds with a lens the size of your thigh. We simply don't know enough about optics to take that package and put it into a smartphone without compromising quality in some way.

wlesieutre1y ago

The optics and sensors might be a physics thing, but everything else about standalone cameras really could've done much better at staying competitive.

As others have mentioned, lack of geotagging, wireless connectivity, and other convenience features made them poor competitors to smartphones. And it wasn't just wireless connectivity being behind the times, Canon's T7i (aka 800D) launched in 2017 still made you find a mini USB cable. They were good at optics, but dropped the ball on the rest of the product.

Even though the phone had worse quality pictures, it brought many other things to the table.

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Forgeties791y ago

What camera bodies are you using that are 10lbs? Even a 5D with a 70-200 attached is like 5lbs. Most camera bodies are between 1-3lbs unless you’re talking cinema cameras, which are an entirely different beast.

Most people with DSLR’s or mirrorless are working with around 3lbs even with a lens.

bsder1y ago

But then why hasn't open source stepped into the breach?

This seems like the kind of thing that a single, dedicated hacker could crack wide open.

The pieces are all commodity, no? People can buy lenses independently, so you don't have to design those. Everything else should be COTS--processor, networking/cellular, display, etc.

It might not be super cheap, but it shouldn't exceed $500 on the BOM. And then people can iterate on it over time.

ge0rg1y ago

Creating a high performance image processing pipeline requires significant engineering effort and probably a custom SoC or DSP. You need to take care of auto focus and all the other physical configurations (shutter time, aperture, ISO), then you need to add post processing to correct for lens distortion and to do white balancing. I wish there was a FOSS camera, eg with the rather open MFT lens mount, but I don't see it happen any time soon.

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