[PocketPixels]

This is path dependence, and it happens frequently whenever there are combinations of products and results.

Let's say there are five camera manufacturers. Each one makes a completely different size camera sensor. (Let's simplify and assume each camera manufacturer is fully vertically integrated, ie, they make the lenses and the electronics).

1. Apple Camera makes 3:2 rectangle sensors in full color
2. Blueberry Optical Co. makes 3:2 rectangle sensors in monochrome
3. Cranberry Foto GmbH makes 1:1 sensors in full color
4. Durian Digicam makes cameras with a circular sensor so no part of the lens image goes to waste
5. Elderberry Cinema makes 16:9 cameras with anamorphic lenses for that w i d e s c r e e n movie look

All cameras cost $999 for a ~16 megapixel CMOS, kit zoom lens included. All five companies are competent: solid hardware, solid software, responsive marketing, leadership considers photography a core part of the company business. Consumers are pretty evenly split among the five brands; no one brand is dominating the market after one year of this exciting new age of "digital photography." With me so far? Cool. We've got the variety and innovation you dream of in your original post. Lovely stuff.

Inside ten years, I'll bet they'll all be doing what Apple Camera is doing: 3:2 rectangle sensors in full color. Below is an explanation of why, but you can saver yourself some time with the Cliff's Notes version:
People are dumb, and Capitalism is made of people.

Still want to know why? Because 3:2 is the choice of both Apple and Blueberry, and color is the choice of Apple, Cranberry, Durian, and Elderberry. Those overlaps are going to set Path Dependence in motion.

Fig Paper Inc. is trying to make photo paper for lab prints and for home printing. They are a new company, and they want to target the biggest market with the fewest products. So they start making 4x6" photo paper, allowing them to serve Apple customers and Blueberry customers. They tell users of Cranberry, Durian, and Elderberry camera systems to print their images on 4x6 paper and just trim away the white space. Nobody thinks that is optimal. Fig assures everyone that circular and square papers are coming…Soon™.

Grapfrut.com offers cool picture frames. They make the same calculation that Fig Paper made: target the 3:2 sensor crowd. (Especially because, let's be honest, it's very hard to get circular picture frames to balance correctly on a table or hang correctly on a wall.)

Meanwhile, in this first, exciting year of Digital Photography, all five camps of photographers are posting pictures to the Web and entering monthly photo contests run by Popular Digital magazine. 80% of these photographs are color. 20% are in black and white. A few people who use color cameras downsample their color photos to B&W. No people who use black and white cameras upsample their photographs to pleasing color photographs.

After a year or two, the general public has grown accustomed to the idea that "normal" photographs are in color. And the general public has seen more framed/printed pictures of 3:2 photographs.

Website templates spring up with layouts and subconscious design choices that favor 3:2 photographs. Circular photographs don't display at all in some websites, and 16:9 photographs appear "squished". The web designers and software people assure everyone that expanded options compatible with 1:1 and 16:9 sensors are coming…Soon™.

Two years into the Digital Photography revolution, everyone wants to upgrade to 24 megapixel cameras. Some photographers are wondering if they want to stay with their current systems. After all:

• If you have a 3:2 sensor, all the websites work for you. All the picture frames work for you.
• If you shoot in color, you never have to explain your aesthetic to your coworkers.
• If you shoot in 16:9, you can't win Popular Digital's monthly contest because your images appear distorted.
• If you shoot in 1:1, you have to do weird things with matting or spend time and money on custom picture frames rather than the cheap next-day frames from grapfrut.com.

So what happens? A few percent of Blueberry customers switch to Apple. A few percent of Durian customers switch to Apple. Almost no Apple customers switch to another brand.

Two years after that, to the surprise of utterly no one, Popular Digital still has not updated its website CSS to fully support circular pictures. They promise to do so…Soon™. Fig Paper has come out with 1:1 print-at-home paper, but it costs more than the 3:2 paper.

One year after that (so year five of the Digital Photography revolution), Durian announces that they will be offering a line of cameras and lenses that support 3:2 sensor ratios. The Durian camp splits into Team Circular Purists and Team Rectangular Heretics (this schism mirrors a similar split in Durian's manufacturing and engineering teams, too). Some Durian veterans, unimpressed by the lens adapters offered by Durian, switch to Apple cameras.

Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. Inside ten years, everyone is shooting 3:2 in color. Brands that haven't moved toward this standard don't have to go out of business; but they must find ways to stay profitable while serving a smaller group of customers. Ahem. Ahem.

That's Path Dependence. Don't tell me markets are rational. Markets are efficient, at best. The Invisible Hand is the best we've managed; the Invisible Brain rarely gets involved.

Path Dependence is why 90% of the cars on the road run on gasoline, even though steam powered cars from 1925 were very efficient over long distances. Path Dependence is why you must use crummy #2 pencils to take standardized tests and you can only buy (far superior) #2.5 pencils online. Path Dependence is why I'm typing all this stuff on a QWERTY keyboard that gives the keys "J," "K," "L," and "SEMICOLON are you KIDDING me?" primo beachfront real estate under the fingers of my dominant right hand.

[MarkJerling]

This is path dependence, and it happens frequently whenever there are combinations of products and results.

Let's say there are five camera manufacturers. Each one makes a completely different size camera sensor. (Let's simplify and assume each camera manufacturer is fully vertically integrated, ie, they make the lenses and the electronics).

1. Apple Camera makes 3:2 rectangle sensors in full color
2. Blueberry Optical Co. makes 3:2 rectangle sensors in monochrome
3. Cranberry Foto GmbH makes 1:1 sensors in full color
4. Durian Digicam makes cameras with a circular sensor so no part of the lens image goes to waste
5. Elderberry Cinema makes 16:9 cameras with anamorphic lenses for that w i d e s c r e e n movie look

All cameras cost $999 for a ~16 megapixel CMOS, kit zoom lens included. All five companies are competent: solid hardware, solid software, responsive marketing, leadership considers photography a core part of the company business. Consumers are pretty evenly split among the five brands; no one brand is dominating the market after one year of this exciting new age of "digital photography." With me so far? Cool. We've got the variety and innovation you dream of in your original post. Lovely stuff.

Inside ten years, I'll bet they'll all be doing what Apple Camera is doing: 3:2 rectangle sensors in full color. Below is an explanation of why, but you can saver yourself some time with the Cliff's Notes version:
People are dumb, and Capitalism is made of people.

Still want to know why? Because 3:2 is the choice of both Apple and Blueberry, and color is the choice of Apple, Cranberry, Durian, and Elderberry. Those overlaps are going to set Path Dependence in motion.

Fig Paper Inc. is trying to make photo paper for lab prints and for home printing. They are a new company, and they want to target the biggest market with the fewest products. So they start making 4x6" photo paper, allowing them to serve Apple customers and Blueberry customers. They tell users of Cranberry, Durian, and Elderberry camera systems to print their images on 4x6 paper and just trim away the white space. Nobody thinks that is optimal. Fig assures everyone that circular and square papers are coming…Soon™.

Grapfrut.com offers cool picture frames. They make the same calculation that Fig Paper made: target the 3:2 sensor crowd. (Especially because, let's be honest, it's very hard to get circular picture frames to balance correctly on a table or hang correctly on a wall.)

Meanwhile, in this first, exciting year of Digital Photography, all five camps of photographers are posting pictures to the Web and entering monthly photo contests run by Popular Digital magazine. 80% of these photographs are color. 20% are in black and white. A few people who use color cameras downsample their color photos to B&W. No people who use black and white cameras upsample their photographs to pleasing color photographs.

After a year or two, the general public has grown accustomed to the idea that "normal" photographs are in color. And the general public has seen more framed/printed pictures of 3:2 photographs.

Website templates spring up with layouts and subconscious design choices that favor 3:2 photographs. Circular photographs don't display at all in some websites, and 16:9 photographs appear "squished". The web designers and software people assure everyone that expanded options compatible with 1:1 and 16:9 sensors are coming…Soon™.

Two years into the Digital Photography revolution, everyone wants to upgrade to 24 megapixel cameras. Some photographers are wondering if they want to stay with their current systems. After all:

• If you have a 3:2 sensor, all the websites work for you. All the picture frames work for you.
• If you shoot in color, you never have to explain your aesthetic to your coworkers.
• If you shoot in 16:9, you can't win Popular Digital's monthly contest because your images appear distorted.
• If you shoot in 1:1, you have to do weird things with matting or spend time and money on custom picture frames rather than the cheap next-day frames from grapfrut.com.

So what happens? A few percent of Blueberry customers switch to Apple. A few percent of Durian customers switch to Apple. Almost no Apple customers switch to another brand.

Two years after that, to the surprise of utterly no one, Popular Digital still has not updated its website CSS to fully support circular pictures. They promise to do so…Soon™. Fig Paper has come out with 1:1 print-at-home paper, but it costs more than the 3:2 paper.

One year after that (so year five of the Digital Photography revolution), Durian announces that they will be offering a line of cameras and lenses that support 3:2 sensor ratios. The Durian camp splits into Team Circular Purists and Team Rectangular Heretics (this schism mirrors a similar split in Durian's manufacturing and engineering teams, too). Some Durian veterans, unimpressed by the lens adapters offered by Durian, switch to Apple cameras.

Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. Inside ten years, everyone is shooting 3:2 in color. Brands that haven't moved toward this standard don't have to go out of business; but they must find ways to stay profitable while serving a smaller group of customers. Ahem. Ahem.

That's Path Dependence. Don't tell me markets are rational. Markets are efficient, at best. The Invisible Hand is the best we've managed; the Invisible Brain rarely gets involved.

Path Dependence is why 90% of the cars on the road run on gasoline, even though steam powered cars from 1925 were very efficient over long distances. Path Dependence is why you must use crummy #2 pencils to take standardized tests and you can only buy (far superior) #2.5 pencils online. Path Dependence is why I'm typing all this stuff on a QWERTY keyboard that gives the keys "J," "K," "L," and "SEMICOLON are you KIDDING me?" primo beachfront real estate under the fingers of my dominant right hand.

Brilliant! I love the "Soon™"

[Wheatfield]

They make what they think will sell in enough numbers to make it worthwhile to manufacture the product.
I bet every one of your suggestions has been batted around in every marketing department in every brands' head office and has been rejected as being a money losing white elephant.

[Robot camera]

In the day when there were all sorts of medium format film cameras, the cameras varied widely in design, optimised for different purposes. Take the 6X7 format, for example.
The Pentax was just like a great big 35mm SLR, and reasonably portable with a large range of lenses. The Mamiya RB and RZ cameras were also SLRs, but designed for the studio, not for carrying around all day. The Mamiya press camera was, well, a press camera, evolved from the old 4X5 press camera designs. There are probably other examples.

But what we have now are the cameras that are SLRs, the cameras that are mirrorless but still look like SLRs, and the mirrorless cameras that look like rangefinder cameras. For most purposes these options all offer pretty much the same thing; a camera with an eye level viewfinder. But now we have mirrorless cameras that unlike the film cameras I mentioned, can have their lenses, viewfinders/screens and much of the mechanical parts arranged in a variety of ways, so that the camera layout is optimised for any purpose the designer wants.

Pentax is like any other SLR maker; they have a camera system based round the SLR body form. But what if they also had a camera with another body form, optimised for (say) studio work, or compactness, or waist level portraits, or whatever you can think of. If it was fully compatible with all the lenses and accessories the SLRs are, now that would be a versatile camera system indeed.

[Lord Lucan]

I have just noticed this thread, particularly the claim of 1:1 being possibly more efficient use of the sensor and image cicle.

As it happens, I spent some of this weekend digitising some negatives my father took on his 6x6 Rolleiflex. He was a part-time pro, covering theatres, portraits and weddings. Most of his subject scenes were either wide-ish, like shots of the stage, cast lineups and other groups, or tallish like standing portraits. For the theatre, it was often important to display the actor's whole costume.

For many of the portraits he apparently rigged a background cloth, the edges of which were within the frame; I do not have the final prints, but presumably for these he would have cropped to a rectangular portrait format. Similarly, in many whole stage shots the orchestra pit intrudes at the bottom and he would have cropped those prints to a landscape rectangle. On the shots I decided worth keeping by digitising, I have done the same. Only in about 25% of his shots did the square format really work, such as groups of 3-4 people and crawling babies.

While a square format of 43mm diagonal (30.4x30.4 mm) makes more efficient use of a FF lens circle and gives a larger picture area than the 36x24mm FF format (924 sq mm versus 864 sq mm), if you do not want a square format final picture most of the time, and more often crop to a rectangle, it is less efficient. Cropping a 30.4 mm square frame to a 2:3 ratio leaves a frame only 30.4x20.3 mm, which is a paltry 617 sq mm. Even if you adopt a 1:1.414 ratio (like A4 paper, an ideal) you still only get 30.3x21.5 mm, which is 654 sq mm.

Original B&W negative from Rollieflex 6x6 TLR

Copied with K-1, M100mm Macro with extension tubes

[biz-engineer]

Let's say there are five camera manufacturers. Each one makes a completely different size camera sensor. (Let's simplify and assume each camera manufacturer is fully vertically integrated, ie, they make the lenses and the electronics). Apple Camera makes 3:2 rectangle sensors in full color Blueberry Optical Co. makes 3:2 rectangle sensors in monochrome Cranberry Foto GmbH makes 1:1 sensors in full color Durian Digicam makes cameras with a circular sensor so no part of the lens image goes to waste Elderberry Cinema makes 16:9 cameras with anamorphic lenses for that w i d e s c r e e n movie look

Excellent post . Love it .

[robgski]

People are dumb, and Capitalism is made of people...The Invisible Hand is the best we've managed; the Invisible Brain rarely gets involved.

Read more at: Why so little variety of cameras? - Page 3 - PentaxForums.com

I think you draw the wrong conclusion. People are individuals making choices as individuals based on factors that they choose and prioritize individually. Each individual is a cell in the Invisible Brain that control the invisible hand.

In any case, a truly innovative camera company would allow a consumer to choose all the components and make a bespoke camera.
How much are you willing to pay for a camera made to your specs?

[ThorSanchez]

I think you draw the wrong conclusion. People are individuals making choices as individuals based on factors that they choose and prioritize individually. Each individual is a cell in the Invisible Brain that control the invisible hand.

In any case, a truly innovative camera company would allow a consumer to choose all the components and make a bespoke camera.
How much are you willing to pay for a camera made to your specs?

I think a bespoke, one-off camera with something like the refinement and integration of a mass-produced camera would cost somewhere between a car and a house. 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars.

[JensE]

For my 'everyday' bicycle, I paid about two times as much to have it built according to my specs as I would have for a series model with similar quality. I don't think I would come up with enough individual wishes that could be fulfilled in a custom camera kit to justify even that, and it would be much more, I suspect. I'm talking about the same price range as a K-1 II, btw.

[Wasp]

Back in the day, Pentax made a big song and dance of how much more usable a 6x7 negative was when compared to a 6x6 negative. Much less cropping needed for a 5:4 print like 10x8in, they said.

[JensE]

Considering the actual size of the negative, there is indeed quite a difference 6x6: 56 x 56 mm2 (1:1), 6x7: 56 x 70 mm2 (4:5 - classic portrait format).

[Lord Lucan]

Back in the day, Pentax made a big song and dance of how much more usable a 6x7 negative was when compared to a 6x6 negative. Much less cropping needed for a 5:4 print like 10x8in, they said.

As in their 6x7 brochure here (scroll down to the fifth double spread) http://www.lucan.org.uk/pdfs/6x7_broch_85.pdf . Of course, a lot of prints were done on 8x10 paper in those days.

[PocketPixels]

Olympus had two really cool cameras a few years back:

Olympus AIR A01 was a profound departure from anything else in their product line. It was basically just a sensor and a m4/3 mount in a tiny box. You mounted any Micro4/3 lens you wanted, and you used a bluetooth or WiFi connection on your smartphone to see the picture, set the settings, and take the photograph.

Olympus Tough TG Tracker was shaped like a tiny little camcorder, complete with flip-out screen. Came in black, green, and red. Camera was totally waterproof and dive-ready, and included an f/2.0 190° fisheye lens. Included a GPS, compass, flashlight, and altimeter. Functions adequately well as a fitness tracker even if you never take a picture. I have one of these little beauties, and it is glorious.

Both models have been discontinued. To my dismay, but not to my surprise.

Canon has been doing some cool things with remote cameras and monoculars that also take pictures.

The most innovative product Pentax has released in a while, for my money, are their VD binoculars which can "break" into two pieces for monoculars, or combine into a telescopic spotting scope. These are pretty wild concepts coming from a design department that recently asked us to get very excited about a 2mm outdent on a DSLR viewfinder.

I don't think it's easy to walk into the boss's office with a radical and new idea. And I don't think it's easy to walk into a camera store and spend your quarterly bonus on a radical experiment.

[UncleVanya]

Olympus had two really cool cameras a few years back:

Olympus AIR A01 was a profound departure from anything else in their product line. It was basically just a sensor and a m4/3 mount in a tiny box. You mounted any Micro4/3 lens you wanted, and you used a bluetooth or WiFi connection on your smartphone to see the picture, set the settings, and take the photograph.

I actually own an AIR A01. I have mixed feelings about it. ON the one hand - it is a cool option and fun to play with. On the other hand - it's really just a big sensor and a bit of software and a few buttons and wifi/bluetooth. Much of the ergonomic aspects of a good camera design are not possible with the A01 - but that said, it does have a cool way of attaching to various size phones that also holds them at a good angle for most casual uses. The main thing I used it for was to pair with something like the 20mm f1.7 Panasonic or the 12-32 to have an ultracompact - put in the pants pocket camera. The second use was to backup another body when I didn't have room or want to carry a second m43 camera body but needed to be sure I had a backup.

I should probably decide if I want to keep that or sell it... pondering. LOL.

[PocketPixels]

I actually own an AIR A01. I have mixed feelings about it. ON the one hand - it is a cool option and fun to play with. On the other hand - it's really just a big sensor and a bit of software and a few buttons and wifi/bluetooth. Much of the ergonomic aspects of a good camera design are not possible with the A01 - but that said, it does have a cool way of attaching to various size phones that also holds them at a good angle for most casual uses. The main thing I used it for was to pair with something like the 20mm f1.7 Panasonic or the 12-32 to have an ultracompact - put in the pants pocket camera. The second use was to backup another body when I didn't have room or want to carry a second m43 camera body but needed to be sure I had a backup.

I should probably decide if I want to keep that or sell it... pondering. LOL.

I think the AIR A02 and the TG Tracker 2 are the two (entirely fictitious) cameras everyone really missed out on. I am certain that the second version of your AIR camera would have been glorious with just another year or two of industry progress. My TG Tracker has only two flaws: the plastic lens protectors scratch too easily (I'm on my third, with one spare left in the drawer, and eBay has run out), and the camera over-sharpens its still pictures. TG Tracker 2, in my fantasy, would have found solutions to both flaws.