Originally posted by Mareket Yeah I can only approach this from a western objective point of view unfortunately, but I do appreciate the discussion. It's always better for education to talk about things rather than just read. Reading about LGBT issues over there, things seem a lot more easy-going than in the US or UK. Which is interesting enough in itself.
Cheers for the reply, I'm not really that interested that I'd read a book, it just sprung to my mind around this mirrorless marketed at women idea. Thought someone here might be able to comment.
Also, it is very bizarre for me to consider such a culture considering my bisexual (with very strong women's/LGBT rights ideologies) girlfriend currently supports me whilst I pursue a career in photography, and would only stop doing so if I decided I wanted to be a house-wife. The idea of there being distinct gender roles and no-one caring is very weird to me.
But yeah, this is a camera/photography forum, not a place for discussion about modern society. I'll shut up now.
The gay issues in western world are very influenced by the church/Catholicism/Christianity. If you take them out of equation, which is the case for most asian countries. They become non-issues. In Japan there are very defined gender roles and the culture is more about the greater good of society at your own sacrifice. It's a lot to do with the samurai culture, and that's where a lot of the gay issues originate.
Anyway, back on topic of cameras. it's part of american culture to get bigger and by definition the bigger something is the better it must be. A huge house with half of it being unused, huge SUV, the bigger the better. I guess same goes for huge camera and massive lenses. Since I'm not american this concepts are quiet silly to me. I like living in a high up apartment with no garden or law to take care off, it frees up my time on other hobbies that I have. No lawn to mow etc... I do not own a car and used to own a motorcycle, I used to own a big Nikon dSLR and I never used it since it was too big. Then I moved to m4/3 and I've took loads of photos, but I hit lots of limits, then I've found my sweet-spot in Pentax.
I've just convinced my Russian co-worker into buying a K-01, I've played around with it yesterday and it's much smaller than K-5 no matter what other people say. He just sold his Nikon D300s with f2.8 zoom since it saw too little use as it was too heavy. Now I dare anyone too say that he's not manly. He's very happy with it so far, especially with the 40mm prime and the sensor. It's quiet fascinating little camera. It has the cute look about it that Japanese would like, but I think it's quiet big for the Japanese market. When I was there last February the Q seemed to have quiet a presence in stores on display and quiet a lot of women looked at it because of size and the looks, both very important for that market. But I think the Q priced itself out of that market since it seemed that people liked it, but just couldn't justify to handover the money for it.