[Aristophanes]

It's a matter of time before adobe lightroom is working well on tablets. It would be nice to give a quick tap and have NFC import of that days photo's where you can then make your edits and upload to flickr/facebook/google+/instagram or whatever. Wifi also lets you use apps for timelapse or remote shooting. Nikon's D5300 already has this and I'm sure Canon will follow at the same price point.

The just-announed Sony QX thingies use NFC.

---------- Post added 09-03-14 at 10:44 PM ----------

LR on tablet? If you're talking about mostly hybrids like Surface3 Pro, OK but it already does AFAIK.
For the rest, not quite there yet if we'll ever be. Processing power is nowhere and I'll remind you we all cry because LR is slow on PC.
As for using your fingers to do anything but very quick adjustments and export, I don't see how to really that be the precision of an elephant in porcelain (china) shop.

Lightroom is overkill for 90% of DSLR shooters. Yet we still need to sell to that 90%.

The same clientele is walking away from MS Word towards much lighter clients for word processing.

There is still a market for dedicated cameras with quality optics and fast, accurate AF, plus hobby tinkering and LBA nut jobs.

What there is less and less market is for dedicated LR-like software. This is partly driven by the app-driven mobile OS's and the stagnation and even decline of the home PC. Aperture is gone A(Apple sees the numbers, made the call). LR is pretty much moving towards subscription. Capture One etc. are OK but are pretty much in their own little world of the digital darkroom.

Problem is: most of the market who buy mid-range optic-driven cameras do not process extensively. They simply do not have the mite and will not invest in the techniques. They need very high-quality JPEGs or some modestly scripted RAW to go straight from the optical engineering to the mobile OS via wireless communication as the baseline technical behaviour. Small scale edits and DAM should be automated as much as possible with a seamless back-and-forth between devices. In one sense the SD card should be seen more and more as the backup, or the second copy.

[Uluru]

.. In one sense the SD card should be seen more and more as the backup, or the second copy.

I think it is right.
Cameras of the future must not rely on SD cards as the sole mean of their function. Instead the camera itself should have sufficient internal memory storage for quicker processing and rely on SD card more like as external means of backup.
Leica is heading a good direction — I truly hope Japanese optics companies will open their eyes. Because a camera that you have forgotten an SD card for, or the card if filled up, is not a camera to be with you always — despite what the marketing team claims.
Cameras must have sufficient internal storage first.

[K-3-lover]

Maximum bandwidth for NFC is 424Kbit/s, the slowest Bluetooth connection is 1Mbit/s, and USB 3.0 can go up to 5 Gbit/s (10,000 times faster). What's the benefit of using a wireless technology to transfer a days worth of images, when it takes more than a day to do it?

There is a high speed version of NFC called TransferJet of which speed is 375 Mbps. I wish if Flu card would support TransferJet. One of the attractive use cases is to play back HD video to TV without HDMI cable.

[jatrax]

Lightroom is overkill for 90% of DSLR shooters.

Small scale edits and DAM should be automated as much as possible with a seamless back-and-forth between devices. In one sense the SD card should be seen more and more as the backup, or the second copy.

When I am teaching or at least advising a new photographer they usually 'get' the camera stuff but when I start harping about DAM and backups and keywording and titles and finding images later they always glaze over. They do not 'get' it, they just want to take pictures. And have those end up in some safe 'cloud' thing so that they can find them again with their phone or tablet.

Totally foreign to me, I'm Lightroom-centric, everything I do revolves around Lightroom. But excellent point, likely 90% of dslr users have never used it and wouldn't if you gave it to them. It is too complicated and way overkill to take pictures of the family vacation. Sadly my family is still waiting for pictures of our last vacation almost a year ago. They are in Lightroom, as DNG's waiting to be processed. Hmmm.......

[monochrome]

Totally foreign to me, I'm Lightroom-centric, everything I do revolves around Lightroom. But excellent point, likely 90% of dslr users have never used it and wouldn't if you gave it to them. It is too complicated and way overkill to take pictures of the family vacation. Sadly my family is still waiting for pictures of our last vacation almost a year ago. They are in Lightroom, as DNG's waiting to be processed. Hmmm.......

I was fine with PSE and PS pre-CS but Lightroom is completely opaque to me (and I don't mean the gray interface). To this day I cannot find a single file Lightroom has imported. Consequently I shoot mostly jpeg now, I don't rename, I don't folderize and I hate PP. That has a lot to do with (100% to do with) why I haven't posted anything in forever.

I sold a few items last month and did a batch resize and Auto-Process in PSE - that was just great. But who cares about FS images?

I understand why 90% of consumers don't use anything but whatever Apple does when you import to iPhoto.

[jatrax]

To this day I cannot find a single file Lightroom has imported. Consequently I shoot mostly jpeg now, I don't rename, I don't folderize and I hate PP. That has a lot to do with (100% to do with) why I haven't posted anything in forever.

I am fighting the urge to get on a plane, fly to St Louis and show you how it works Grrrr. But that is exactly the response I got from the last three people I tried to teach. They just want to take pictures.

The sad thing is given 20 minutes of proper setup I can have the default import preset loading, renaming, saving in proper folders, applying a develop preset good enough for 90%, making a backup and exporting a moderate sized jpeg for uploading all in one import batch. Click, go for coffee, done. But without spending a week or more figuring out how all that worked it would be a mystery to me too. Just too complicated for the average user.

I did not even try to explain it to my wife, she could care less, I just exported my settings, imported them to her computer, set everything up the way it made sense to me, wrote out simple instructions on a Post-it and let her go. Outside of a tendency to forget to keyword, she is doing just great.

[Uluru]

Think of like this: if a camera could use a 35mm film to deliver same and instant results as a Polaroid, digital photography would never be needed.
Same with RAW developing; if we can bypass the clumsiness of the digital negative and deliver very well acceptable JPEG (read, today's Polaroid), then such a camera shall have a larger supporter group and more use.

That is why the stupidest cameras we have ever seen — the smartphone — is becoming de facto photographic tool of today. Because there is no visible RAW in it. RAW is irrelevant step. That step of handicapped obsession with the irrelevant is gone in smartphones, and people get an instant Polaroid. That is why smartphones are so popular photographic tools, because camera makers and software makers for cameras have just duplicated all the clumsiness of the film, to the last boring point of it, while smartphone makers have realised how to shorten the way. (And sell you all that on a monthly plan, with an excuse you can also make the so called "phone calls" with your instant camera).

Investing in superior and highly capable JPEG engines, and finding a way to access that power instantly and without fuss, increasing the computing power of the camera and NOT relying on computing power of a desktop machine to deliver an acceptable photograph, is the only way.

Cameras that deserve the title of "being with you always" must have
(A) superior JPEG engines,
(B) sufficient computing power,
(C) sufficient internal memory,
(D) use SD cards only as backups, not primary memory bank.
(E) reasonably well wirelessly connected / controlled (with an option to turn that off completely)

Form factor, etc. comes last as is dictated with optics first, or, "how big you want your lens to be"?

But the real trouble is that traditional Japanese camera companies think the opposite: form factor first, THEN stumble over every single rock mentioned in steps from E down to A.

---

Last edited by Uluru; 09-03-2014 at 09:45 PM.

[stevebrot]

To this day I cannot find a single file Lightroom has imported.

It is a rule of life that we lose things because were were not careful where we put them. Copy the files into the catalog file structure at import directly from the SD card and have them sorted into folders by capture date. Assign keywords at import time. Add additional keywords after import and assign to new or existing collections as needed. If you don't have time to do it properly the most recent import is available until overwritten. You may also stash references in the "temporary collection" until you have finished with the categorization.


Steve

(Is this far enough off-topic?)

---------- Post added 09-03-14 at 10:41 PM ----------

Same with RAW developing; if we can bypass the clumsiness of the digital negative and deliver very well acceptable JPEG (read, today's Polaroid), then such a camera shall have a larger supporter group and more use.

You mean sort of like the first wave of digital cameras? When I bought my Canon G2 back in the Dark Ages, RAW capabilities were a relatively rare value-added feature.

As for 35mm film with Polaroid capabilities ==> no need for digital...You totally lost me. The power of digital is that the captures have almost no physical reality, that and the immediate gratification of rear LCD viewing. People loved their consumer Polaroids cameras, but hated the bulk of the capture media and the amount of trash associated with the culls and the relative expense per image. One hour minilabs provided very quick access to finished prints for 35mm users, but even then there was the matter of boxes full of snapshots and hard-to-keep-track-of negatives. Digital photography was a Godsend to the snapshot photographer.

Direct-to-the-cloud image capture is an intriguing concept whose time may very well have come. It relieves the casual user of the tedium of maintaining the hardware needed for image storage. The ongoing expense for that storage and the bandwidth costs for viewing/working with the images may get a bit old, but if nobody makes money, it is a cinch that nothing will ever happen.

Coming back to the K-S1, a single-step wireless solution through a smartphone/tablet proxy would be a nice feature. In the meantime, however, simply mounting the SD card filesystem onto a compatible tablet or phone to publish to the cloud can accomplish much the same thing. Perhaps they may even find a way to do it easily without a wire


Steve

[noser]

Cameras that deserve the title of "being with you always" must have
(A) superior JPEG engines,

I agree with your entire post. The one thing that I keep wishing for is a decently behaving compression scheme that could get quick universal adoption so I can once-and-for-all put a the proverbial 10 foot pole between myself and JPEG.

It's not that I hate JPEG's - I don't! It's obvious that having a shareable file instantly in your device that is displayable 'anywhere' is almost priceless.

But I'm not a fan of how the algorithm works internally... Given that there are similar formats that suck less, and can encode enough colour data to make post-shot white balance adjustments just as good as with RAW, I'd rather the universe just woke up one day and 'got it'.

Rant aside, when I'm on vacation I often switch to JPEG mode, and usually a jazzy preset for a bit of color, contrast and sharpness punch. It's not like I'll ever edit those shots... print, share, or display, yes. But edit? Nope. Assuming I'm getting what I like SOOC, I can't complain (and don't notice) the JPEG-iness of the images unless I'm peeping at 100%'s.

[Uluru]

I agree with your entire post. The one thing that I keep wishing for is a decently behaving compression scheme that could get quick universal adoption so I can once-and-for-all put a the proverbial 10 foot pole between myself and JPEG.

It is all about practicality and engagement to use camera more, not use computer more.
Say, why some company does not think like following:

1. Let's put 32GB or internal memory in this camera.
2. Lets ut some great computing power.
3. Split the memory in two: 16GB for RAW storage, and then leave 16 GB for JPEGs, which can be made on the fly in, say, two pre-sets user wanted. As an illustration, one set of JPEGs for Fuji Provia simulation, one for 2MP web and social media version.

One click of a shutter release button creates three files and all is done on the fly, as camera has sufficient computing power and internal memory. When connecting to a computer, all is downloaded. Instead of boring DCIM folders with incomprehensible file names, folders are sorted and named by Months and by user's name for example. Then when the camera is idle, data is backed up silently onto an SD, NOT written down on SD during the image recording session which slows everything down. When the internal storage comes to 80% of capacity, camera warns you on the back LCD.

Voila! Zero computer work afterwards needed. Or at least, minimum of computer work, only if some other than preferred JPEG setting is to be used. Why someone does not implement something as simple and engaging as this is beyond me. Japanese cameras today, when compared to smartphones, are tech from the stone age.

[RonHendriks1966]

Sony version of K-S1 is even more compact:

Sony madness becomes real: E-mount QX1 officially announced :) | Mirrorless Rumors

The future is here!

I was looking at that too. Sounds great, but actually I never seen one in use. Now the aps-c e-mount looks even better on paper. Put it on that lenovo 6 inch phablet and you have a great tool. Somehowe it can work excellent as a portraitcamera with just the one great lens on it. But it's still aps-c while a FF sensor and just the one new 50mm Loxia lens sounds great to me.

[ZombieArmy]

I was looking at that too. Sounds great

It sounds great but is inherently flawed, especially with how tablet/phone designs are being done today. It's a good walk around camera, but it's terrible for vacations or other more serious excursions simply because most tablets and phones today do not allow interchangeable batteries (besides samsung). If your tablet or phone dies, well you're just SoL unless you're carrying around one of those on the go chargers, but that's just even more bulk.

If a consumer wants an interchangeable lens system with a low profile it just makes so much more sense to get a system like the Q, Pansonic GX7 or the Sony NEX/a6000. They're easy to use, light weight and in the case of the Q, very well priced.


As an added bonus, with the last time they did this as a point and shoot version the app was horribly buggy and offered limited manual control. Just food for thought.

[Rondec]

The ergonomics of using a phone or tablet for "serious" photography are poor. They are fine for snap shots/selfies, but the idea of going somewhere and shooting say 50 photos with one of these devices makes me tired just thinking about it.

[IchabodCrane]

Notice that the two least camera-centric companies making cameras (Samsung, Sony) are the two that are further along with some of the ideas floated here in the past couple of pages.

[jimr-pdx]

Notice that the two least camera-centric companies making cameras (Samsung, Sony) are the two that are further along with some of the ideas floated here in the past couple of pages.

Both electronic megagiants
no wonder some of us want simpler cameras. If only Pentax still had a warehouse of k-x chips to wire into updated safox/prime, M mode/DNG only. Or do we also 'demand' no safox, manual focus too w/split screen? And oh yes it has to be ugly* to keep forum chat strong!

* Like how I worked the K-s1 theme back into our thread? Was that wrong?