[cali92rs]

It's a recipe for 100% market share of those who want what an ILC does. Let's face facts. Very few Instamatic owners wanted an LX. But very many Instamatic owners wanted 126 film carriages and flashcubes.

By your reasoning Pentax should have reconfigured the LX to accept carriage film and tungsten wire flash.

Not at all...
I definitely think there is a future market for k-1/D850/5dmk4.
Obviously there is a smartphone market.

It is the in-between market which is being under-served by camera makers. The $300-$800 market that consists of folks that want better pics than they can get from smart phones, but do not get better results with their Rebels/D3400s because they do not know how to (or don't want to spend the time to learn) fine tune their camera's jpeg engine. They do not want to spend 10/month on Adobe CC or troll thru youtube learning how to set their camera. So they get frustrated with their cheap, space consuming DSLR and it collects dust, while they go back to their smartphones to tale pictures.
I know a few people like that personally. I offer to help them, but as soon as I talk about using faster or slower apertures they have already lost interest.

[Aristophanes]

When I have an opinion, I'm stating it - I don't need others to make up "opinions" for me, thank you very much.
Ideally, camera makers should find a way to appeal to those clueless smartphone users. However, they should not compromise the superior interface of a dedicated camera for it.

The "clueless smartphone users" ARE the photographic industry now.

In the billions compared to the few tens of millions of ILC consumers.

And the entire point of the ILC is to upsell to the smartphone beginner.

But the way the tech and market is structured now bypasses all the familiar smartphone software and connectivity for said consumer.

That's not very bright now, is it?

The choice between JPEG edits on a 3" screen in JPEG or get a Mac/PC for anything more is silly.

Snapseed and VSCO can handle the basics of RAW on mobile OSs but the silence from the camera manufacturers for similar or even better is deafening. They could add so much more to the capacity with lens profiles (DxO has them) and other RAW tweaks like HDR and focus bracketing/stacking, FPS grouping for GIFs or just superior organization, etc.

---------- Post added 08-27-17 at 05:08 PM ----------

You use lots of words, but you don't say much.
I understood your point completely. You are ignoring my point completely.

My point is that people who use smart phones do not want to do PP.

When they use a smart phone, they take a picture, skip PP, and use the image.
Pentax's latest cameras, the K-70 and KP, provide the closest thing yet to that capability.

People who own smartphones have bought somewhere near $1 billion worth of apps for photography to edit and process their photos.

That utterly dwarfs the entire ILC photographic market multi-fold over the last decade.

Instagram has billions of processed photos. As does Flickr all the way up the food chain from base consumers with a snapshot mentality to pros using smartphones alongside their DSLRs. for some serious quality.

They are even eating into the low-end ILC base because of superior editing and connectivity.

Live Photos, for example, is just software arranged and readily viewable high-FPS shooting. It works and is pretty cool in the right circumstance.

Now, if I do that same high FPS on my DSLR, I have a multi-hour mess of a time trying to emulate and share that effort. And I even have my $3,000 home Mac kit to assist!

The ILC industry has not figured out how to join the dominant post-processing and connected photographic world.

So you are wrong.

---------- Post added 08-27-17 at 05:13 PM ----------

Not one person in this discussion has commented on the abysmal ergonomics of a smartphone. Holding a small stack of index cards with one hand and touching their flat surface with another doesn't lend itself to anything more challenging than a snapshot.

Why do we assume dSLR makers want to or should make a mass-volume consumer product? They shouldn't. They can't. They lost that market. Over and done. They might have added touch screen and a powerful processor to compacts, (oh wait - Ricoh could do that to the GR), but what's the point of a $750 compact? They're dead.

Camera makers are moving and should move toward expensive products for wealthy consumers - the more expensive the better - where a phone and it's shortcomings are actual limitations. The jpeg engine in a dSLR isn't a limitation. Stop acting like it is. Inability to post-process RAW files on a camera monitor isn't a limitation because you can't do it on a phone either. Stop insisting it is.

The laptop is already there. Stop acting like it isn't. Post-Processing software (good software) should be free. Work on that. It should be a brand-identifier. Obsolete Adobe. Buy FastOne or RawTherapee and make it exclusive to your brand.

Forget WiFi. Unless you put an IMEI # and data contract on the camera you can't do social media anywhere nearly as efficiently. You're tying yourself to the very platform that wants to erase you. Once you admit that, make products that do what your users want them to do. Stop asking the other guys' users what they want. They're the other guys' users!!

Apple won the low end. Deal with it. Make something Apple can't replace with a pocketable device. Figure out how to make a profit. And for the love of money, figure out how to sell it in America.

Smartphones are kind of crappy for long shoots but larger screenings excel at fast processing and editing. Tablets like the iPad Pro (have one) are exceptional at organization and editing images.

Apple isn't just eating into the low-end, it is chewing into all ends with the process...the "lab"...getting images to the consumer. They and Google and Samsung own it. They are now the key to the ILC getting to the viewer.

Their app-driven post-processing and phone to tablet viewing platforms are THE dominant force in all photography now. The evisceration of the optical manufacturer's low-end market is unparalleled because it stole the main revenue stream from the likes of Pentax, Nikon, Canon...

They aren't gong t make up for it by continuing to insist everyone process on a dedicated Adobe machine at another $2k.

[monochrome]

No they don't. That world is already served. They need to figure out how to make money serving those who don't want to edit their images on a 3" washed out screen for distribution on some dying platform like Twitter.

[reh321]

People who own smartphones have bought somewhere near $1 billion worth of apps for photography to edit and process their photos.

And how does a JPEG transferred from an ILC differ from a JPEG generated by the phone? Couldn't they use these tools to edit a KP generated image if they wanted to?

The thing is, they already have the phone in their pocket. If you were running Pentax, what would you do to make the KPii able to compete with that?


added comment:

Last year a member of our church took some pictures of an activity for the web-site. The next day he sent them two sets of images: as taken and as though in a beach setting. Obviously he had done some kind of PP, but all images were rejected by the web-site manager, because the colors were wrong on all the pictures. His PP had all consisted of playing. Do we know that these iPhone users are improving their images, or are they playing? Do we have any reason to imagine that quality has any value to them?

---

Last edited by reh321; 08-27-2017 at 02:03 PM. Reason: added comment

[mecrox]

No they don't. That world is already served. They need to figure out how to make money serving those who don't want to edit their images on a 3" washed out screen for distribution on some dying platform like Twitter.

Absolutely no one really wants to edit their images on a 3" washed-out screen.

If I take a RAW or a jpeg from my camera and run them through an app on my iPad, I will get a better result than anything the camera-maker can provide, either in-camera or in mobile software..

Why a better result? Because in-camera jpeg processing is crude by comparison and because the camera-maker offers no mobile OS editing software, just a squiffy Silkypix-type programme for PC. And jpeg as a format is nothing special either. Chances are Apple is about to leave it behind in favour of HEIF/HEVC. So they'll further close in on the quality gap to ILCs.

So basically, I get a file with better IQ from a pad (it could be a smartphone) than I do out of my thousand-buck camera. The next stage for thousands of people isn't spending $$$ on a proper PC editing suite, or dumping editing on the pad or the phone - it's dumping the expensive camera. See where this is going for the vast majority of those who might be interested in what a good camera can offer? The camera-makers have fallen behind and they need to catch up. A rather basic one-size-fits jpeg implementation and a proprietary RAW format predicated on owning a PC aren't enough anymore.

[Rondec]

What the camera industry has missed is the mass switch mobile OS as both he main means of processing photos and viewing them.

Currently the camera manufacturers have a duality: in-camera JPEG processing, meaning either auto or user-driven manipulation of the RAW file through dedicated processor including lens correction, WB, HDR, even keystone on some models. You can even adjust levels etc. on the fly at composition with the final output JPEG.

Except that this all relies on switching from shooting mode, so losing "moments' in the field in many cases. It also means trying to upgrade the post-processing system on a not very good, 3" screen. Even with some of the touchscreen now, the backlighting, glare and just the small size make this very challenging combined with he face down ergonomics of the camera as a poor editing platform. But this is how the industry tries to keep control of post-processing.

The Olympus Pen-F model is an attempt to entice customers to compose and edit at the same time using (some pretty good) art filters and other controls. Almost all lower-end DSLRs and mirrorless have the same options.

The other duality is to load onto a PC/Mac...not mobile OS. They give you a CD or download for a dedicated desktop app that handles RAW andJPEG and can do reasonable editing. But all this presupposes the consumer wants to manage and edit photos this way, via a desktop/laptop, mostly stationary editing experience.

But the smartphone revolution in photography demonstrates a far superior way to manage and edit and share photos.They use superior screen real estate and resolution combined with some excellent dedicated apps at low cost to manipulate photos easily and share them readily. What they cannot do is the basic in-camera replication of:

1. Lens profiles
2. HDR
3. Lens and focus stacking
4. WB and some levels (app dependent)
5. EXIF manipulation
And many other RAW-derived processes, like sensor shift, etc.

So it's in-camera JPEG versus the mobile OS app. Given the screen real ease, processing power, cloud interaction, and social connectivity advantages of the mobileOS, it's not even a contest.

Now, the camera manufacturers have missed this boat because their Japan-centric ideology about how their tech should work. It's in"their" camera or nothing, really, with a grudging nod to an enclosed, half-heaterd CD.

And the problem is NOT mobile OS processing power, especially for smaller files. Today's iPads, for example, have nearly the same processing power as many consumer-grade laptops. This is all because the ILC side of the industry does not grasp that the desktop reliance is d-e-a-d for the mass market. It's largely gone. You could count on maybe 5% of all ILC buyers using LR or similar, but the other 95% want what their mobile OS device does, with superior ease-of-use. The preferred OS by far for the vast majority of photography now is mobile OS.

The camera manufacturers never did for mobile OS what they did for desktop, which is create dedicated RAW processing apps distributed with the sale of the camera. They didn't even need to make a full Adobe Bridge equation either...just some basic integration. They've had about a decade to "see" this, and still no major manufacturer is heading the right way.

A major contributor to the ILC market decline is the abysmal state of post-processing options for the mid-range consumer. It's too PC-reliant, too laborious, and uses lousy, time-consuming software.

---------- Post added 08-27-17 at 11:51 AM ----------



You're kind of missing the point.

The cellphone user is the one Pentax etc. want to upgrade to an ILC, to do what a smartphone can bear do with optics, larger sensor, speed of AF and shooting, etc. Thos engineered, innate, hardwired advantages in tech and market.

But when you start with an ILC, even Pentax, one of the main controls you are confronted with is how to set JPG white balance.

So you learn that, and histogram along with the PSAM from a good ebook or YouTube....so far so good.

Now Mr. Smartphone convert wants to do a little more and suddenly....they need a PC or Mac, dedicated post-processing software, and all sorts of intermediaries to do what the smartphone does natively.

The user barrier becomes a time-consuming wall that most $0.99 apps covered 5 years ago. And if you take the RAW for in the road, mobile OS doesn't go there.

So your ILC investment is locked into a PC-centric universe that is cumbersome and dwindling, not to mention another costly investment.

In camera jpegs are quite good and do not require constant adjustment of settings. I typically shoot with auto iso and auto WB in Av mode and have no problems with the camera settings. Set once and you are done.

A 24 megapixel camera like the K3 generates 30 megabyte raw images and 12-ish megabyte jpegs at the highest settings. Taking five of those files to do an HDR image, as an example is going to be a chore for most tablets -- never mind the time required to wirelessly transfer the images to said device.

I think most people editing on tablets are fine using jpegs as their starting point and then adjusting from there, but I am going based on my acquaintances. Clearly yours are different.

[Kunzite]

The "clueless smartphone users" ARE the photographic industry now.

In the billions compared to the few tens of millions of ILC consumers.

And the entire point of the ILC is to upsell to the smartphone beginner.

But the way the tech and market is structured now bypasses all the familiar smartphone software and connectivity for said consumer.

That's not very bright now, is it?

The choice between JPEG edits on a 3" screen in JPEG or get a Mac/PC for anything more is silly.

Snapseed and VSCO can handle the basics of RAW on mobile OSs but the silence from the camera manufacturers for similar or even better is deafening. They could add so much more to the capacity with lens profiles (DxO has them) and other RAW tweaks like HDR and focus bracketing/stacking, FPS grouping for GIFs or just superior organization, etc.

The clueless smartphone users don't know, nor do they care that there is something significantly better. Once they start caring and realize they could have access to better tools, they're no longer clueless.

Going for the lowest common denominator is not a solution.

Image processing on low-end, uncalibrated screens - with huge variability from brand to brand and even model to model?
I'm experimenting with it, but IMO it's mostly good for playing/fooling around.

[johnmflores]

While on assignment on the road I will take pictures with my cameras, transfer them via WFi or dongle to my phone, edit with Snapseed, and post to Instagram, Facebook, etc...The screen on my phone is 100 times better than any camera, I've gotten used to its color profile, and can generate files good enough for social media. Once home I will reprocess on a wide gamut monitor in Lightroom for publication.

There is an immediacy to social media that most traditional cameras are not built for.

[monochrome]

While on assignment on the road I will take pictures with my cameras, transfer them via WFi or dongle to my phone, edit with Snapseed, and post to Instagram, Facebook, etc...The screen on my phone is 100 times better than any camera, I've gotten used to its color profile, and can generate files good enough for social media. Once home I will reprocess on a wide gamut monitor in Lightroom for publication.

There is an immediacy to social media that most traditional cameras are not built for.

and never can. E. They don't have a connection to the internet. Once you start moving files via WiFi there's no way to compete. I use a card reader with a lightning connector.

I don't have - and I don't want - a tablet.

[Aristophanes]

And how does a JPEG transferred from an ILC differ from a JPEG generated by the phone? Couldn't they use these tools to edit a KP generated image if they wanted to?

The thing is, they already have the phone in their pocket. If you were running Pentax, what would you do to make the KPii able to compete with that?


added comment:

Last year a member of our church took some pictures of an activity for the web-site. The next day he sent them two sets of images: as taken and as though in a beach setting. Obviously he had done some kind of PP, but all images were rejected by the web-site manager, because the colors were wrong on all the pictures. His PP had all consisted of playing. Do we know that these iPhone users are improving their images, or are they playing? Do we have any reason to imagine that quality has any value to them?

When the consumer upsells the optics, sensor, and tactile controls, they'll upsell the underlying software expectations as well.

Case in point for usability: Nikon advertised a soccer mom high FPS camera a couple of years ago but a main criticism of the camera from a women's or family magazine was that the accompanying software had no way of grouping action shots and helping to organize them. So the knock on the review was the need to spend a LOT more $$$ on computing power and third party software. And a whopper of a learning curve. That complication kills sales.

And a particular problem is the JPEG software management has not kept up with the other tech, like RAW pulling of shadows, HDR, high FPS. Once the JPEG leaves the $1,000 camera it's actually in worse shape to manage and share than the smartphone JPEG. This is especially true if the dominant OS now in use is a mobile OS. Snapseed (Google) is pretty good, but there's no excuse for the Pentax's and Nikon's to not have their own, native mobile OS RAW translators in the mix, withmlens profiles right there. They are 5 years behind where they need to be. What makes it worse is that all mobile OS photo editing has been non-destructive from the outset.

That is EXACTLY the dilemma ILC tech faces in the consumer market.

And to be honest....Pentax has lousy JPEG. My Ricoh GR is only slightly better.

[Larrymc]

And to be honest....Pentax has lousy JPEG. My Ricoh GR is only slightly better.

That's a mighty broad "blanket" statement. Why don't you show us some examples.

[reh321]

When the consumer upsells the optics, sensor, and tactile controls, they'll upsell the underlying software expectations as well.

Case in point for usability: Nikon advertised a soccer mom high FPS camera a couple of years ago but a main criticism of the camera from a women's or family magazine was that the accompanying software had no way of grouping action shots and helping to organize them. So the knock on the review was the need to spend a LOT more $$$ on computing power and third party software. And a whopper of a learning curve. That complication kills sales.

And a particular problem is the JPEG software management has not kept up with the other tech, like RAW pulling of shadows, HDR, high FPS. Once the JPEG leaves the $1,000 camera it's actually in worse shape to manage and share than the smartphone JPEG. This is especially true if the dominant OS now in use is a mobile OS. Snapseed (Google) is pretty good, but there's no excuse for the Pentax's and Nikon's to not have their own, native mobile OS RAW translators in the mix, withmlens profiles right there. They are 5 years behind where they need to be. What makes it worse is that all mobile OS photo editing has been non-destructive from the outset.

That is EXACTLY the dilemma ILC tech faces in the consumer market.

And to be honest....Pentax has lousy JPEG. My Ricoh GR is only slightly better.

Please re-read #341 above. You keep getting confused between the natural market for (D)SLR cameras and the purely amateur market. The people who gravitate to smart phone cameras today are the equivalent of those who were satisfied with "Brownie" cameras several generations back, then Instamatic cameras, then Disc cameras. They followed SLR cameras twenty years ago, because they saw SLR cameras as being "hot", but now they've moved on to smart phone cameras. Yes, Pentax could go after them, but only at the cost of losing in their natural market.

And, By The Way, I like the job done by the Pentax JPEG engine.

[Aristophanes]

That's a mighty broad "blanket" statement. Why don't you show us some examples.

Youtu.be

Youtu.be

Not the only source putting Pentax in the mediocre to poor range.

---------- Post added 08-28-17 at 02:25 AM ----------

Please re-read #341 above. You keep getting confused between the natural market for (D)SLR cameras and the purely amateur market. The people who gravitate to smart phone cameras today are the equivalent of those who were satisfied with "Brownie" cameras several generations back, then Instamatic cameras, then Disc cameras. They followed SLR cameras twenty years ago, because they saw SLR cameras as being "hot", but now they've moved on to smart phone cameras. Yes, Pentax could go after them, but only at the cost of losing in their natural market.

And, By The Way, I like the job done by the Pentax JPEG engine.

There is no "natural market for DSLRs". There's a segmented market of niche users, some of whom are soccer moms, some serious prosumers, and others highly paid professionals, all International as is photography.

The Instamatic crowd never encroached on the SLR or RF crowd much in film days, but now, with global population at 9 billion and aggregate wealth never greater, ILC and especially DSLR sales are declining and nowhere near the historical trends of household item ownership one would expect.

What has shifted is how we process and share images, and the ILC gang have missed that zeitgeist hugely. They cannot get the media they create to the viewing audience readily or affordably. The friction for the soccer mom AND the professional to get their output to any audience is substantially higher for the ILC user than for the smartphone user. In the film days processions and sharing were agnostic of camera model for the most part, with the most involved being the slide show, or dreaded home movie. Pros and grandmas both had shoeboxes of prints.

So the ILCs put out a superior optical image, right when screen technology for viewers is peaking, and they STILL cannot get their media onto the same devices or labs, as thencasual smartphone shooter. The smartphone shooter has multiples more control over creative application and processing and a chasm of greater opportunity for sharing digital media to digital platforms over the ILC.

The correlation between ILC owners and laptop and desktop users is probably 1:1, but that symbiosis is a weak point for the camera industry more than the PC industry as PC sales and personal computing ownership shifts to mobile. The soccer mom and more casual ILC buyers should not expect to have and operate their own darkroom, yet that is exactly what the ILC industry expects with the only alternative sub-par JPG in-camera processing and editing using 15 year old software memes and capabilities eclipsed by $0.99 mobile OS apps. Your "natural DSLR" market needs a huge number of satisfied soccer moms buying decent glass to underwrite revenues. There is only room for one Leica.

[FilmORbitz]

So your opinion is to not give consumers what they want, rather what they SHOULD want (SHOULD want according to the tiny population of DSLR enthusiasts).
Sounds like a recipe for 1% marketshare.

I'll jump in and mention that Apple made a tidy little business giving consumers what Steve Jobs thought they should want (and I would NEVER want): silent no-fan computers (silence trumps performance), single-button mice (simplicity trumps efficiency), long battery life at the expense of performance, and overpriced $2500 ultrabooks with the guts of a $999 Windows machine. And Unix -- because it's easier?

While I've not read this entire thread (and will no doubt repeat things already said), I'll toss in my own two cents:
The ILC mfgrs know exactly what they need to do to survive -- make pocket-sized imaging devices with virtually unlimited capabilities, but ooops, that's already been done! Smartphone photography is entirely adequate for the vast majority of individuals because the primary purpose of photography, today, is sharing -- ILCs are a decade behind in this area. The capabilities that are unique to ILCs, like super-telephoto imaging, are simply too expensive for non-professionals. And serious hobbyists (meaning we spend stupidly once in a while) simply don't represent a big enough market to sustain the kind of diverse industry we might desire. You always follow the money, and in this case, the ILC market is a distant second to smartphones and always will be.

As a result, some cherished brands will disappear or pivot. I'm showing my computer biz roots, but who here remembers Wordstar? Word Perfect? VisiCalc? All of them the best tool for the job, at the time.

Times change.

[surfar]

Not the only source putting Pentax in the mediocre to poor range.

Didnt alter one setting AND what lens did they use?...

Normally those guys do a good job,HOWEVER it must have been...."what are we guna do this week?nothing new to review!"