Quote: Bet I haven't convinced you...
You're right.
I am the last person to be hostile to computers - I have been working with them since I had to learn to program mainframes at university in 1971/1972. There is no doubt that a modern digital camera without a processor dwarfing a workstation CPU of the early eighties would not be possible.
And it can also not be questioned that user access to the more sophisticated details of the image processing would be crazy. The processing of the sensor data is much too complex.
But we are speaking about film cameras. And here we see 2 fundamental different philosophies: do you want to tell the camera what it should do and how it should do it, or do you just tell it what kind of result you want and let it decide how to achieve this. The MZ5n is of the first kind, and you have to know exactly not only what you want as a result, but also what the camera will do in a technical sense. For the first, only a minimum of computing capability is needed, the second is what I would call rather a computer which takes pictures.
For many of the other devices now controlled by processors, not a few are really dependent on this controls for reasons not so obvious. From my profession I know that in many cases precision manufacturing was partly replaced by extensive inherent measurement and correcting through microprocessors "on the fly" because this is much cheaper. Without these, mechanical precision in manufacturing would have to increase a lot.
And the tendency of electronics becoming the heart of the matter started much earlier. I remember back in 1973 the contract leader for the then frigate program of the German navy was not a shipyard, as one would think, but Siemens. Even then, building such a ship was much cheaper than supplying it with all its electronicly controlled functions.
Sorry for the OP I am kind of hijacking this thread, but I felt I had to answer.