Agfa, Kodak, Ilford and a thousand other companies had just one product - film and failed to adapt to digital. Agfa vanished, Kodak went bankrupt (twice) and Ilford is in its death throes. Just like the current MLM fad, Lularoe (who sell overpriced leggings in vomit-inducing colors and patterns), they'll be gone soon.
Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Panasonic and Pentax are waiting for the grim reaper to arrive to take them to the deathly museum of perished companies. The same reason everybody else perished - failure to adapt to the market and failure to identify what it is that the market really wants.
I've been into photography since my first camera back in 1973 that was given to me by my late aunty and late grandmother. That was a Kodak 126 Instamatic. It took cartridge film in a square 35mm format. I loved that camera though my parents were not too impressed with the cost of film and developing.
Over the years I've used various cameras and followed developments in the camera world fairly closely until about ten years ago when it seemed that camera companies were failing to innovate. Pentax was a classic example - they would keep re-releasing the same camera with slightly changed functions and with a new model number every year or so. It was the same blessed camera! Niko, Canon etc pretty much do exactly the same thing albeit on a longer timeframe.
It's all been a case of milking the market. Slowly increasing ISOs until there are so many zeroes they had to make the display wider to accommodate them. In practical purposes there's no need for these ludicrous ISOs. They went for ludicrous shutter speeds until they reached the limit of the technology. Again, there's no need for it. If 1/1,000 isn't fast enough to freeze motion then 1/16,000 isn't going to do it either. It's all become pointless feature clutter. The same with resolution - ever higher resolution that provides nobody with anything worthwhile. If the photo isn't good at 8 megapixels, it's not going to be any better at 800 megapixels.
For some strange reason and I'm not sure why, manufacturers have been slow to realise that ISO, shutter speed, fantastic lenses and more megapixels are not what the public wants. Sure - ask one of the people that post on those ludicrous online discussion groups that abound and they'll spout the most exotic requirements and why it's essential. The problem is that all these "features" have taken away from cameras the very thing that made them fun and usable.
If I bought a film camera I had 4 things I could set - shutter speed, ISO, aperture and focus. That was it. It required no great big manual to explain how to access these features. In fact, most cameras didn't have much of a manual. Now if I buy a camera, the manual has become so huge that it's like a car manual - and how many of us read car manuals?
Cameras have been bogged down by flash trash. Scene settings - why on earth would anybody want to fumble their way through a hard-to-read and equally hard to navigate menu on a pokey little screen to put their camera in "sunset" mode? Or at a party - to put their camera in "mother-in-law" mode?
I have several cameras. I have an XT that I bought new, 12 years ago for a massive price and which is now unsalable but which produces excellent images. That has scene modes, I have an Olympus I bought secondhand for next to nothing yet which had originally been some ludicrous price just five years before.That has a really terrible menu. I have a 15 year old Canon S1 IS compact that nobody would ever buy. That has scene modes too.
So why am I against "scene" modes? Simple - the kind of person that would have used scene modes is the kind of person that would use a phone instead of a camera because it's simpler to use and more inline with what they actually need and want. Scene modes have no place on a camera.
Then there're all the "features" - none of which anybody ever needs. The camera companies are just not listening to their users. They're listening to the product worshippers from camera sales groups. Most of those people love technology and talking about technology but probably never do anything other than taking a photo of their dinner and posting it on facebook with their phone camera.
I went to take photos of the eclipse with my Olympus. I did reasonably well. Digging through the menu for the controls was a real challenge though. Uploading the images was a challenge. Charging the battery was a challenge. These are the things manufacturers are ignoring. Nobody but nobody wants more complicated fancy electronic features on a camera.
What do I want in a camera? I want something small - the Olympus is nice and small. I want something I can easily upload photos with. I've not yet seen that feature on any camera. I want something I can charge easily - I've not yet seen that feature either.
To transfer images I have to go to all the performance of pulling a memory card out or connecting a data cable to a computer. I can't just sit it beside my iPad and let the iPad transfer the images across. I've not seen a camera that can just be placed on a Qi wireless charging station or plugged into a USB port to charge. This is how electronics are charged, these days.
All this head-in-the-sand attitude is going to get the camera manufacturers is their names added to the list of such illustrious names as Coronet, Fed, Minolta, Yashica etc. I have my 3 cameras plus my tablet/phone. No prizes for guessing I use my tablet or phone far more than anything else for my photography.
Why don't I use my XT? It's big, bulky and needs a computer to transfer the data. Why don't I use my Olympus? Though I can read JPEG images from the card using a card reader on my iPad, it's still not very user friendly. I can't just plug either into a handy USB port to charge.
These days, if I want to take a picture, I pick up my tablet or my phone.
The way things are going I can see the tombstones being ordered shortly for Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Panasonic, Sony and Olympus. The lack of tablet support, specifically iPad support, is what's going to kill the vast majority of these companies How long have we had tablets? Was it 2009 when the iPad first came out? Seems to me that 8 years of resting on their laurels should have taught the camera companies something. Plummeting sales means only one thing - the public dont want to buy your product. I share as gees are eggs would never buy shares in a deadbeat company.
