Panasonic ENDS cameras & Nikon FIGHTS back!

This week's photography news!
0:00 Introduction
0:20 Squarespace pre-roll
0:47 Sony a7 IV Anti-forgery
1:50 Instagram 9:16 Aspect Ratio for Stills
6:10 Panasonic Lumix quits low-end cameras
8:23 Leica x Lumix L2 partnership
11:03 Nikon profits & investment
14:31 Squarespace end-roll

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[hughjohns]

The aspect ratio has to suit the composition, not the other way around. I don't see myself changing my compositions to suit Instagram, or even using Instagram for much longer.

[-AtomsPhere-]

I think cameras just need better marketing. I’ve been shooting with an iPhone for years and I finally just got a Fuji x100 original for 200 bucks. That camera is 11 years old and takes better photos than my iPhone 12. Something I didn’t realize is how ALL of our photos look the same now because they’re all shot with smartphones. Just the fact that the images I was taking looked different than the 95% of things friends were posting on Instagram was very thrilling to me. These companies need to highlight the value of what a real camera can do for the consumer and how it’s different than their smartphone.

[csc-photo]

“We find [the Z9] is significantly behind the competitors from Sony and Canon”. 🤔😑
Absolutely bizarre statement, in the face of such high reviews, camera of the year awards, and record sales of the Z9. Dude, even Polin, who’s known for being pretty tough on Nikon… has repeatedly stated how level the playing field is now. Silliness.

And please keep the Android OS out of, and far away from my cameras.

[tehsin]

8:00 Disagree. Samsung and Panasonic had camera's with smartphone interface. But people weren't buying them, so they stopped making it. If there was a bit of support from consumers and 'tech reviewers', we could have seen those tech to trickle down to main cameras by now.

[angela-r]

This is so backwards. Instagram is ruining photos. Most photos for scenes and landscapes look better horizontal - and that is how our eyes see, and we watch movies horizontally. To require every photo to be vertical doesn’t make sense at all. We really need a new photo-based app to take over Instagram, and leave Instagram for the vertical photos and videos.

Regarding camera development: I keep waiting for a high quality, small / portable camera with interchangeable lenses that I can set the color grading for in camera and then quickly and easily upload to the cloud with no tech issues. Fuji is “almost” there with their film simulations and recipes, but their smaller interchangeable lens cameras lack some of the higher quality features and their Fuji app for Apple to send photos to your phone is garbage. I’ve been waiting for that to work correctly for years. Or if not interchangeable lenses, I would take a good small range zoom instead - as long as the camera is small enough and with high quality images.

[Chris-NZ]

Oddly enough my eyes are in a horizontal orientation, next we’ll be asked to evolve to vertical -. The Instagram hamster wheel is dead to me.

[nmm]

Out in the real world we visualize what we see horizontally. We go to the movies and watch films horizontally. We sit with our laptop and watch YouTube horizontally. Gamers play with horizontal screens. Instagram and FB Zuckerberg platforms are only good for smartphone selfies and social influencers seeking their fleeting 5 minutes of fame. Loved hearing your software development pitch to Nikon, partnering with Android would be a fantastic boost for them.

[SteelRiderCarl]

I'm going to say right off the bat that yes, I have a smartphone and I do use it to take pictures sometimes, but given a choice between taking pictures with my phone or even the chintziest point and shoot camera I own, a Canon PowerShot A2300, I'm picking the camera every day and twice on sunday! Real point and shoot cameras have a lot of things to offer and it all starts with the very fact that it isn't your phone. It's got a lens that retracts so it doesn't get scratched and smudged like a phone's lens does, you can't get interrupted taking an important picture by a phone call or facetime, it lacks the distractions that your phone likely has, it's far better to use ergonomically, and you can shoot all day with the camera and if you need to make an important call to square up with the rest of your group at the end of the night, your phone is more likely to have some juice left in it if you've been shooting on a camera.

One thing I will say, though, is that they need to make it easier to load pictures from the camera onto the phone and a lot of it comes down to one big fatal flaw in smartphones that affects other scenarios: Your smartphone can only connect to ***ONE*** WIFI access point at a time! This really should have been fixed years ago. Bluetooth can connect to multiple simultaneous devices but it is simply too slow to keep up with moving high resolution images.

[ivan]

Very entertaining format of photo related news are just delightful videos.

[alastairtheduke]

I totally agree with Tony here as far as the way to stand out as a camera brand. Invest in software. Make the experience as easy as smartphones BUT take advantage of the superior hardware. In the future, not only can you have UI feature parity with smartphones + superior hardware, but also the computational software that phones use and that's a 1, 2, 3 punch that no phone or current camera can offer.

[ChallangeYourMind]

I love the idea of a bigger sensor to cover both landscape and portrait without having to rotate the camera.

[Dee-cfnl]

All I’m going to say is that I would not want my sensor rotating or moving in any manner. How about Instagram allowing you to rotate your portable device to view full screen horizontal images.

[NedskiYT]

I paraphrase. "High-end camera manufacturers should make vertical sensors for vertical compositions."
ABSOLUTLEY UNNECESSARY IMHO! That would a GIGANTIC waste of design and manufacturing resources.

They can take their current designs and ADD another aspect ratio choice in their menu firmware.
My Canon DLSR's and mirrorless cameras have menu choices of 3:2, 4:3, 16:9, and 1:1. The viewfinder/screen will show the "crop" while the raw image aspect ratio stays at 3:2 and the JPEG image will be actually be cropped the the desired aspect ratio.
The photographer can see what each aspect ratio will look like without having to permanently commit to only ONE aspect ratio choice.

Ask camera makers what they would prefer to work on, a completely NEW sensor layout or a change in 😉

[-.]

I think this move by Instagram may be a return for landscape photography on the platform, now you can just rotate your 16:9 landscape pictures 90 degrees and post it vertically (wrong orientation), so that people can rotate their phones when viewing.

[davidanderson]

Instagram and Tictok are basically the only platforms using a vertical format and 99% of those users are viewing their images on a phone screen. Why would you want a vertical full frame sensor when all the platforms using higher resolution content are horizontal?

[robertx]

Don't apps like Nikon's Snapbridge fulfill the auto-upload to the cloud thing? Your phone already has the sim card and the cellular connection, and all the camera requires is bluetooth and a fairly simple protocol to facilitate transfers and limited remote control. Putting Android on a camera just introduces security issues as well as the need for constant software updates to keep up with the moving target of Android versions.

[bfqywqd]

A rotating sensor is idiotic. Another moving part that can go wrong. Why don't we add a mirror, too? Have we really become so lazy that we can't rotate a camera to take a photo in portrait?

[jpokeefe]

Adding android to any camera will increase the OS' share of available memory, thus decreasing it for camera functions. It will also increase the vulnerability of the camera to malware. I don't think that is the best way to get computational photography on to cameras.

[greatpix]

Tony, I often shot professionally with square format cameras because I could crop to portrait or landscape format later and didn't have to flip the camera. Every format has it's advantages and disadvantages. It's the poorly designed software like Instagram that puts limitations on it's users. I've been using computers since the 70's and IG is one of the worst designed pieces of software I've ever seen, and it's stayed that was for far too long.

[KalabelaiGaming]

no matter how important Instagram is I'm never going to frame my photos specifically for it