WHAT’S NEW
The camera industry is certainly intent on moving forward, so there’s plenty of new stuff coming, just in time for your wish list to Santa Claus. Sony continues on its winning ways with the amazingly compact A7C fullframe mirrorless body and Panasonic is also thinking smaller with the Lumix S5. Lenses for mirrorless camera systems continue to be big news, especially Fujifilm’s f/1.0 speed 50mm for its XF mount, the world’s first autofocus f/1.0 prime. There’s also a new ‘fast fifty’ in the Nikkor Z mount and, if you’re fortunate enough to have a Phase One XT, there’s now a Rodenstock 90mm f/5.6 in the system… yours for a cool $23,100!
HAVE YOU EVER wondered what’s going on behind the scenes at a camera company when it’s doing well… or, indeed, when it isn’t? In the end, it’s going to be all about the people involved, but how does it all work? The Japanese camera makers, in particular, are big companies and so there are a lot of people involved in any project. In many cases, the camera business is actually part of a much bigger corporation – as is the case with Panasonic and Sony – so there are all sorts of other dynamics at play and many, many levels of management to deal with.
Typically, there are divisions that handle a particular product category and, within these are designers, planners, engineers in many flavours, manufacturing experts, sales and marketing people, testers, and various line managers. That’s a lot of people making a lot of decisions, so it’s a bit surprising that anything gets done at all, but clearly it does. And you’d think there’s plenty of scope here for a project to go completely off the rails or, at the very least, turn out to be something very different to what was originally envisaged.
But then there'll be those ideas or innovations that are just so compelling, everybody works to make it happen. You can add good communication as another essential ingredient here.
When you think about it, though, very few cameras have turned out to be duds in recent times, but some have come and gone pretty quickly, which means something went wrong somewhere… most probably in misreading what the market really wanted. The Pentax K-01 APS-C mirrorless camera springs immediately to mind here – nice idea, but…
Scarred from its experiences in mirrorless (the Q system also died), Pentax has stuck with DSLRs ever since. New technologies certainly throw up particular challenges because the way ahead is usually uncharted waters, and so you have to make some bold predictions that may or may not turn out to be on the money. If you get it wrong, it’s going to be costly, but if you don’t do anything, it could be even more of a financial disaster because you’re no longer competitive… in fact, that could be the end.
The way ahead in digital imaging certainly wasn’t clear at the beginning – except that it was coming no matter what – as the technology was very much in its infancy and film still had plenty of profitability left in it. The subsequent twists and turns of the next decade caught quite a few out, and for some it was all just too hard to keep up. If there are any inherent weaknesses, it’s at those times that they’ll be exposed, which is what happened to the original Kodak. It wasn’t the failure to embrace digital imaging that brought it undone – in fact, Kodak pioneered a number of the key developments but failed to go on with any of them due to muddled management. Those at the coalface knew what to do, but nobody higher up was listening.
There’s a different challenge emerging now as the
Covid-19 pandemic wreaks havoc with the global economy, and some aspects of product planning – such as the allimportant sales predictions that help determine a project’s viability – are thrown into disarray. Anything that’s considered marginal may not get the go-ahead, but the impact of this won’t be apparent for quite a while. However, right now, you’d have to say there’s plenty of optimism about the future if the current spate of new product launches is anything to go by. In fact, despite a bit of a lull mid-year when many countries were in full lockdown, 2020 has delivered plenty of interest and variety. Consequently, now is probably be the perfect time to help those sales figures along by treating yourself to an early Christmas present.