Цифровое фото и аппараты для оного

June 6 (commentary)--Not too long ago I wrote "It also seems interesting that the iPhone got to HDR, pano-stitching, and more, faster than most compact cameras. Photography-centric." One of you wrote me an email that provoked a further thought there.

Just why did the iPhone turn out to be photography-centric? Not because Apple wrote a great iPhone camera application. Obviously, they didn't, otherwise we wouldn't have the constant flood of improved versions from others. Apple in this case is an enabler (imaging sensor that can be reached by programs). It's the community of users that is generating the improvements, extensions, and new features. In some cases, literally a user. You find a few of the apps for the iPhone are written by a user who has some knowledge of some algorithm or technique photographically, and enough skill to write some program code. Voila, something they wanted and a way to share it with others and profit from it.

Likewise, we have companies with core technology (algorithms, processing tricks, knowledge of imagers, etc.) who quickly saw that there was customer demand for more and simply created an app for it.

The key element here is the customer (a photographer). You can call it customer-centric or photographer-centric, but it amounts to the same thing: the customer is a photographer and wants something, while a few companies and individuals have figured that out and are providing it.

The camera companies are not only slow to realize this, but aren't building expertise to deal with it, either. Take something like pano-stitching or HDR. For how many years have camera users been doing these things? Let me shock you on this one. Back in 1994 I was approached by more than one software vendor that had capabilities to do both things, much of it still under patent at that time. So I've been doing those things for 17 years now. Yet there's only one Nikon DSLR that has something even remotely approaching what was possible in 1994 built into it (the D5100's HDR ability). One. In 17 years. That's 17 years of ignoring a growing customer demand.

When the Japanese companies do finally get the notion that a photographer might want one of these features, they license it. While you may think that all those imaging ASICs out there are carefully and meticulously designed full of camera maker-specific goodies, they aren't. One dirty secret of the Japanese camera industry is that a lot of imaging processing they do is licensed or in a few cases reverse engineered. The key post-sensor imaging processing bits have come from outside the camera companies. Those image processing ideas mostly started with American secret programs, like reconnaissance programs in the military and NRO dating back into the 70's, and quickly migrated into Europe and Russian programs of a similar nature. From there many of these things fell into the public domain at some point, and then as sensors proliferated, we got more and more commercial and scholarly R&D as well. But not so much from the camera companies.

The fact that the iPhone rapidly proliferated a huge number of photography apps (currently 4100+ as I write this) indicates how broad and diverse the customer demand is for a variety of imaging applications not being served by the basic "press shutter release get image" camera notion. The fact that the camera companies slowly add some of these customer-demanded features to their cameras shows that the camera companies eventually recognize the demand, but are slow to fill it. Plus they're not filling it from inbred R&D, they're doing so from mostly outside sources.

This poses the question of what a camera company really is. Does it just assemble some hardware and software from other sources, or does it drive the market and future of imaging? Unfortunately we're getting the former, and not the latter more often than not.

The iPhone is customer-centric because new customer demand is met with multiple organizations trying to serve something up to meet it. It's customer-centric because when something new and unique does appear, customer demand immediately drives it to be visible (and possibly even viral), helped along a bit by the App Store.

Traditional cameras are not so customer-centric. It takes huge customer demand to eventually get a maker to add a feature. New and unique things happen irregularly, and thus increased customer demand also follows an irregular path.

The awful truth is that the camera makers think they're good at both recognizing and driving customer demand. They aren't. They're terribly inefficient at both things. What they are good at is recognizing when a competitor stumbles upon something that customers like and copying it soon after the competitor's product starts selling better than their's. Stumble Upon is not a good product design strategy. It's vulnerable to a complete disrupter coming in and stealing all your customers.

Oh, wait, that's already happening with the iPhone, Android, and other smart phones at the mass consumer end of the camera spectrum. Oops.