Mimeographs from the Future

One thing you will hear many seri­ous ama­teurs and all pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­phers tell you is that you invest your money in glass. Specif­i­cally, the care­fully ground, minutely coated and painfully expen­sive glass that makes up a mod­ern cam­era lens. For nearly every sit­u­a­tion imag­in­able, the lens is the decid­ing fac­tor on the upper limit of the qual­ity. Sure, more pix­els in a dig­i­tal cam­era can help; but, they can also hurt. More pix­els means smaller sen­sor area, and there­fore less sen­si­tiv­ity. Less sen­si­tiv­ity means you have to crank up the gain, and as any­one who has worked with analog-digital con­ver­sion, more gain = more noise.

This is why it was espe­cially sur­pris­ing to hear some­one who should know bet­ter make a blind­ingly stu­pid statement

“There will be no need to carry around those heavy lenses,” Nokia’s mar­ket­ing EVP Anssi Van­joki told a gath­er­ing in Helsinki, accord­ing to Reuters.

That’s some­one quite high up in Nokia say­ing that cam­era phones will make dig­i­tal SLRs obso­lete. It’s not sim­ply mis­taken, it’s cravenly stu­pid. It’s either wil­full igno­rance of how the basic physics of pho­tog­ra­phy works, or it’s lit­tle more than pro­to­typ­i­cal mar­ket­ing bull­shit. And while Busi­ness­Week may say he’s one of the 25 most influ­en­tial peo­ple on the web, I’d say he’s just another mar­ket­ing flack who hasn’t the slight­est clue on how to com­pete, and instead man­ages to just spew nonsense.

Now, if he’d said “peo­ple don’t care about image qual­ity”, or “most peo­ple are sat­is­fied with what they get out of their cam­era phone”, then I could agree with him. Then again, most peo­ple were sat­is­fied with hor­ren­dous audio cas­settes blast­ing big hair bands through their Cerwin-Vega speak­ers, so I’m not sure how much that really means in the grand scheme of things. I do think that the ris­ing qual­ity of the cam­era phone has dis­placed a lot of low-end dig­i­tal cam­eras, but that’s a far cry from replac­ing the DSLR market.

Plus, it would seem that most peo­ple who buy DSLR buy them for the same rea­son they buy so many other things. It impresses other peo­ple. It’s hard to do that with a 1/8-inch lens.

Tagged: camera, nokia, photography