The Iron Law of Cheap Tech Comes for the Camera Industry

Now the time has come (Time) There's no place to run (Time) I might get burned up by the sun (Time) But I had my fun (Time) I've been loved and put aside (Time) I've been crushed by tumbling tide (Time) And my soul has been psychedelicized (Time)

Editor’s Note: Well we’re deep into the dog days of August and our annual summer readership dip. Folks are on vacation, and it’s just too hot to read a bunch of serious ruminations about anything. Also, we’re going to have a lot of new content about the Pentax 17 first look review in the Thursday vlog and Foto.Feola.Fridays. So we’ll be doing The Best of Perfecting Equilibrium Sunday readers for the next few weeks. Since this post originally ran on July 17, 2022, Leica announced the 35mm film M-6 and sold more than 5,000, and Pentax announced four new film cameras. The first, the Pentax 17, shipped this summer and has been so popular that it has been back ordered worldwide.

Tis a tale as old as tech time; some nerd in a tech giant’s obscure back shop invents a new product that is both wildly better and cheaper than the one that made the company a titan. And despite the tech giant’s attempts to bury it, the new tech soon puts them out of business.

And that’s how the quartz watch drove Rolex and Omega and the entire Swiss watch industry out of business…

Wait…what’s that you say? Rolex not only isn’t dead, there’s a years-long waiting list before you can drop 5 figures on one?

And Omega is so hot that there were riots at the introduction of its latest iteration, the Omega/Swatch MoonSwatch?

Meanwhile, sales of the $5,000 and up original Omega Moonwatch are up 50 percent, and would be even higher if not for supply problems.

Here's how the original Moon Watch stacks up against the MoonSwatch and the Lunar Pilot:

How is it possible that people pay 10 times as much for a Speedmaster when the Moonswatch is 10 times as accurate, and the Lunar Pilot is 30 times sharper?

Because they’re not buying watches to tell time. The watchmakers have repositioned as handmade luxury machines.

You can see the same battle taking place in real time in photography.

Oh, sure, smartphone cameras wiped out point-and-shoot cameras long ago. But for serious work the big iron reigned supreme; cameras and interchangeable lens from Nikon, Hasselblad, Sony and Leica, with systems running well into the tens of thousands of dollars.

Perhaps the peak professional Digital Single Lens Reflex was the Nikon D850, a 45-megapixel monster…which was basically a Nikon F6 with a sensor instead of a film plate.

But the Iron Law of Cheap Tech will not be denied.

The Iron Law of Cheap Tech is that lots and lots of cheap specimens always overwhelm one big expensive one, no matter how well designed and engineered the latter.

The law takes its name from the early days of the PC era, when the SLED – Single Large Expensive Disk – technology copied from mainframes was run out of business by RAID arrays.

It's simple, really: No matter how fast and reliable a SLED is, an array of a half-dozen or more cheap disks is faster. And if one blows up, so what? There are five more backing it up; just swap in a replacement for the dead one, and it will rebuild.

Ever since Oskar Barnack eased his aching back by switching to discarded 35mm movie film and inventing the Leica camera, the state of the art has advanced by improving and refining lenses. Aspherical elements. Multi-coatings. Lenses stacked with glass, putting the purest possible light on a single rectangle of film.

There wasn’t much of a choice. Each frame of film receives a single exposure of light (Film double exposures are a different technique). And the first several generations of digicams, like any new wave of tech, used the designs perfected over decades of film camera tech – just with a sensor in place of the film plate.

Gradually, engineers began leveraging the technology to do more than just replace film. First came shifting the sensor to combat camera shake. Once anti-shake took hold…well, there must be more that can be done with a moving sensor, no? While Nikon was packing the megapixels into the d850, Pentax, Olympus and other companies were experimenting with pixel shift. Pixel shift uses the anti-shake system to move the sensor several times in one-pixel increments, then combines them all into a single high-res image. ?

Early versions of pixel-shift were not much on practicality. They required the camera to be mounted on a tripod to photograph objects that were very, very still. You could only shoot landscapes if there was no wind, for example, to rustle leaves and tree branches. So it was really good for highly detailed images of brick buildings, and not so much for family portraits.

But a sensor is a chip, so Moore’s Law applies. Sensors have gotten so many orders of magnitude faster that a mid-range camera like the Olympus OM-1 not only offers high-res photos using pixel-shifting handheld on moving objects, it can shoot 120 frames per second.

For comparison, that would be almost 3 rolls of film. In one second. Without counting the time to change out and load new film.

Here’s how this leverages the digital advantage: With the single exposure film required, any imperfection – any scratch, any speck of dust – was recorded in the image.

But let’s say your sensor has a dead pixel. Or 10. Who cares? Once your camera has shifted your 20 million pixel sensor four times to take four images, those dead pixels are easy enough to flag and eliminate from the finished product.

And why stop with just higher resolution? Why not take one exposure for the highlights, one for the shadows, one optimized for color, and one in black and white for the increased detail?

Companies such as Olympus are pushing the envelope with these computational photography techniques, such as Olympus’ AI autofocus techniques for birds in flight. But the most innovation seems to be happening in smartphone photography from Apple, Google and a slew of others with innovations such as Night Mode.

Meanwhile, Moore’s Law marches on, driving the Iron Law of Cheap Tech before it, bringing these high speed sensors to smart phones. In December Sony introduced the Xperia Pro-I phone with a similar sensor that can also shoot up to 120 frames per second.

As camera sales continue to collapse, the photo industry is starting to ask whether smartphone cameras using computational photography techniques will offer more quality than high-end dedicated cameras.

Absolutely.

So is it all over for the camera manufacturers?

No. Not any more than it’s over for the Swiss watch industry.

Leica has already gone the Rolex route. The current model in the legendary M series, the Mll, sells for a cool $8,995. Without a lens. Adding the classic Leica 35mm f/1.4 Summilux costs an additional $6,195.

But that’s positively a steal compared to, say, the M-A Titan, a $20,000 limited edition film camera.

Doesn’t a $20,000 2022 film camera sound insane?

Camera manufacturers can thrive despite smartphones the way the Swiss Watch industry survived the quartz watch: by producing niche luxury items, and embracing their history.

For watchmakers, it means endless variations on the Omega Speedmaster Moon Watch.

For camera makers, it means film.

Like the vinyl revival in music, film has become hip again, driven by the analog aesthetics of Diana cameras and communities like Lomography.

And it’s not just hipsters. As so often happens, there’s been a divergence between the engineers pushing their products to higher performance, and what the users actually want. That’s why the biggest, most successful camera manufacturer in the world right now is…Fujifilm. Not for its lovely retro X series digicams, or the crazy high-performance GFX 102 megapixel medium format digital camera.

No, Fuji’s success rides on its inexpensive Instax instant film cameras. They’ve sold more than 50 million Instax cameras. Even better, every single one of those 50 million cameras requires the owner to buy another pack of film after every 10 or so shots.

Photography’s past isn’t dead. It isn’t even passed. So, Nikon, forget about a d950. Don’t pour all your development into a Z11. Put some of it into a 2022 Nikon F! Oh, and Pentax? We really, really want a 21st Century 67!

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