Nikon just announced the long-awaited D3S and it looks like there is one real piece of innovation in this camera.
I’m not talking about Nikon boosting its already best-in-class low light sensitivity to a staggering extended ISO of 102,400. Nor that they bumped frame rates to 9-11fps, added 720p video or left the megapixels of their sensor unchanged at 12MP.
Their true innovation is their new 1.2x crop mode. While full-frame is great for wide-angle photography, such as taking landscapes, the crop sensors shine in Action and Wildlife photography, when you need every millimeter of telephoto reach that you can get. With their new crop mode, you can reduce the area of the sensor that will be used to take the image to 30×20 mm. Your megapixels will go down as well, from 12 to a bit more than 8x. But you get the benefits of a 1.2x cropped sensor, so your 400mm telephoto lens becomes an effective 480mm lens. If you don’t need it any longer, simply switch back to full frame resolution. Effectively, this will eliminate the need to carry two camera bodies, one for wide-angle and one for action/wildlife.
I hope Canon will implement crop modes into its bodies as well, preferably into the Canon 5D Mark III, whenever it’s coming out.
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A new study by CFI Group titled CFI Group Smartphone Satisfaction Study 2009 confirmed what many of us already knew or at least suspected: We love our iPhones and hate AT&T.
But we are an enduring bunch: Despite AT&T’s woes and its last place in customer satisfaction, we are not willing to give up the iPhone. Sure, if another carrier would offer it in the U.S., half of us would bolt – especially if that other carrier were Verizon, since they are seen as having a rock-solid network, but no cool smartphones.
Also not surprisingly to us iPhone users, applications are what really differentiates the older smartphones from the new breed, which utilize apps to offer more than simple vanilla email, calendar and address book functions…
For more details, the study is worth a read!
Based on a sample size of over 2,000 live applications and over 200 million user sessions tracked each month across iPhone, iPod Touch, Google Android, Blackberry and JavaME platforms, Flurry compiled a map of how many apps do we use how often for how long.
How often do we use what kinds of apps for how long?
Even although they omitted photography as one of the 19 categories they researched, this is still very interesting data. While this proves that apps like iFart wear out pretty quickly, I’d have thought that Social Networking apps would have been used more often. And while I agree with the frequent use of Books apps, I cannot really believe that people do not keep around Book reading apps for long, even although it is not that easy to read on mobile phones.
As to photography, my guess would be that it is similar to Navigation. But I might be totally wrong here…
Both Joe and I have written (and will continue to write) about the Good Enough Revolution. In Joe’s case, it was about the future of imaging, in mine about Steve Jobs being its (intentional?) master.
But the good enough revolution does not stop with consumer products – in fact, you can see it right when examining professional camera gear. Case in point: Canon.
With the advent of the Canon 7D, Canon now has two complete lines of professional gear: Top-of-the-line professional gear (1D for Action Shooters, 1Ds for Landscape/Full-Frame/Wedding shooters, f2.8 zoom lenses covering the entire range from 16 to 200 mm) and the good-enough line (7D for Action, 5D for Landscape/FF/weddings, f4.0 zooms covering 17 to 200mm). In fact, the good enough pro gear provides them with extra revenue, since not only pro’s and discerning amateurs use that gear, but also pro’s often use good-enough gear as backups to their top-of-the-line equipment. Canon clearly gets it that they need to offer two complete sets of cameras and lenses to the customers that are most profitable to them.
Contrast this with Nikon – they are sitting pretty in the camera department, mainly with the D700 and the D300s as good-enough cameras. But their glaring hole is in their lens line-up (see also bythom’s lens overview). No dedicated f4 pro glass, only variable aperture lenses. As much as I applaud Nikon for their strong camera line-up, they seem to have neglected upgrading their lens line-up and fail to offer two lines of pro zooms.
And that’s the reason why I would not buy Nikon today, if I had a chance to start all over again.
