Have to fess up that I like reading Thom. Don't always agree, but still interesting to read his thoughts tho.
eg. I don't think anything that the camera companies can do to 'reverse' the sales decline.
My thoughts re the sales decline is simply that the general masses have 'bought' their one good camera, subsequently find it annoyingly heavy and too large to use, and smartphone IQ has progressed to more than acceptable so the 'one good camera' syndrome died a fast and furious death. The heady days of DSLR sales figures are long gone .. nothing .. not even this advanced level of programmability will reverse this trend.
The sales highs of a decade ago were an anomaly.
Already the smartphone market is seeing signs of the same 'syndrome' .. so I always thought what he says about reversing the sales decline trend makes no sense.
But then he says:
"Sure, there's a lot of the usual top-of-the-line tweaking in it, particularly to the focus system, but the Mark III feels a lot more Mark II.5-ish to me"
of the Canon 1DXIII, and from what I've seen of it, is a bit unfair. What TH seems to want from Companies X,Y and Z is to totally revamp a product line that heavily relies on familiarity from it's customer base.
Having read that the 1DXIII has an AF joystick integrated directly into the AF-On button .. genius! Irrespective of if it works perfectly or not .. just the idea behind it .. ie. the potential revolutionary way to control AF(I've always been a huge AF-On type shooter).
But still TH isn't happy, because the camera can't rename his images on the fly .... in 15 different languages and formats, and won't make his breakfast and bed and do the dishes and whatnot.
Seriously tho, I understand that it's stupid that such cameras are limited to fine naming the way they are(just mad, and sad that there isn't not one single effort of thought to file/folder naming to make life a small amount easier in some way.
But to think that this is the holy grail of renewed interest in ILC camera sales by moms and dads ... is just plain pie in the sky.
The bulk of sales in serious type ILC level camera bodies is basically up to us .. the enthusiast, and there's only so much market level in that.
Making one greater than another is only cannibalising sales from one brand model to another .. will never increase overal sales the way TH seems to think it will.
He obviously has his wants and desires mixed up with what he thinks the mass consumer think is important to them.
eg. what I believe is important to me too .. simply not the same product types. I really wanted to get a D850 late last year(early this year), and I was a little disappointed that something so simple like the film scanning feature was so basically implemented(where it'd have better been done in Picture Control, and hence films scanned in NEF mode!) for me it was the lack of effort made(not the actual feature itself). Not about to reward a company for a half baked effort .. and the upgrade wasn't imperative .. just 'a thing' I could have done if it had been done well.
I believe that if the camera companies want to 'increase sales' of ILC cameras, then they have to look at a total revolution in product(not a revolutionary for of the same product) .. a totally new product type (for them).
And take back sales from smartphones.
So the only obvious path forward for Nikon/Canon would be to make a smartphone type small form camera, that also works as a phone, and accessorise it to high heaven with add on lenses and other module types.
It would be marketed as a ILC camera, just that it's a smartphone 'replacement'.
This is what made the smartphone so popular. Note all the add hype around them, and the marketing $ poured into them .. 99.9% of all this sales pitch is directed at the imaging side of the phone.
The actual comms side of the product is pretty much irrelevant.
So for Nikon .. make a sleek smartphone sized mirrorless camera that is marketed as the Nikon camera that you can phone home with. Good quality lenses .. etc, better quality images than current smartphones can do. etc.
From what appears to be the current trend, it seems that mr and mrs general public dont' spending US$1K on a stupid comms device because it's their every day 'good camera' too now.
