Have we for­got that we invent things? Here’s a pic­ture from Maira Kalman:

Recently Leica came up with a new cam­era sys­tem, Nikon intro­duced a slew of new prod­ucts last week­end, while Kodak seemed to have jumped at the video mar­ket and came up with a Mac-friendly, 1080p HD pocket cam­era along with some point-and-shoot cam­eras.

Yet, some not-so-distant 4 decades ago peo­ple took a shot at the moon and landed there.

Are you see­ing the pattern—or more appropriately—the gap, here?

No real inven­tion has been made to the league of extra­or­di­nary light-capturing, image-making world where some Japanese, aptly named Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Sony, Konica/Minolta have con­quered this play­ground a few decades ago and took the game over from the Europeans of Heir Leitz, Sir Hasselblad, Mr. Carl Zeiss. Recently Jim of the United States of America claimed that he has found a future-proof for­mula to the still/moving camera-making world with his RED Digital Cinema Camera Company, and its modular-designed camcorder/DSLR hybrid.

Nonetheless, we are very excited about this recent devel­op­ment, Leica S2 expected to make a jolt only to drop the bomb­shell and announce its jaw-dropping price point for the new sys­tem, and RED is still yet to con­ceive a uni­ver­sally accepted soft­ware solu­tion for both the video and the photo images it cap­tured. You see, videos & pho­tos are two dif­fer­ent worlds.

So where do they left us?

The very notion of pho­tog­ra­phy (image cap­tur­ing craft) as an expen­sive and not-so-easy hobby have left a con­sid­er­ably com­fort­able play­ing field for them cam­era mak­ers, unlike the computer/software indus­try where peo­ple now lives & breathes by it, they can make mis­takes and go away with it in glory, they don’t have the sets of eyes & ears of the awry blog­gers & jour­nal­ists of the world wide web where they spot­ted some irreg­u­lar­i­ties like Apple’s rejec­tion of Google Voice iPhone App from their App Store, made some buzz, and days later Obama’s crew picked it up and made for­mal inquiries where some real answers—or even changes, are expected to come fold.

We, pho­tog­ra­phers, on the other hand are left cold. We have to sur­vive between the opti­cal crisp­ness of an image and some poor engi­neer­ing in between, the word ‘usabil­ity’ is unknown behind the lenses, let alone ‘notable indus­trial design’. We’re like the spec­ta­tors of the megapixel race where there’s no judge nor ref­eree to call the fouls, we’re con­sumers of highly priced objects where insur­ance com­pa­nies do not have prod­ucts like Auto-mate, or Life-Sure, or Edu-Safe in most part of the world¹, an indus­try where there’s no Photographic Products Overseeing Committee or Photographic Usability Commission, we are abused by the vision & per­sis­tence we pho­tog­ra­phers go by, the very thing that pro­duced the pho­to­graphic indus­try in the first place.

That was the state of the mobile com­mu­ni­ca­tion indus­try, until Apple came to the game.

The iPhone has changed the rule of the game, uplift the whole thing alto­gether and turn the game into some mature play, they move the indus­try with real inven­tions, they put some smiles in a lot of people’s faces. The bro­ken voice­mail? Fixed. The unnec­es­sary but­tons & clumsy inter­face? Changed for­ever. Technology that we can touch? Done. Copy & Paste? Piece of cake! And not to men­tion how mil­lions of devel­op­ers joined up the ride and develop 3-rd party Apps, help­ing the wheel of inno­va­tion move faster.

The cam­era that we came to know now are basi­cally imag­ing com­put­ers, behind those optics & metal enclo­sures are sil­i­cons dri­ven by binary codes, the same codes that empower the com­put­ers or mobile phones that we use every­day, only the dif­fer­ent thing is com­puter soft­ware has stan­dards. We have soft­ware usabil­ity groups, hack­ers & jour­nal­ists who knows what’s wrong and help pro­tect the users from the obliv­ion of poor soft­ware, want an exam­ple? Windows Vista.

Camera soft­ware do not have such lux­u­ries. It mainly con­sists of 3 dif­fer­ent lay­ers: 1) a firmware that gov­erns the cam­era and its functions/features (oper­at­ing layer), 2) image pro­cess­ing algo­rithm that reads and trans­lates data from its sen­sor into a com­puter read­able image for­mat (core layer) and 3) imag­ing software/drivers/codecs that runs in our com­puter to fur­ther develop the images into a usable out­come (user layer).

Development on the user layer is almost healthy, cam­era mak­ers are mak­ing avail­able their codecs for free, some even offer doc­u­men­ta­tion of their spec­i­fi­ca­tion and we have dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies com­pet­ing and craft­ing very usable soft­wares, good and not-so-good apps are being used every­day to make the world looks better.

However, inside the core layer, amongst the lines of codes, there are arrays of safely guarded secrets that aren’t as healthy, a root­ing decay existed here which is prac­ti­cally invis­i­ble from the rest of us due to the nature of the afore men­tioned par­tic­u­lars. Each com­pany made their cam­era in a cer­tain way that only they have access to the com­po­nents and cre­ated APIs that are known only to their engi­neers, which means when they decide to put a fea­ture that goes with a cor­re­spond­ing but­ton, only they can decide how and which but­ton goes and what is the out­come of that but­ton push.

There’s an appar­ent lack of stan­dards that left us ‘stuck’ for a long wind­ing ride.

Here are some exam­ples: Beyond cam­eras & cam­corders, Canon is also a printer man­u­fac­turer, so they assim­i­lated a sce­nario for us to snap & print a photo directly from the cam­era and decided to cre­ate a pro­pri­etary but­ton that do just that, and guess what? People don’t use it, a few cam­era mod­els later they decided to remove the fea­ture and leave the but­ton for some other good use. Under those big bright viewfinder of a Nikon cam­era, lies the heart of the image called the CCD sen­sor that Nikon has bat­tled long and hard to make the col­ors look right. When they finally got the for­mula right, they switched side and goes with CMOS which leaves many users in doubt². Longtime Nikon users will know the pain of pro­duc­ing color-consistent images between each cam­era models—similarly non-Nikon users also fight the same prob­lem only at a rel­a­tively smaller intensities.

One major flaw in cam­era design that still exists today is what we call shutter-lag time, though mostly appear in consumer-level point-and-shoot cam­era, the fact that it still exists both­ers me a lot. It’s like a car when you hit the break pedal it stops a few sec­onds late, it’s no longer a both­er­a­tion but a crime of some sort. Camera mak­ers pub­lishes only the megapixel or how fast the cam­era starts, but not how slow the shut­ter responds to your reflexes. Just because oper­at­ing cam­era is not a life-threatening activ­ity it doesn’t mean that the cam­era mak­ers are exempt from the basic law of human logic.

What is wrong about the indus­try is not know­ing about what we want, but sim­ply to rec­og­nize what we DO NOT want, cam­era mak­ers must learn from the tech indus­try and steal a cou­ple of ideas from the iPhone or the Mac. Wouldn’t it be great if one could tap, pinch or swipe zoom, focus, scroll an image from the tiny LCD at the back? Wouldn’t it be awe­some to record inter­views and cap­tions on the go directly to the cam­era? It would be much reward­ing even if one could finally trust the cam­era and shoot pic­ture with­out ever cor­rect­ing the col­ors! It’s funny how some newer con­sumer cam­eras has a face/smile detec­tor but most still couldn’t tell color bal­ance³ cor­rectly! Try shoot­ing inside a café over­see­ing a win­dow and see if the cam­era can cap­ture both scenes correctly.

Photographers are inno­vat­ing and invent­ing images every day, but we are also human beings, not because we are uniquely per­sis­tence in what we do they can treat us like god, do any­thing they want and get a way with it; they have to start invent­ing and make the cam­era indus­try stronger, nim­bler & health­ier by intro­duc­ing usabil­ity, con­sis­tency & user-friendliness to their prod­ucts. It’d be even bet­ter if they could stop their ego fight and work together into cre­at­ing a stan­dard that ben­e­fits no other than us as their customers.

Nothing is ever per­fect when it comes to beauty, the grass is always greener on the other side, we are just one tiny eco-system of cre­ative work­ers and tool-makers whose main pur­pose is to envi­sion beauty and to craft visual art, such prac­tice can only be main­tained with sup­port­ing habi­tat of creative-inducing tools, tools that empow­ers, inspires and aspires. We are now at a cross­road where the two have met, the ques­tion is how do we go from here with­out ever going lost in the com­ing jour­ney, the engi­neer­ing genius must now see how far the vision goes, as much as the cre­ative worker’s workaround of engi­neer­ing lim­i­ta­tion and lack of innovation.

The truth is, the race is not going away. New prod­ucts intro­duced by Nikon will soon get a respond from Canon, while oth­ers will fol­low, this will hap­pen again next year, and the year after that. The cycle that moves the indus­try are being dri­ven by mar­ket demand & com­pe­ti­tion, no longer by pure sci­ence. Hopefully, some­one will make the effort to bring inno­va­tion back to that cycle; fresh ideas on the world wide web and how the images came to life will cer­tainly bring new par­a­digms in the com­ing year, some new play­ers will emerge and are already doing cre­ative things on the mar­ket­ing side for their upcom­ing sur­prises, one could only hope that they do some­thing right this time.

We need that change.

Update: The lat­est SLR offer­ing from Canon, Nikon & Leica have addressed some of the major flaws in cam­era today: Sensor image qual­ity, Autofocus speed & Viewfinder rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Seems like they began to know how to listen.