Disclaimer: I have not really written about cameras a whole lot, so I am looking for feedback here. My field of expertise is with electro-optics and optoelectronics, not really with optomechancial systems, although I dabble in a little bit of everything. If image sensor and camera world is of interest to you, tell me and I will explore it further.
Camera companies have been hurting. They have been hurting for a while because cell phone companies have destroyed a significant portion of their business. There are two main reasons camera phones have been able to make such a huge impact. One of them was, rather prophetically, first uttered by the famed Olympus camera designer Yoshihisa Maitani: "If you do not have camera, you can't take photographs... With a camera you can carry with you everywhere, you'll never miss that once-in-a-lifetime moment again." That was the original driver for Olympus historically focusing on compact and rugged camera systems. What he did not realize back in the 60s was that the camera you can always have with you will turn out to be a camera phone. Noone really realized that until fairly recently. I have a bunch of nice cameras and I am willing to carry them around quite a lot to get the picture I want. However, more than half of the pictures I take are still taken with a cellphone, so I always upgrade my smartphone to the latest and greatest. Apparently, I am not the only one and all that demand has pushed smartphone manufacturers to develop ever more spectacular camera modules for their camera phones. They were spectacularly successful at it because of much larger financial resources than any camera company that ever existed and because they are not in Japan. I have worked for two Japanese camera companies in my career and Japanese engineers, on average, are not good engineers. There are always exceptions, of course, but by and larger, they have too much respect for authority and not enough creativity and willingness to make a mistake. Japanese corporate culture does not forgive mistakes. To re-iterate: they are smart and capable, but corporate culture in Japan is just not conducive to goo engineering. They are, however, incredible craftsmen and optimizers.
That is one of the reasons why in terms of image quality Apple or Google can get out of a particular sensor size, they are several generations ahead of what any Japanese camera company can do. Same goes for user interfaces.
The other big reason camera phones were so amazingly disruptive is the workflow. Taking a picture, doing quick edits and sharing it with the world takes seconds with a camera phone. It is not quite so quick with a camera. Japanese cameras have god-awful menu systems and antiquated user interfaces aimed at the existing pro photographers. There is a reason why I am so fond of Leica cameras. Aside from amazing lenses, Leica cameras have much simpler user interfaces. With most Japanese cameras, I can't grab one without accidentally pressing on three buttons and then spending 20 minutes trying to figure what that did. When traditional camera companies try to simplify the user interface, they always assume that their target audience is complete retards with single digit IQs who just learned that cameras exist. Leica's Q2 camera gives me the core controls I need for photography and keeps everything else out of my way. Then again, Leica is not a Japanese company. In a Japanese company, noone except for the very top level of the management can make any decisions and the guys at that top level are so far detached from the technical and user aspects of the design that they are really risk averse. They would rather not change anything that they do not understand. That appears to encompass a lot of things. Then, within the electronics industry In Japan, there appears to be a pecking order where some companies are supposed to be the leaders and others the followers. It is a little too rigid to be successful, so camera companies really got slaughtered, revenue-wise, in recent years. They basically had to retreat into two market segments: mid-to-high end system cameras and "tough" weather resistant cameras, although the latter is really being eroded by action cams that are mostly not made by Japanese companies. I can see why. I have Sony's RX0m2 (not quite an action cam, but something along those lines) and the user interface is the worst I've seen yet and by a solid margin.
Every time I think that Japanese camera companies have gotten beaten up enough to evolve and modernize, I get a reminder that I am wrong.
Today, OM, which is what used to Olympus Imaging, had a PR event. They have been teasing it for a while, and everyone thought they would release a new camera or two. Some sort of a product introduction would go a long way toward convincing people that Olympus Imaging being sold to someone else might pave way to newer and better products.
Nope. They made an announcement that they have finally figured out how to rebrand themselves and now they are called "OM System" and that they have a new mission statement that is different yet just as awkward as what they had before. Somehow, when Japanese camera companies formulate their English language mission statements they steadfastly refuse to ask anyone who speaks fluent English to help with the wording. All of their mission statements are uniformly awful and uniformly useless.
They did say (for the eleventh time this year) that a new camera is coming and they mentioned that it will rely on some sort of computational imaging techniques. The latter is potentially a good thing, except we have no clue what form that will take. I am cautiously pessimistic, but I am open to being surprised.
Here is some unsolicited advice to the new OM System company: fire everyone involved in the release of the today's news. Every single marketing and PR person who had anything to do with it, especially everyone with any decision making power.
Introduce some new hardware.
Outsource the software.
Definitely outsource the smartphone app.
Hire a bunch of young content creators to use your new camera and talk about it on social media.
Go back to the lab and work on new hardware.
Traditional marketing for cameras is dead and the sooner you get away from it, the better.
Not bad, but a little more width would help. The tripod is Field Optics Research's Dome Top Hunter 32.
Rather amazingly, the balance on this thing is just right as is.
