Chuck Alaimo said:
I think to a certain extent your mistaking existence resistance to WiFi with the priority of wifi. When I think of absolute needs in a camera body wifi isn't one of them. Nice to have, but, I can think of many other things that are a higher priority.
I don't think so. Perhaps we all just have to agree to disagree. But, before we do, let’s beat this poor horse one more time.
This is not and never has been about what I or anyone else personally view as a priority. It's about how the camera industry failed to recognize a truly disruptive change in technology and the price they have already paid for that – the near total annihilation of the market for casual consumer cameras – and the fact that despite the high cost of their failure, they continue to cling to old habits, which limits the options available to their customers and handicaps them across all categories, from beginner to professional.
Everywhere you turn today, you read that the future will be an “Internet of Things.” Soon, everything in our lives will be connected. This is already happening and available on several fronts – home thermostats, kitchen appliances, automobiles, our bank and credit cards, etc. etc. Now, it really doesn’t matter if people like it or not, it’s already here and growing daily.
So, if heating and air conditioning people and kitchen appliance makers and banks can figure it out and see the value in connecting to the internet, I ask a very simple question – what’s wrong with camera manufacturers?
Someone wrote that I don’t understand how difficult it would be to make cameras connect to the internet. Really??? Sorry, but I don't buy the argument that the engineering teams of Canon, Nikon, Fuji and Sony are comprised of idiots.
The point of the original article, which was actually just a rewrite of a previous story covering a technology presentation, is that camera manufacturers were woefully slow in adapting to the internet. And, due to their inability to adapt, they left themselves vulnerable to competition that has swallowed up much of their market.
And…even in the face of those market-destroying changes, they continue to lag behind the rest of the world.
To say it is just something nice to have, but isn't a priority, might be a legitimate criticism. Except that it's hard to gauge priorities when something isn't readily available and easy to use. Auto exposure and auto focus were not priorities until they became readily available and easy to use. Digital cameras weren't a priority until they became readily available and affordable. When video was first added to DSLRs it was just a minor add on that no one expected to be important. There was no one demanding that DSLR's offer video. Yet now it is considered an essential feature.
I am confident that eventually the industry will get a clue and when they finally do, the very people who insist they don't need this, will be using it daily, demanding improvements with each new camera release and threatening to switch to another brand because Canon's connectivity is "behind" XYZ's.
Canon is continuously excoriated here for silly things like dynamic range. Yet the entire industry totally misread and apparently continues to misread what is probably the single most obvious and important trend in society today and it mystifies me why anyone feels compelled to defend them in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary.
The industry screwed up. They are paying for it. We are paying for it twice – our cameras lack features and flexibility that every smart phone has and as consumers the collapse of a large portion of the market will inevitably force price increases and cost-cutting for the cameras we want to buy.
