A

It’s funny that the old film based SLRs had product life spans of at least 5 years, where many of the better designs lasting about 10 years. They did not have to be obsolete as often due to the limited mechanical improvements or gradual electronic offerings. When updated, the new product had improvements you could easily measure in different areas. The largest gains realized, were from you the shooter. Your mastery of exposure, composure, focusing (yes, you practiced manual and prefocusing very often), etc; made the difference…

Now, with the digital SLR age, it seems we are seeing product changes happen more often. At first, the DSLR product life was around 3 years. Now, we are down to something less than a year. Even taking inflation into account, many of the new DSLRs are priced way above their film based SLR counterparts from years past. Digital technology is getting much cheaper for all appliances, but not for the midlevel DSLRs (and above). Could it be that the price target is kept moving and high, so to create a price to product ratio? As an example, people will expect the spend $4,000 or above for a certain level of performance, and would discount the performance of anything with a lesser price? So, the solution is to up the performance curve (even on a barely measurable level), with mainly keeping or increasing the price? It paints a picture that the camera is to make more of the picture than the shooter, so for better pictures, pay the price. This is just out of control with the DSLR turnaround is getting just as bad as the point and shoots…

With the above being said, does this make digital photography cost effective? For the elite and the professional with big budgets, this is maybe OK. For others, this sounds very discouraging. We don’t want to get into the buyer’s remorse hype. This pattern sounds rather like the personal computer rant (Windows & Apple). When it comes to system upgrades, associated software upgrade costs are just bummers. Well, here it seems to have arrived in the digital photography world…

To sum this up, I guess we can’t do anything about what the manufactures are doing. I hope great podcast shows like this spend more time helping us to master our basic photography skills. Less on camera and brand specific technological capabilities, with more of how can we pull off this shot using generic photographic techniques. Heck, the last photo contest winner here, used a point and shoot and I am all for that…

In the camera hobby, it seems as though all we get are brand backing zealots who inexplicably stand behind one of their two brands, and when asked why they are loyal to that brand, they can not provide a well supported, thoughtful explaination, beyond “Nikon’s the best”, or “Canon rules”. Correct me if I am wrong, but they both make great products which allow us to become great photographers, at very reasonable prices. I happen to shoot with Nikon. But does that make me want to slam Canon product? On the contrary-they are to be commended for making a great product line, and encouraging Nikon to get serious and develop a full frame format camera we can all drool over. The 1D Mark III and it’s sheer mind blowing innovation did more to get the D3 out there than many of the skilled, talented engineers at Nikon.

Guess what, photographers? We all win!

Arthur

Scott, you are lucky. You might actually have a chance to buy a 40d before the end of the year, where as the Nikon shooters know it’ll be a year before we actually see a D300 in stock!