Going Forward, Going Backward

2006.03.19

Month after month, new digital cameras are announced, promising to improve on older models. And they do, for the most part.

Each new press release highlights what has been improved, yet hidden in the details some things regularly seem to decline.

Does this bother anyone? Do people notice? Does anyone care? I don't know the answer to these questions, but it bothers me sometimes. Knowing that a digital camera could have been better, if a certain feature hadn't been reduced. Some improvements are subjective, but sometimes feature disappear.

In early 2004, Konica-Minolta announced the Z2 with a 10X optical zoom lens, ISO 50-400, 1/1000-15s+bulb (up to 30s) shutter-speeds and 800x600 resolution movie-mode. One year layer, its replacement, the Z5 was announced with a 12X optical zoom lens, ISO 50-320, 1/1000-4s shutter-speeds and 640x480 resolution movie-mode. Eight months later, the Z6 was announced with the same 12X optical zoom lens, ISO50-320, 1/1000-4s shutter-speeds and 320x240 resolution movie-mode.

Notice how the ISO range, shutter-speed range and movie-resolution steadily diminished in this series of cameras? Yet each press release announced an increase in resolution and optical zoom. True that the decrease in ISO range is minimal and ISO 400 was pretty useless in these cameras, but a 4 second shutter-speed is quite limiting for night-photography. The 800x600 movie mode was pretty outstanding when introduced by the Z2. When the Z5 was introduced, a 640x480 resolution movie mode was normal. The 320x240 resolution of the Z6, however, is quite being its time.

The Konica-Minolta Z-series of cameras are perhaps an extreme example but there are numerous cameras from Nikon, Olympus, Sony and Pentax which had similar evolutions. I'm not sure about other manufacturers but this practice seems common. Perhaps the intended audience doesn't care, but perhaps not.

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