New Digital Cameras Are Boring
What is it about newer camera technology that sucks the life out of the process of taking pictures nowadays?
Digital camera technology has come on leaps and bounds in the last 10 years with developments in buffer rates, processing power, focusing systems and even AI features.
The guess work around exposure and white balance has been taken out of the craft completely with the rise of the electronic viewfinder but the trade off, in my opinion at least, is the mystery around the medium that made us all fall in love with making photos in the first place.
The first few years of digital camera technology can briefly be described as a race between major brands to pack as many megapixels into their camera bodies as possible. This was accompanied by subsets of competition over colour science, buffer rates, auto-focus speeds & sharpness.
Ultimately we’re at a place today where there really is no distinction between camera brands when it comes to these core categories. If you pick up a modern camera, you’ll be able to take good quality images that are incredibly sharp and yet here lies the problem.
The blurring of these lines have closely followed a general trait of modernity in which character and detail is substituted for technical perfection.
Credit: Panasonic Attribution 4.0 Generic License
Colour science is now so homogenous between different camera brands that their seems to be no sort of signature stamp on colour reproduction between different systems. No longer do we talk about Canon’s ‘iconic’ skin tones because this race towards the technical standards of excellence has already finished.
The removal of the anti aliasing filter from almost all newer camera bodies provides for edge to edge sharpness, leaving us with technically perfect RAW files with infinite dynamic range but almost no textural characteristics that would help evoke the tone intended by the photographer when capturing the photo.
The end result is better quality images but worse looking photos and this all comes down to one key factor that both camera brands and consumers are ignoring — sharper images don’t automatically translate to better photos and it’s for very this reason that a whole community of photographers are fleeting back to older camera models that favoured color rendition and user experience over crammed feature sets, over sharpening and resolution.
We’re in a place where camera technology has the potential to shift radically in one way or another. I can only hope that camera brands keep in mind that there is still a veritable market of consumers who view photography as a form of art and who favour photography first cameras over hybrid ‘creator’ cameras, the likes of which are moving ever closer towards becoming fully fledged computer systems.
