But I don?t need it!

But I don’t need it!

I used to say this a lot…

There was a time, before a compact camera could outcompute a NASA Moon Module, when every extra facility in a camera had to be engineered in, with more design work, more parts, and more careful assembly. Extra complication required higher standards of quality control and it was really difficult to retrofit something that the original designer hadn’t catered for.

Consider the flash synch on my Leica IIIa: it’s a separate little accessory that comes in a tin, with careful instructions for how to fit it, and how to use it. You have to screw it onto the shutter speed dial, carefully and precisely. It depends on the fact that the dial rotates (it’s part of the drum that the wound shutter blind sits around), and it depresses a mechanical switch on the unit mounted on the accessory shoe of the camera.



But it’s not like that now. Your digital camera is a small computer, and it can do a whole lot of things with the peripherals it has around it. Alter the programming by changing the firmware, and its capabilities change.

So, for instance, there’s just a bit of programming to do and you will have twenty scene modes instead of five. It’s not difficult, though it may well be pointless. Similarly, once the sensor is providing data to the CPU in live view or in a mirrorless camera, it’s no big deal to do something about focussing, or video.

So don’t confuse the sales hype about 8k video capability with the camera being able to offer YOU something you want or need. It’ll be the thing that sells the camera to a few users, and it will certainly earn kudos for the manufacturer. But if what you care about is not on that list, don’t let it sway you either way.

‘Brand ambassadors’ and ‘influencers’ set a lot of store by these things, but you needn’t.