Owning a WB850F, my thoughts

I was thinking more of Sony's presentation of goods. I am sure they can make the life of a customer who is trying to get something fixed a misery as well as the rest. I have always found Sony stuff very reliable, my A200 never had a firmware update, there never was one made available but it functioned perfectly and I could use an ancient Minolta lens on it fully automatically, no software problems. The camera industry is most probably in a bit of a melt down at the moment with too many companies making too many types of lens mounts (with CSC can be 2 per manufacturer making the market increasingly thin) and increasingly complex operating software in the cameras and now the lenses (Samsung has 2 suites of lens firmware) and at the same time phones are making inroads on the whole industry all the time. All this in a time of growing austerity in the Western economies. Something must break soon

I do wonder what anguish and confusion lies behind the bland exterior of these large corporations. I should think the meetings in Canon on what to do about mirrorless cameras would be pretty entertaining, a great pity all this drama is so secret.

swhs wrote:

Greynerd wrote:

A very comprehensive analysis. Sorry to hear you are finding things a struggle. You should not need patience though. How your average Joe on the street is going to cope with this I do not know. You have to wonder what field testing if any has been done on the camera with its production software firmware installed. They must stop beta testing the stuff with early take up buyers in the rush to get to market. Samsung really need to put a chunk of money into goodwill or their reputation with the photographic community will go farther down the toilet than it already is.

Sorry I am sounding like steakb. I will sign off for the day until I get better but it is depressing sometimes just looking at the way Samsung work. They do make money but a bit of Sony's customer orientation, though extravagant, would be nice occasionally.

I was tempted to switch my lumpy but reliable with long battery life Canon SX40 to a WB850 but that idea has completely evaporated.

Customer orientation by Sony? In lots of cases they treat customers like a POS.

But I agree about the beta testing. It is however not new, and cameras getting complicated software wise make the same practices from there (software development) come to cameras. It's not just Samsung

A very similar phenomenon was taking place in other fields already in the late 1980s, where a dealer told, about failures of televisions, that none are tested in the factory, as just letting the customer find out about problems, then fixing that TV, is cheaper than testing each TV for faults!

I'm not sure how much such concepts are applied in the production of cameras, causing a lot of individual camera failures that would have been found out with proper testing. Insider info is welcome!