Alec

Horshack, jnd, Eric Calabros, mick232: THANKS!

SigmaChrome, Joseph S Wisniewski I think you hear Blockchain and think Bitcoin / Ethereum. Those are insanely inefficient by design (although Ethereum will eventually become considerably more efficient).

By comparison, Solana (e.g. when minting an NFT - similar use case) takes abt as much energy as a couple of Google searches.

Why would you EVER want to put control of your image's prevalence, authentication (licensing, sales, access, other features possible), into the hands of a private corp?? Here's a partial list of cloud services that have gone extinct:
https://www.macobserver.com/columns-opinions/devils-advocate/the-cloud-is-a-lie/

Pls note, the majority are established and rich corporations - don't give me that "Sony Adobe won't ever go bankrupt". Sure. Neither will Google. That didn't stop Google, Apple, Samsung, Cisco, Dell, Microsoft from shutting down cloud services on some C-suite manager's whim.

This should be open source and blockchain based

Good insight. Action cams basically have a "smartphone plus" camera (maybe leading by a generation & tuned for action) withOUT being a smartphone - i.e. more replaceable, plus more mount options. So they have a niche. 360deg cameras, ditto. For normal pix / vid - smartphone or full frame (or medium format). The reason there's "not enough profit margin" in M43/APS-C is that very reason. People no longer see the value in those intermediate sizes vs full-frame options available, and hence the manufacturers lose the ability to price those intermediate products higher if they expect them to move. Hence less money for next generation R&D, and the tailspin continues.

Reading between the lines: M43 is dead, just like APS-C - not enough of a gap vs smartphones on one flank and full-frame on the other.

@Gmon750 no facts were hurt in the making of that response. Sounds like you're the perfect customer for that $999 optional monitor stand.

You view a mac as a tool. Apple (and Adobe) would like to regard their products as more of a tax than a tool.

No. Sony A1 is chav.

EU laws have consumer protection far beyond that in other parts of the world, and the manufacturers are passing on the associated costs. It's a simple equilibrium of prices vs costs of doing business + taxes, and manufacturers have no incentive or "hidden agenda" to somehow "punish" the Europeans.

Anything other than a world-wide equilibrium of prices vs costs of doing business + taxes in each jurisdiction, would in fact be costing them money and sales.

I do see some posterization on the woman's face

"And now the wait for the A2, the one with matured 8K @ 16 bits, begins"
;-) ;-) ;-)

It probably looks better on yours due to oversampling / pixel binning on playback. On my HDR 4K, 0:30 (in front of the ear) 0:56 (camera upper-left of her face / her right), etc.: posterization / color depth limitations are plainly visible. 10 bit color depth is a step in the right direction from 8 bits, but with HDR and grading it's not a lot at all.

Looking forward to toothpicks by Nikon

What do you think about this after today's news re: AP switching to SONY? Still far-fetched or perhaps now a bit less so??

Conversation between management and engineers:
"ok that feature you said you could do that we told you NOT to do because there wasn't market demand, and also prohibited you from independently assessing market demand - you have to do it yesterday, because sony"

Case in point: to live-stream from my SONY camera, I need https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07P7Q1WYL

To live-steam from my Samsung Galaxy Android phone, I need nothing of the sort. This dynamic doesn't help the camera market - it is one thing when cameras are insufficiently far ahead of the smartphones in daytime image quality, but quite another when they are actually leaps behind in terms of connectivity.

Craig, that's sound reasoning. That said, besides gravitas/heritage/brand equity, Nikon has patents and a large customer base. SONY did really great with Minolta's camera and lens engineers (nearly all of whom had stayed on at SONY).

The main reasons the (camera) market is imploding is (1) smartphone cameras are more than adequate for consumers; (2) smartphone ecosystem is far more innovative; (3) smartphones enjoy standalone 24x7 network and cloud connectivity that cameras do not.

With 5G, cheap connectivity will no longer be the exclusive domain of smartphones. Even washing machines will come with a SIM slot. I don't expect cameras to go away any more than say quality microphones would go away for sound capture. But yes, for that to happen, camera makers would have to get off their butts and innovate like there's no tomorrow.

Hopefully SONY will buy them within the next 36 months. Given what they've been able to do with MINOLTA SLR & lens engineering heritage, if they add Nikon they'll be even more competitive.

ozturert, Toni, you both make good points. That said, there is always a sizable range between "what we can deliver with all-out effort" and "what management thinks we can get away with delivering for the time being". There are always things left in the back pocket, for reasons ranging from intra-company politics, to holding back until next generation thus saving per-generation R&D put in play, to controlling costs by managing down innovation and technological risks it brings along.

That's all speculation - but what IS undeniable, is that this camera offers a substantially greater per-generation innovation than several past generations. There are multiple reasons for it (ranging from general camera market losses to SONY's advance to finally covid-19). Regardless, I'm glad Canon is raising up to those challenges. Even being a SONY shooter - the market as a whole benefits.

Evidently it takes a 80% drop in profit for the company to consider giving users an actually innovative product, as opposed to minimally viable.

The diagram depicts DRAM built into the sensor. So it has nothing to do with the shortage of 3rd party stand-alone off-the-shelf DRAM chips.