Having reflected on this, I then came across this issue of capitalism running out of road in a different way. Since we started our YouTube channel, I have watched videos on cameras, video equipment, lenses, microphones, and all the things I had to learn about to reach an acceptable level of production quality. During that process, I came across the YouTube channel of a chap known as Gerald Undone. His videos were probably the most sophisticated analysis of camera equipment available on YouTube, and he was widely followed because he was just so good at spotting which products were good, explaining why, and what should, alternatively, be avoided.
And now he is giving up doing that. Why? That is because he says that all the fun has gone out of his job. His argument is that, whoever you now buy a camera from, whether it be Sony, Canon, Nikon, Leica, Panasonic, or anyone else, most probably including your phone, you will get a piece of equipment that is near enough perfect, and capable of delivering a photograph so far beyond the limits of your imagination that preparing technical analysis of them any more is becoming a waste of time.
As he has said, talking about the creative process, which is something he has never really done, remains relevant. Talking about the kit is not. It has reached the point where every reasonable demand that a human photographer can make of any such kit not only can be, but will always be, delivered. The rate of return on further investment in developing such equipment is now so small that it is hardly worthwhile to make it.
That summarises the neoliberal problem in a nutshell. We have reached the point where, when it comes to “stuff” of this sort, there is little further progress to be had, and any claims of difference will now come down to marketing spiel, and not to reality. What matters now is the capability of people, which is the very thing that neoliberalism wants to destroy.
This capitalism, global markets – neoliberalism, in effect – works so well that we must abandon its use.
Rather than, say, use this thing that works so well to go and work on the next human desire after decent camera lenses. Which is that next human desire that can be solved being something we can only discover from market processes, of course.
In this context, I am thinking a lot about how we need to reconsider GDP and related macroeconomic goals There is nothing to publish yet, but what I am finding, as a consequence of that thinking, is a whole new range of economic indicators on what is really happening in the world around us, which can provide better indications of how we can allocate the world’s resources,
We all bate our breaths, of course.
Capitalism is running out of road because the camera developed by these profit-making corporations is so near to perfection that it’s not worth improving? That is equivalent to saying Antonelli ran out of road when he passed the chequered flag.
In the depths of my memory I seem to remember the head of the Patent Office, around 1900 (IIRC) saying the Office should be closed, as all inventions had already been made….
Charles Deull. Allegedly. “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
“Experts” claim he never said it. Gamecock thinks that it just can’t be proven that he said it. “Where there’s smoke . . . .”
It’s broadly true. It is so cheap to make good stuff no one makes bad any more.
That said, the Nikon D850 is quite probably the best 35 mm DSLR ever made. And comes with my personal recommendation. Buy one while you still can.
BiG,
I’ve never tried a Nikon. Back when we lived in the dark ages of film, I started with a Halina 35X, but quickly moved to a Praktica. Lost that in the Xray machine at LHR, and being short of time (those were the days) had to scoot to get to the airplane. In the USA, there were no Practices, so I bought a Minolta. Nasty horizontal cloth shutter, not at all the vertical stainless steel I was used. Stuck with Minolta up to the point they got bought by Sony, and changed from DSLR to mirrorless. Very pleased with A7Riii (and a6700)….
I recently bought a 2nd hand Sony DSC RX10 mk14. For nature, particularly birds, photography it suits my needs perfectly. Unless the Sony gives up the ghost, I may never need to buy another one.
I topped out on tech with my D90. It does everything I can think of.
Why? Unless you have a particular need for a certain type of auto-focus performance (mostly for sports) the only reason is to collect “quite probably the best 35 mm DSLR ever made”. Newer mirrorless and compatible lenses will be better for everything else.
One of the factors that turned the old rules on their head was robots. Once you got robots building things, the important skill wasn’t putting things together, it was managing the process for putting things together, and that can work at a colossal scale. And robots are cheaper than the cheapest humans and outperform the best humans.
So many luxury brands got their reputation in the era where you were paying for the best craftsmen, like Mercedes and Rolex. But a Toyota or a Swatch are just as good, maybe better.
Isn’t it awesome? People like Richie but Apple stuff and the rest of us get it cheap.
Ironically, Apple Macs are among the best value propositions now. The regular PC market has been utterly hammered by the AI datacentre bubble. RAM and GPUs especially are through the roof, but all parts are affected to some degree. Apple’s purchasing power (bulk and smarts) has enabled them to keep costs down, and they’ve decided to take the opportunity to increase their userbase rather than milk the current one. So something like the Mac mini is just stunning value; it does everything normies need and you can’t even do a self-build equivalent for anything near as low in price.
It’s a bad sign if we’re doing “rethinking the entire economy” on Monday. Could be a long week.
Hmmmphttt. He’s full of merde as usual.
It’s long been true that if you want “very good snapshots”, you should buy a digital camera from a reputable make which you like the feel of in your hand and which suits your budget.
On the other hand, if you want a lens that’s a tad out of the ordinary (I often use a 24-105; I’d very much like a more-compact 20-200 – but they don’t as yet exist) you’ll have to choose wisely – unless your budget is unlimited.
And if you want/need 100 Mp in the image – for selective enlargement, say – the you’re SOL – there aren’t any in 35mm format. So there’s a ways to go in sensors, processing and optics/optical computation before we’re close to done….
The equipment is good enough now that you need to go a long way in getting more skillful before it actually limits you.
It’s like crossing the USA. Back in the 1920s they had expeditions to do that via automobile involving many vehicles, with spare parts galore (especially including tires).
Now? Hop in the car, any car (unless it’s a junker) and go. You’d have to attempt to climb a mountain with a car before you have to look at what you would need.
I’ve been up and over Hardknott Pass in my little one litre automatic Corsa like a breeze. Just 15 years ago my Rover would have crapped out at the bottom.
Pretty poor imitation of a Rover then! Sixty-odd years ago when my father’s Standard 10 found it hard work any Rover would have taken it in its stride.
The specs-appeal smartphone ones don’t come with lenses that can do them any justice at all, and even the fast disappearing 35mm max out around 50 mpx (I _thought_ Canon did a EOS with 100 mpx but can’t be bothered to check) because that’s also pushing the limits of the multiple thousand dollar optics you stick on the front. i.e. if you can’t get what you want you need a longer lens, and if you need a longer lens than that you need a telescope. With atmospheric correction.
Don’t think you’ll get a “full-frame” 20-200mm more compact than this:
https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/cameras/lenses/sigma-20-200mm-f-3-5-6-3-dg-contemporary-review-this-superzoom-stretches-to-angles-other-lenses-dont-reach
Only Sony-E and (Panasonic) L mounts, but that’s down to Nikon and Canon, not Sigma.
Other than cost there is no reason to buy small / crop sensor cameras nowadays.
However much we complain he’s mad, he’s ignorant, he’s malevolent, we must never overlook the fact that he’s extremely stupid.
I don’t think genuinely I have ever seen someone whose estimation of his own capabilities is so out of kilter with the reality. He is pretty thick if the truth be told. However as the late A. L Rowse said – ‘almost all the worst damage in society today has been inflicted by the half- educated’
“What matters now is the capability of people, which is the very thing that neoliberalism wants to destroy.”
That’s a leap. Some evidence there might be nice.
I’ve been recording a podcast with a couple of friends for the last few months. The basic premise is one of them is over fifty and has decided to seriously try online dating and we discuss how it’s going. I’m the happily married conservative token male 🙂 Audio only and we’re in three different locations, so we’re just using whatever computers/microphones/phones we have to hand. The platform Riverside we use uploads all three recordings and combines them to level out volumes, filter out background noise, and does a pretty good job. It’s not professional quality but it’s not bad.
I haven’t noticed anyone trying to destroy our capability.
He’s still working on setting out his false premises and misunderstanding the concepts he’s trying to ‘reconsider’.
Mr Undone is correct.
In the 1980s I was on the board of the first high street developing and printing chain. Great fun until Boots’s economies of scale made it impossible to progress so we sold out at the right time. I then took a keen interest in the obvious next stage, shops offering the facility of “photoshopping” your own images mainly from SD cards.
The 1990’s was a golden age for the range of small, cheap and superb quality “point and shoot” digital cameras and for a few years everyone wanted one. Then within a few years, as mobile phone cameras first arrived on the scene then rapidly improved in leaps and bounds, regular people simply stopped buying cameras. Why carry an unnecessary gadget around? The high street printers continued to flourish and do to this day but wonderful quality small digital cameras went the way of the dinosaur (and the cassette, the cd, the I-pod, satnavs plus any number of other example of truly excellent but ephemeral technology).
A generation or so ago every half-decent high street had a camera shop. When’s the last time you saw one – albeit that is just as much a symptom of another far greater malaise that has taken over our towns and cities.
My high street has one, but their stock is largely trade-ins, and the latest mirrorless stuff. Very skewed towards high-end nerdery.
That’s all that’s left, apart from instant cameras. Phones now do everything else, in many respects better because their rich metadata makes automatic library organisation so much easier. My Fuji X-T5s can connect to a Fuji app on my phone to embed GPS position but I usually forget to run it because it’s a faff, being a typically poor Japanese piece of software.
Much of the attraction of those pocket-sized digital cameras was the ability to watch and track through your photos on a 1 1/2 inch screen. Mobile phones have blown that out of the water.
Remember when hand-held camcorders became affordable? Everybody wanted one. Then the same story, a game-changing technological advance became redundant within a few years.
You’re about a decade out (perhaps your memory compressing the past, which mine does increasingly). 1990s digital point-n-shoots were execrable and relatively rare; far better results (other than upload convenience to computer) could be achieved with equivalent film cams. It was in the 2000s, particularly around 2004 – 2014, that pocket digicams became good and popular.
There is currently actually a bit of a resurgence, at both the cheap shit level and higher end. Trendy youngsters are wanting a discrete camera again, perhaps to separate them from all the uncles and grandads using phones. Manufacturers are rereleasing/tweaking six or seven year old models to suit.
Correct in that he’s bored with reviewing what he sees as incremental improvements. His view that cameras are a done deal and good enough is easily disputed. What he’s really saying is that he’s successful and comfortable enough to put his feet up, which is another statement about capitalism I suppose. I suspect he’ll be back after a while, a bit like Matti Haapoja.
Now that capitalists have perfected bread, let’s have government make it!
Decades ago, while still in the IT trenches, this took the zeitgeist of standards. Consultants insisted we pick best practices and freeze them. Guaranteeing obsolescence in short order.
how we can allocate the world’s resources
Who’s the “we”?
All your stuff are belong to us.
Pretty much how it’s turning out. You have to be careful buying anything tech now to not end up on a subscription model. Modems the latest, no doubt with “age verification” (ID check approval).
Still like your old Kindle? Fuck you. – Amazon
“What matters now is the capability of people, which is the very thing that neoliberalism wants to destroy.”
So neoliberalism has given ordinary people high quality equipment and the means to distribute their work that would in the past have been the sole domain of the well paid expert and the corporate world of publishing and broadcasting.
Methinks this Spudatribe is less about neoliberalism destroying the people and more about it destroying the well paid sinecures of the ‘expert’ classes.
Yeah. How dare these unimportant people have the means to compete with me.
‘…a piece of equipment that is near enough perfect, and capable of delivering a photograph so far beyond the limits of your imagination…’
And yet that photo you want to take of ‘the British Big Cat’ or UFO you just spotted is a blurry out of focus mess…
It’s amazing how the mysterious world has remained mysteriously impervious to the world of high resolution imaging. It’s almost as if the whole thing is a crock of horseshit.
Gamecock can’t find the “blur” button on his D90.
“I am on YouTube, therefore Capitalism has failed” – Richard Murphy
Having reflected on this, said Thomas Watson Sr. (IBM chairman) in 1943: ” (and) I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
Or more recently:
DEC paid big for that blunder. They came out with a decent home computer in mid-80s, but no one made software for it. It turned into a huge business – 2 billion desktop computers today – and DEC completely missed it.
DEC didn’t do themselves any favours with their PDP8 and its 12-bit architecture.
You focus on the wrong decade. They replaced the 8 with the PDP11 by 1970. And sold 600,000 of them. By late 70s, they were making the VAX, of which they sold another 600,000.
Wow. Has he dun sum lernin? Where did he get his cameras, lights, mics, compute and video editing software from? Which of these companies accept Spudcoin? OK, maybe some of it is open source but I can’t imagine his hardware is coming from some coop collective somewhere?