(Camera: Samsung WB600)Wondering whether the recent hypes about a short film and the studio shots done with the ubiquitous smart phones forebode the doom of the cameras as we know them?
Well, our take is that there should be no cause of concern. This is not a foolhardy wild guess. As far as revolutionary ideas are concerned, a cellphone fitted with even a 40mp full-frame sensor and a Leica lens will not be an utter, unparalleled challenge to the cameras as we know them today. In principle, such a cellphone can gives movie makers and photographers a more convenient and economic way to do their things. But a fair bet is that this will probably be as good as it can get.
The rationale behind this argument is simple. While changes in forms can bring about some material gain to a product, like the ipad versus a netbook, it is the change in the media that revolutionises a concept. History has seen enough examples to prove this.
To take the mode of writing for example. Changes in the media mean the leaps from carving on rocks to writing on sheep skins, to writing on papers, to typing on papers, to recording electronically (to what the Hong Kong scientists have recently succeeded in recording data in micro-organism). Changes in forms mean the development of hard discs to floppy discs, then to CDs and DVDs, to memory cards, to flash drives -- basically these are invariably electronic stuff.
The media-change takes the development from one stage to the next, whereas the form-change deepens that development at the same stage. So, no one will use sheep skins for writing because it is a thing of an stage of yore. But even though flash drives are the order of the day, we are still relying on hard discs (especially the external ones) decades after its invention. The two are at the same development stage.
A smart phone fitted with a full-frame sensor and a fast high-quality lens will be thrilling. But it will still be a phone which does smart tricks. Bet that will be a very expensive one too. At any rate, it will stand no chance to replace a regular camera soon unless it sports something implying a media-change.
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