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etudiant

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Posts posted by etudiant

  1. Sadly no elixir to help, just my warmest regards and sympathy.

    Life serves out lots of lemons,appreciate the few lollipops that it also throws in.

    You have massive talent, please don't bury it. But life is a journey, not a Calvary, so have fun along the way, it is a priority.

  2. Surely no surprise, a refined 3rd generation product will always outclass a new tech entry in terms of durability and refinement.

    The key is whether the new entry provides performances that are simply beyond what the refined classics can deliver. If they cannot, they deserve to fail.

    I'd also note that the number of accomplished shooters with both still as well as video creds is pretty small. Maybe Canon is not dumb to segregate the two categories.

  3. In all honesty, the entire sector is bleeding and no one is sure about their longer term survival. So everyone is frightened.

    That does bring out the worst in corporate behavior, exemplified by Canon's really wretched handling of their R5 video performance issues. I like to believe that they would have responded better in a less difficult environment. 

    As is, the R5 is apparently a fine photography camera and a decent, albeit quirky video camera. That is better than 'worst of the year' grade, even though your own Canon R5 experience may have been the hands down winner in that category.

    I've no brilliant thoughts on resolving this, but Andrews selection of the M1 as the innovation of the year does seem a watershed moment to me. When the top innovation in photography is a pixel manipulation tool, rather than a lens or a sensor, the world has changed.

     

     

  4. I don't understand the pessimism about future revenues. Streaming has oodles of potential.

    The gaming sector is now much larger than the movie business, so at home entertainment certainly offers a revenue pool deep enough to float the movie business, provided they make movies that have appeal.

    For ATT, the owners of Warner, bringing in more traffic to their infrastructure is probably important, so that surely helped drive the decision. Plus this also eliminates their costly dependency on the theater chains. 

  5. The 'cinema experience' today is not fun, an often dirty venue, an overly loud 'coming attractions' soundtrack and grossly overpriced snacks.

    Plus the attendance is usually paltry, even before the virus hit. I don't think most people will miss the movie theaters, except perhaps for teenagers with high hormone levels.

    So I think WB is doing the right thing, ditching a decrepit distribution model at a convenient time. Presenting the industry with a done deal allows them to optimize their position.

    Other than fulminating, I don't think the various players can do much about it.

  6. On 11/28/2020 at 8:25 PM, Andrew Reid said:

    Did you see how many shitty compact cameras Nikon used to make? Masses and masses of them, for the masses. The market has practically vanished. They did nothing about it. Of course the market is getting smaller. Professional tools are a niche compared to consumer cameras. It is only high margins and expensive price tags that keep them from being completely unviable. Now that the camera companies have backed out from bothering to compete in massive consumer markets, they have dug themselves an even larger hole. Also remember with Nikon it is not just cameras that are the problem.

    Their outdated chipmaking business is about to hit the wall as well.

    It has about one customer.

    It is probable that Nikon will try harder to sell their lithography gear to the Chinese as the demand from Intel fades.

    China wants to become self sufficient in semiconductors, but their domestic industry still lags the market by several generations.

    Nikon's equipment is quite good enough to get the Chinese close to the state of the art, allowing them to at least keep the gap from widening.

    So expect that mutual interest will bring them to a deal, quietly.

  7. Imho, killing the show is short sighted. It needs to return to its roots, as a venue for industry professionals to strut their stuff and to build relationships. Trade shows originally arose to help industry,

    They gradually morphed to become marketing events for the consumer. Now the consumer is online and feels she does not need the show any more.

    Sadly the prospects for a near term return are poor, falling sales and travel restrictions make it easy for the bean counters to strike the Photokina budget. The downside to these short sighted decisions will become apparent later, a less flexible, less responsive, less innovative industry.  Dumb, dumb, dumb, imho.

  8. It is worth remembering that ASML, the current monopoly supplier of EUV lithographic tools, was only saved from bankruptcy by a $4.5B injection of cash by Intel, Samsung and others.

    So Nikon management was not dumb to reject going for this technology, it was ruinously expensive to develop and did not even line up well with their core strength in lens making.

    EUV relies on mirrors, because glass soaks it up. Zeiss had the world's best know how there and was willing to roll the dice to use it, to produce to the specs ASML required. The man who lead the team is now the chairman designate of the entire Zeiss group.

  9. Superbly informative posting.

    If Canon or Nikon have any sort of market research, this is the kind of input that should catch their attention.

    Obviously, the old saying applies, that pioneers are the guys who have arrows in their back.

    So perhaps EOSHD is just too much on the cutting edge, focused on the unprofitable new developments while Canikon rakes in the chips from the mainstream gear. Even then, they should worry about missing the boat technically. Industry leaders are supposed to lead, not scavenge from other innovators.

  10. 31 minutes ago, crazyrunner33 said:

    https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2020/09/investigating-the-canon-r5-heat-emission/#comment-5065269671

    The only heat issue I see is the CF card getting hot enough to potentially harm someone when handling it(there's regulations for this type of stuff). As noted in the article, the EXIF reported a peak of around 63c, and they didn't observe any components reaching such temperature. The hottest spot was the CF slot after the update, it hit 57c and the card was 52c. The sensor was 48c. 

    Iirc, various computer graphics cards operate at well over 65 degrees C, with peak temperatures over 80 degrees C not unheard of.

    So Canon is at least being very conservative in their 'safeguards'. as well as really sloppy in their management of the recovery times, because those seem entirely disconnected from the actual temperatures.

    Imho, this festering uncertainly does maximal harm to Canon.

    They would have been better off to say up front that the R5 was not a tool for professionals, people who should be using a C300, but just a stopgap for use in a pinch. Now there is the impression that the entire product line is an elaborate scam, with features blocked or included because of marketing dictates, rather than engineering and economics. As Intel has discovered, that approach works until it does not, but then it is a long way back... 

     

  11. 3 hours ago, Matthew19 said:

    We need to know if firmware can be downgraded in this thing. Someone needs to be saving these firmware updates in case we can. 

    Fortunately, there is no way for Canon to do a Tesla style OTA 'upgrade' of the firmware, else I'd expect this hack to get disabled immediately.

    Still, we may be coming to a point where Canon's most dedicated users need to wait for real world feedback before installing Canon's latest updates, or simply decline to install them, for fear that some other features get crippled.  

    Is this in Canon's best interest?

  12. This is an excellent interview, the man clearly is on top of the issues and is dealing with both the technology as well as the business environment.

    I thought his answer to the Olympus question was masterful, he ruled out nothing but highlighted his priority is his people.

    It would be difficult to find a comparable performance by anyone from Nikon, Sony or Canon, they all all indians, not chiefs.

  13. The discovery be Andrew and the Chinese heat sensor team that the CPU is not gagging on the processing heat, despite minimal heat sinking, surely suggests policy constraints rather than technical limitations determine this camera's performance..

    Ianal, so I have no idea to what extent such market segmentation is legal in the US, even less about other jurisdictions. It does highlight that the customers are ciphers, rather than people, at least to the marketing algorithm. However, those algorithms may be badly wrong. Iirc, the Chief Counsel of Bayer estimated that the liability from Roundup cancer claims was $200MM at the outside. He was mistaken by a factor of 100. So Canon may well be more concerned in private than their thus far impassive public persona suggests.

  14. Just for the record, the Curevac 80% owner is a guy called Dietmar Hopp. His (former) chairman is a US citizen and did attend a White House briefing along with about 20 other Pharma CEOs in early March.

    So it is eminently possible there was a Trump input. The idea that it would be available preferentially for Americans sounds Trumpish, plus it has precedent in the early days of penicillin.

    The trouble of course is that Trump is poorly educated and probably does not appreciate that the problem with vaccines is not finding one, it is making sure that it does not do more harm than good.

    So even if Curevac has some promising product, making sure it does not have some unexpected side effect, as Thalidomide did, will take time.

  15. 33 minutes ago, Shaocaholica said:

    Not everyone will have the same optimistic view of a winning scenario.  A win for an observer may as well be a huge perceived loss in both income and reputation for either party.

    Don't think so.

    Apple is hugely bigger than RED, if they lose, it is only bit of money.

    RED however is fighting for its life, a loss would almost certainly decimate the enterprise value and make an outside takeover vastly more likely.

  16. 25 minutes ago, drm said:

    LOL...Andrew, you are a comedian too :) 

    I don't think that I have mentioned this on here, but I have a Ph.D. in Finance & was a Finance professor for many years. In addition to my media company, I teach people how to raise capital and grow their businesses through innovation and strategy.

    I have long said that automation (robots, AI, etc.) is going to devastate certain portions of the job market, just like smartphones hit the camera markets, but many times worse. There are many industries where a person just won't be able to work when automation gets going. A current example is the push for $15/hr restaurant workers in the U.S., which just means there will be more machines & less workers (see the kiosks at McDonalds & self checkouts at Walmart, etc.). In the legal field, computer programs are already able to analyze documents in ways that humans simply can't. Businesses can already purchase Baxter, which is a ~$20k robot that you can show a task and he will repeat it (think assembly line) for a rough cost of $3/hr. The A.I. revolution is going to cause massive upheaval in society over the next 50 yrs. 

    If you want a vision of the future, just look at the conditions today in Chicago, Baltimore, and other cities where the manufacturing jobs all left. When the service jobs leave, what's left? Mad Max.

    Think that is not the likely outcome for Japan, which still has a strong social fabric.

    In the US, the destruction of much of the black middle class thanks to the mass foreclosures during the 2008 banking crisis has shredded that fabric. Conditions in Baltimore etc reflect that.

  17. Samsung is looking prescient, they recognized that the camera sector was facing massive change, making it a bad place to launch a 'me too' product.

    Canon lags in the sensor space and in the software arena., which are the technologies driving the changes in the relatively stagnant imaging market. Canon is pursuing a rational corporate strategy in response, to maximize the returns from this fading sector to invest in more promising industrial markets. So it is unreasonable to expect massive new product investments here, rather a continuation of the existing policy of low cost, cautious and incremental development. The new mount exemplifies this tack, zero new technology, just a repackaging of the existing capabilities, hyped as a 'mirrorless breakthrough'.

  18. Would not an Apple/Nikon partnership in imaging make sense?

    Nikon is a great name in optics, but has no real partner in digital or electronics, while Apple has those, but is not a player in optics.

    A hookup would avoid the humiliation of Nikon going to Samsung or Sony for their electronics and systems integration, plus Apple could fund Nikon from their petty change account.

  19. 3 hours ago, Cliff Totten said:

    Wait,...hold on.....what? Is the a passive adapter or an active adapter?

    Ok....I'm about to take a super long crazy shot in the dark here. We know that Nikon is buying the Sony A7-III's IMX410 sensor, this is now fact...and a zero supprise to everybody here.

    Here is the crazy part.....is it possible that Sony has leased their Emount lens and focus protocol to Nikon for all their new lenses? I could certainly see why Nikon would rather buy it than design it themselves. Could Nikon also lease Sony PDAF pattents too? And Sony IBIS also?

    The cost of just buying it could beat the cost of developing it from scratch and trying to mature it as fast as they can. Buying an already tested and mature system could be A LOT easier!

    Nah....on second thought. This kind of industry camera collusion never happens like that in reality. Plus, Sony is not known for selling itself to customers in that way.

    This is just crazy talk.......

    Perhaps it is a straw in the wind, firms recognizing that there are too many systems to support in an at best flat market, especially when one player has half the market.

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