Ilkka Nissila

Nikon has indicated there will be a firmware update with Prores 422 LT which should give a better compromise in data rate between RAW and h.265. I love Prores 422 HQ on the Z8; the color and appearance of the image are so similar to still images, but the files are admittedly large. It is curious why the ZR h.265 is not as detailed (in reviews; I don't have the ZR) at high ISO as the Z6 III. Maybe Nikon felt it was a priority to avoid overheating and allow long recording times while keeping the camera body compact?

Maybe the problem here is more about the targeted advertising, social media sites and generally the web showing ads based on the data that they've collected on your interests, basically always suggesting something you might be interested in buying, than the products themselves? Before the internet, and even in the early years of the web, people were shown generic ads for things such as diapers, books, cleaning equipment, clothes, cars, etc. rather than ads targeted to very niche users, to each user their own portfolio of potential wants and desires. In the past we would be annoyed by ads but ignore them because they were largely not relevant to us most of the time. Today the ads are so precisely targeted that they're harder to ignore. I personally think this data collection and targeted advertisement should be made illegal because it leads to people buying things they don't need and can't afford, and a sense of misery if they don't buy. Young people growing up with the smartphone and social media have increased rates of mental problems. Generally, commercial interests of big companies seem to override the needs of regular people in the decisions made by politicians, leading to a society where people are less happy than before, even though we have more "things" than we had before.

Health care costs in the US are high because of a private insurance-based system (where a large part of the money goes to the insurance company which doesn't actually do anything to improve your health). Health care costs in Europe are about one half of the US costs per person. In my country, large incomes from salaries are taxed heavily to provide free education and low-cost health care to everyone. This also means smaller income differences between people than in the US and as a result there is not as much of market for extremely expensive houses etc. In the US in many highly populated regions, such as NYC, or LA, the costs of housing are very high because many people with a lot of money want to live there. In my country, when people are not doing as well economically, housing prices go down even in the most desired regions, compensating to some extent for the loss in purchasing power. In the US, many people are so rich that they can afford to pay anything the market asks for, and this results in a situation where the "ordinary person" can't afford to live in those areas (which are often the most job-rich as well). This has nothing at all to do with decisions made by the camera companies. When smartphones replaced cameras in the hands of the majority, camera companies lost most of their income and sales volume, and they have had to refocus on the higher-end market since the low-end market disappeared to a large part. The reason those entry-level cameras were so inexpensive 10-15 years ago was because of orders of magnitude greater sales volumes. In addition, the customer wants ever higher specs and better performance, and as sensor resolution has increased, the lenses need to be optically better corrected to avoid showing obvious defects or limitations in image quality when the image is viewed using those high-resolution sensors and displays. This makes the lenses more expensive as the higher quality is more difficult to manufacture. Energy prices have gone up because of wars and lens manufacturing is very energy-intensive. The AI boom has increased the demand for semiconductors and thus the camera companies need to pay more to compete for access to the production capacity for chips. Customers now want cameras designed for video as well as stills, again this means the manufacturers have had to develop expensive processors and sensors to achieve the fast readout and high resolution, and lenses need to focus silently and be corrected for focus breathing and parfocality. Customers will, of course, at the end, have to pay for this development and increased manufacturing costs. Camera companies are not especially profitable today. There is not much that they can do about that. You can always get back to using older equipment as these are available for a fraction of their cost when new. Compare the results you get for dollar using a modern camera with one made 15 years ago, do you still think the new items cost more to achieve the same results? They do not. For similar capabilities that were sold 1-2 decades ago, you can get that equipment really cheaply today. If you feel the camera companies are ripping people off, start your own company and make products more affordable if you can. To make life more affordable for the ordinary person in the US, it would be far easier to make a publicly funded health care system and tax the billionaires, stop funding the military-industrial complex, fire the corrupt government, stop building golden ballrooms, and so on. These things are why life is appearing unaffordable to many people in the US. The rest of the world is used to things like cameras being expensive and don't complain so much since the fall hasn't been from a high tower made of gold and marble.

US has the third highest median wages (PPP) of all countries in the world (only Luxembourg and Switzerland are ahead in this metric). I think it's remarkable that Americans would complain about prices when those prices are much less within reach to people living in almost all other countries in the world, and even make it a point how supposedly THEY are feeling strained. That said, camera and lens prices in the US have increased because the US government has increased/created tariffs which the customers have to, in the end, pay in the form of increased prices. Yes, manufacturers also feel this in reduced sales and because of this many of them probably have gone into the red (making a loss), but there is not much they can do apart from concentrating on other parts of the worldwide market and trying to make up for the reduced US sales by trying to sell products elsewhere. The tariffs affect low and middle classes more than the upper class because they are flat taxes without progression. The US government is using the tariffs to increase relative taxation of the majority of the population to fund tax breaks to billionaires. This is not the camera companies' fault. It's the people who voted in the latest elections who selected these politicians into office. If you have working cameras and lenses, keep using them until they stop working, then have them repaired, until there are no more parts and the repairs are unsuccessful, and only then consider the purchase of new equipment. Now, of course, marketing will try to get you to buy new stuff. Stop following internet gear forums and concentrate on your work and art.

Even in the Soviet Union, the ordinary people understood "the state's truth" and truth as understood as what really happens as separate (they had different words for the two in Russian). Pravda means what the state would like people to believe and the people understood that it would be in the interests of the state that the regular people believe it, but they knew it was not really the truth. In private conversations people would talk about a different version of truth which is what actually happens. I would imagine Americans would eventually also learn to read the motives of the makers of the media content and evaluate it in that context. But it seems the desire to believe and follow an authority is deep in some subcultures of America, perhaps coming from religious history or something like that.

The US press has not been free in a long time. In 2025, the US were ranked the 57th most free country in the freedom of press index. It seems a small number of very rich people control the press and media in general, and truth-seeking reporting is not considered a high priority to these people. Arresting journalists is just another step towards an autocratic state.

US allows spectacularly large campaign contributions from companies and billionaires and so their interests are heavily weighed in elections, making the candidates they support (who then later owe them favors, legislative and executive decisions) more visible. The underlying belief that rich people should have political influence proportional to how much money they can spend is astonishing. Additionally, currently there are contributors from foreign countries and domestic entities to Trump's vanity projects such as Trump's Inauguration and the White House Ballroom project which seem to correlate with tariff exceptions to those who donated to Trump. The level of corruption is just mind-boggling. I think US needs to set term limits to Supreme Court justices and somehow change the system so that they cannot make political decisions but have to strictly follow the law. The constitution should be updated so that it's more clear in what is meant. The executive's ability to change the career officials should be limited so that the qualifications and experience are the deciding factors rather than political affiliation or willingness to break the law when the Great Leader says so. Another thing is that the election districts should be redrawn so that they can only be simple shapes such as squares or rectangles with limited aspect ratios to put an end to gerrymandering. The system's performance should be measured by how well the popular vote matches the actual election results, if there is too much of a discrepancy, then adjustments should be made. Otherwise there is no equal voting rights in effect. Politicians should be put out of office if it turns out they lied before electrions about what they were going to do if elected. And possibly prosecuted. I don't think there is such a thing as a "benevolent dictator". When given power, people's morality tends to crumble and soon enough they become malignant and won't leave office.

I think it's more likely that the ICE agents who terrorized ordinary people will find themselves in prison when all has been said than done (and when the authoritarian regime has fallen) and they should probably avoid antagonizing the people they ultimately are responsible to (the American people).

I think the problem is governments have not only voters but powerful supporters which can give financing to campaigns and influence policy in other ways such as lobbying. In particular, the pro-Israel lobby seems very powerful in many Western countries and anything that could be seen as being critical of Israel or its policies can really trigger these groups. Even if it is actually genocide that Israel is carrying out, many Christian groups somehow take it very personally and some may actually believe that friends of Israel get rewarded by their god and others punished; what Israel actually does seems irrelevant to these people, she is always right in their minds. Now, a government may be influenced by the pro-Israel groups and behave like civilized people in other areas of government, with this one exception. I wonder if Netanyahu really needs to kill as many Arabs as Hitler killed Jews before these people wake up, or if they even then would continue to support him. A retribution by killing 100 or 1000 times as many people as the opposing side has killed would seem normal Israeli policy and in their mind there is no need to being proportional or fair. I agree that the data collection both by companies and governments, potential cracking of secure communications between individuals, and facial recognition is government overreaching and the respect for privacy should be restored as a core value. There is nothing so bad happening in UK or EU at the moment that would warrant constant survellaince or reading private messages.

Nikon argued that the patents (in the lawsuit RED against Nikon) are invalid because RED demonstrated the patented features more than one year before applying for it, so this is against the rules and the patent should not have been granted. Jinni Tech used this argument before apparently successfully. Since Nikon argued the patents are invalid they should not enforce them otherwise they are being dishonest and opportunistic. The patents have been in any case interpreted too broadly and should be specific to a using particular methods described in the patent and not considered generic to all kinds of visually lossless raw compressions in video. The "invention" is rather trivial in any case since similar things (visually lossless raw compression) were used for stills compression before and the raw video file is just a sequence of stills images. Nikon's method of raw video compression is different from RED's and Intopix has a patent on it anyway. I think the RED patents were enforced in such a broad way simply because it was an American company and the purpose of the US Patent system is just to help American companies gain advantages in the market, whether merited or not.

You are correct that the economic impact of European countries replacing those services with our own systems would be huge on the US. Also the loss of influence would be significant. But I suspect somehow that Europe doesn't have the self-confidence to actually go through it. They should, though. But Trump's admin is quick to anger and reacts to even small threats to their plans. Starmer threatened to shut down Twitter/X after the latest scandal (of AI generated sexually explicit images of users based on their photos). JD Vance has said that if UK shut down UK residents' access to X then the US will pull out from Nato. This is how much they are intent on bringing a Trump style admin and politics to UK. I think we need to coordinate action with Canada, UK, EU, Japan, Australia and develop alternatives to all this technology and services and eventually sell all financial assets in the US and shut down Meta, Alphabet, X, use a new financial services system which not US based or influenced and simply live in a world free of US influence and coercion now that that country has revealed its true colors. The remaining problem is the majority of military power is now concentrated under undemocratic, autocratic governments which could cause problems if they feel they are losing the economic and social influence over the democratic and free parts of the world.

Good! But still there is hate speech published daily online on some platforms. Hopefully European countries soon shut those sites down before someone like Adolf or Nigel or Josif or Donald gets elected here alao and does their worst.

There is not that much in terms of news coverage from Iran in European and North American media even in normal times let alone when there are demonstrations and the regime is trying to subdue them (and cut off internet connections). I would guess that the government of Iran probably doesn't especially welcome journalists from the West and the European and North American populations are used to not seeing much coverage from that area, apart from the news about major war, missiles flying etc. We tend to want to see news from areas which are close to us geographically and similar to ours so we can understand and feel some closeness to it. There isn't that much news from South America or Australia, either. I would, to be honest, be happy to see fewer news from the USA and have the media focus on our own region and ignore Trump's latest deeds. But it seems that our media get much of their material from the US sources and so this is constantly coming up. What would be good, of course, is to have correspondents living in different parts of the world and living among the people there are really report what is happening from the perspective of the people living there. This includes Iran. But I suppose it's expensive to arrange and there are risks, if they don't like what you've been reporting.

Fueling hatred and chaos allows ordinary people's attention to be redirected from the fact that ever larger part of the money goes to the super-rich, and by having the working class and regular people fight with each other they cannot organize and demand fair wages and working conditions, and solutions to regular people's problems. The billionaires just want all the money to themselves and they want to bypass democracy using technological means. And now they have an autocrat who does their bidding. Yes, they are cruel people. They behave like they wanted to use up all the planet's resources before all things end (which they will not see in this current generation of billionaires, but their children or grandchildren might). However, only a part of the population believes the lies. Better education accessible to everyone is the solution. In Europe, education is a lot more egalitarian.

To host a large quantity of videos for streaming probably requires quite a bit of money and if there is no paywall then someone has to pay the bills and how to attract enough advertisers to cover them later. US has a lot of filthy rich people who can afford to arrange for these things to happen and take the risk. Europe spends its money taking care of people and so this money for investment is not as easily available unless funded by government or EU money. Since we don't want the business model to be based on data collection & IP theft, what would the business model be based on? Subscription doesn't work because US companies offer free services (but you are targed ads and your data is given to everyone somehow through intermediates and may be used for surveillance, political manipulation etc.) I think basic IT services (including video and photo hosting, forums, social media, basic tools) in Europe should be government funded or at least subsidized and all the infrastructure, code, and data must be located in Europe and preferably the code should be open source so that any manipulation or other illegality can be detected. And the platforms should be considered legally co-responsible for any illegal content or activities.