Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Sometimes the world changes and you have to alter your product in what may seem to be an evil way.

Samsung recently announced that they are including WiFi in their higher-end cameras. I can see some of the engineers and scientists at Samsung wincing in pain. Excellence in cameras is about lenses and mirrors and geometry. WiFi? That is RF communications. What does that have to do with a camera?

The world changes; paradigms shift.

Cameras no longer capture light on chemically treated surfaces. It is now about charge-coupled devices and processing on computers. The lenses and mirrors are still there, but the user is carrying a computer image capture device. The data captured (data, not photons) are sent to a computer. You can use wires or you can use wireless, but you have to move the data.

Paradigm shifts are not new. The mechanical wristwatch changed to a digital wristwatch. Springs, gears, and levers were replaced by integrated circuits.

People who understood wristwatches, however, knew that wristwatches are items of jewelry – not time pieces. The jewelry fashion designers said goodbye to their mechanical engineer colleagues and welcomed the chip makers and computer programmers. They tolerated the changes so they could continue to design fashion jewelry.

People who understood cameras, and still understand computer image capture devices, know that the reason behind the camera is to record a moment forever. They have to say goodbye to the chemists and hello to chip designers and computer programmers.

Paradigm shifts tend to bring necessary evils, and those necessary evils sometimes take funny forms and have unfamiliar faces.