Monthly Archives: January 2006

Nikon plans to abandon film cameras

Posted on by

Sign of the times. According to today’s New York Times,

The Nikon Corporation, the Japanese camera maker, said Thursday that it would stop making most of its film cameras and lenses in order to focus on digital cameras.

The company, based in Tokyo, is the latest to join an industrywide shift toward digital photography, which has exploded in popularity. Rivals like Kodak and Canon have already shifted most of their camera production into digital products.

Nikon said it would halt production of all but two of its seven film cameras and would also stop making most lenses for those cameras. The company will halt production of the film camera models “one by one,” though it refused to specify when.

A company spokesman said Nikon made the decision because sales of film cameras have plunged. In the most recent fiscal year ended March 2005, Nikon said that film camera bodies accounted for 3 percent of the 180 billion yen ($1.5 billion) in sales at the company’s camera and imaging division. That is down from 16 percent the previous year.

By contrast, sales of digital cameras have soared, the company said, jumping to 75 percent of total sales in the year ended March 2005, from 47 percent three years earlier. Scanners and other products account for the remainder of the division’s sales.

“The market for film cameras has been shrinking dramatically,” the company spokesman, Akira Abe, said. “Digital cameras have become the norm.”

So my lovely old Nikon F3 is destined to become a valuable antique? Maybe, maybe not. From another part of the CES forest, David Pogue (also of the NYT) reports:

In one CES panel, an analyst from InfoTrends noted that cameraphones now outnumber non-cameraphones. She also noted that 78% of under-18-year-olds take a cameraphone picture at least once a week.

Another InfoTrends analyst reported, surprisingly, that digital camera sales have actually peaked, and has [sic] declined since last year. Meanwhile, the manufacturers are feeling the pain: Konica Minolta has exited the Canadian market, Sony and Olympus have cut camera production and workforces, and the Kyocera/Yashica/Contax corporation has exited the digital camera market entirely.

Letter to Apple Support

Posted on by

From Jason Kottke.

Hello,

I purchased a new Powerbook three weeks ago. It was working fine until a few hours ago when you announced the new Intel-powered MacBook Pro at MacWorld and I started to cry. “Four to fives times faster,” I sobbed, “a built-in iSight, and a brighter, wider screen.”

My display, while not as bright or large as the new MacBook Pro display, illuminated my wet cheeks and red, swollen eyes as my tears rained down on the backlit keyboard. An acrid smell rose up from inside the smooth metal machine as my salty tears joined with the electronics, joyfully releasing the electrons from their assigned silicon pathways to freely arc into forbidden areas of the computer and elsewhere, including, somewhat painfully, my hands.

Is this covered under my warranty and if so, can you send me a new MacBook Pro as a replacement, please? Thank you for your time,

-jason

Hmmm… Quentin’s PowerBook had a dreadful accident some time back and his insurance company paid up a few days ago. But instead of rushing out and buying a new machine he decided to wait for Steve Jobs’s MacWorld keynote, and is now looking very smug at the prospect of a major coup in the Gadget Wars! Bah.

No ‘Intel Inside’ outside!

Posted on by

Surprise, surprise! Apple’s new desktop and laptop computers have Intel CPUs, but according to Silicon.com

they don’t show the chipmaker’s presence on the outside.

Most brand-name PCs that use Intel processors take part in the “Intel Inside” programme, which gives the computer makers marketing dollars for displaying the chipmaker’s logo on their products and in their advertising.

But Apple decided not to sign on to the programme with the line-up of Intel-based Macs that CEO Steve Jobs introduced at the Macworld Expo on Tuesday.

Er, why not? The answer, according to Good Morning, Silicon Valley, is because the ‘Intel Inside’ logo “evokes a gag reflex” in many longterm Apple customers!

A little in-joke for techies

Posted on by

From CNET News.com…

In a bit of unintended humor, Wall Street closed Apple’s stock Tuesday, the day the company unveiled its first Intel processor-based computers at Macworld, at $80.86.

(Note for non-techies: the Intel 8086 processor was the CPU that spawned the processor architecture of the Wintel PC family.)

Many thanks to Neil MacNeil for spotting it.

Right-wing madness in the NYT

Posted on by

The incomparable Scott Rosenberg has picked up on something I’ve been wondering about, namely why is the New York Times giving so much op-ed space to right-wing crazies?

Part of his answer reads:

There must be an argument going through someone’s head at the Times that goes like this: Their newspaper is under assault from the right, most recently because of its exposure of the Bush administration’s illegal-wiretap power grab; so it must achieve the impression of “balance” by presenting these op-ed voices from the right. But really, to balance the Cato people you’d have to find some wild-eyed leftist arguing that, say, all oil companies should be nationalized tomorrow.

The greatest achievement of the right over the past decade — oh, setting aside the seizure of “all three branches of government” in the wake of a disputed election, the plundering of the Treasury, and the derailing of the war on al-Qaida — is this: By a wide swath of American opinion-makers, “balance” is understood to mean that the usual welter of mainstream American voices needs to be weighed down by a gang of beady-eyed ideologues on right-wing think-tank payrolls who can barely construct a sensible argument.

US journalism is in a desperate state — and has been ever since Reagan’s time. Part of the problem is the delusion that ‘balancing’ opposing views is a way of avoiding bias. Paul Krugman memorably satirised this delusion in an amusing parable. If George W. Bush said that the earth is flat, the US media would report it under the headline: “Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth.”

But the earth isn’t flat, and any journalist with a commitment to the truth has an obligation to say so. Otherwise he’s just lending credibility to nonsense by implying that it must somehow be weighed equally with sense.

“Balance as bias” is also the basis for the lunatic proposition that creationism (aka “Intelligent Design”) ought to be accorded the same epistemological status as evolution in US schools.

Download news

Posted on by

From Good morning, Silicon Valley…

OK, maybe there’s something to this … what do they call it? … this downloading thing after all. The yuletide season proved a lucrative one for the recording industry. Driven by a plethora of iPods left under tree and menorah, legal downloads achieved a new record in the week between Christmas and New Year’s. According to Nielsen SoundScan, legal downloads nearly hit the 20 million mark in those seven days — almost three times the number of tracks downloaded in the same period the year before. That’s a phenomenal spike and one that suggests we’ve undergone a fundamental shift in the way we consume music. And indeed we have: NPD Group recently confirmed that MP3 player sales now exceed CD player sales in the U.S.

Quote of the day

Posted on by

We think the internet isn’t a web page or a destination for your PC any more. It’s an infrastructure and a delivery vehicle for communications and experiences in entertainment. It’s about ease of use and open platforms that connect the internet to any device that you will be manufacturing.

Terry Semel, Yahoo Chairman, speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show, Las Vegas, January 5, 2006. (Reported in Financial Times January 7 2005.)