Lately I’ve been seeing a number of folk asking for a dirt-simple Z camera. This ranges from a Zf—basically a full frame Zfc using the Z5 as the base instead of the Z50—down to a “return to rangefinder” in some form of SP. I even heard recently from someone who claims to have an inroad to Nikon development (unverified at this point) that such models have been prototyped.
I can’t ascertain that this is true, though, let alone what the word “prototyped" might actually mean. A lot of things get tested in Nikon R&D, but at different levels of interest. To me, a true prototype is a complete preproduction version of what will be a final model. Everything else is just a mule (a term for new goodies inside tested in an older body) or a mockup (a hand-made thing to assess some particular function or design approach).
As Goto-san discovered when he originally had the idea of making a “legacy” camera in the Nikon Df, one problem is simple: you’re not going to do such a camera from scratch, as it would be too costly for the likely sales. Thus, any “legacy” camera had to be built mostly from the modern parts bin, including image sensor, image processor, and more.
Goto-san ended up using the D600 as the base for the Df, as it was the simplest, least expensive set of parts to cannibalize. He even threw away the video capabilities that the Df could have inherited, yet that didn’t necessarily make the camera all that much simpler (it still had Live View). He did use the D4 image sensor, though, which was a surprise. I suspect that D4 sales were lower than expected and this meant that Nikon needed to up the volume of use for that sensor to fulfill contractual obligations with the fab. Two birds, one stone.
Still, when you think of what was inside the Df, it didn’t exactly match what was outside. As I wrote in my review “overall, handling is the worst aspect of the Df, and by a long margin.” How can that be when the point was a legacy-respecting simplification?
Put simply, it occurs because the post-D5 platform Nikon used for DSLRs doesn’t blend well with simpler, earlier film SLR mechanics. Moreover, if you leave something out from the new technology, someone will complain about that, so you tend to include more than you probably should. Indeed, when you do surveys of people asking for “old school design” they’re still asking for a sophisticated autofocus system and more. Modern stuff that requires modern controls.
Someone recently posted a recipe for a Zf that involved removing lots of menus and menu items. While I’d agree that Nikon’s gotten a little loose and sprawling with their menus as of late, the real problem isn’t that we have too many options, it’s that they’re more difficult to find and use than they should be.
Nikon at one time in the consumer DSLRs tried having a dual-nature menu system set by, ironically, a menu item: simplified and advanced. The problem was that you couldn’t last long with the simplified menus before you found something you needed the advanced ones for. So everyone ended up with the advanced menus being active. Nikon noticed that, so got rid of the simplified menus ;~).
In return, we got at least one Auto exposure mode that disabled things in the menus. Why disable and not remove? Because you need to train new users how to eventually find advanced things, and if you don't, they don’t transition from novice to advanced very easily. Yet disabling menus becomes a frustrating thing for the user, particularly when the camera won’t tell you why something is disabled.
In other words, Nikon has several times tried wrapping themselves around the “simpler/advanced” conundrum, and not done a particularly good job with the simpler side. Indeed, the reason most of us are Nikon users is because of the advanced side.
Oh, and then there’s this: removing menu items doesn’t make it cheaper to produce the camera! Adding dials makes it more expensive. Spending development time trying to isolate out old code that isn’t used is about as expensive as using the old code and adding a bit of new, and requires just as much QA testing. Most potential customers will think that a simpler camera should be less expensive. In the case of the Df and Zfc, that’s not proven to be true. They’re both more expensive than the “modern” camera they’re based on.
Thus, I’d argue that you can’t just remove stuff from the current menus to make a simpler camera, while adding old-school dials doesn’t make things any simpler either if the dials begin to lie to you (as happens on the Df and Zfc). I believe that if you want to design a simpler camera, you have to do it from scratch.
Moreover, I’d argue that to make such a simpler camera you need to revisit and throw out a lot of assumptions. For instance, no card slot. Just put a reasonable amount of storage in the camera internally and make sure both the wired and wireless ways of moving images off the camera work, preferably automatically (it’s supposed to be a simpler camera, remember?). Curiously, we probably also end up with no removable battery, too. I say “curiously” because we’re going exactly down the route that Apple did with the iPhone. No mini-SD card slot, no changeable battery.
Apple is not a stupid developer. Far from it. Indeed, I’d tend to say that they’ve proven themselves over and over to be among the very best, if not the very best, high technology developer solving for simple user cases for a protracted period of time. They understand the tension between “simpler” and “more capable.”
Personally, I grew up with MRDs (marketing requirement documents) being the focus of development, and used that approach in my Silicon Valley career. Indeed, with one seminal software product I helped design and create, I wrote the entire manual for it prior to there being any software architecture or source code for it, because a user manual is sort of the ultimate marketing requirement document. It outlines everything the product can do. For another massive project, we designed the entire UI before any real useful code had been written, again because the UI dictated what the product would do.
So let’s pursue that for a bit.
Why do we need a simpler camera? Two reasons, basically: (1) as an entrance point for new, younger customers, and (2) as a pocketable carry-everywhere camera for dedicated enthusiasts. When you look at it this way, you can see why the smartphones are winning: they accomplish both at a time when Nikon has backed far away from Coolpix (as have most of the other camera companies).
I’ve already put one item on the MRD: small (pocketable).
But such a camera also has to distinguish itself from smartphones, which probably means “must have larger sensor" (APS-C is currently the best balance between capability and price). But in that section of the MRD comes a bunch of things that the camera companies aren’t doing, particularly in their pocket cameras. The whole notion of constant capture and building-an-image from that is present in virtually all smartphones, but missing in Coolpix or other simpler, pocketable cameras. It’s more than possible to do. Heck, Nikon even had BSS (best shot selection) for awhile, and they had their equivalent to the iPhone’s Live Images, so it’s clear that the Nikon engineering team was playing with technologies made possible by having a constant stream of data. Disclosure: remember, I helped develop the QuickCam in the early 90’s, which was all about the constant stream of data from an image sensor and what we could do with it using the computer’s CPU. For almost a decade I didn’t think about one moment in time except as a result of selecting it from a stream of data.
You probably see where I’m going here: I personally don’t think a Zfc is an improvement over the Z50 (other than things like adding USB Power Delivery), and I don’t think I’ll see a Zf or any other “legacy-style” Z be an improvement over, oh, say, a Z5. A simpler iCamera that really sells would probably be more Coolpix than Z—though it may use Z DX lenses—and requires a different mindset to create.
Put me down as not wanting a Zf. Or a Zfm. Or a Zsp. It would solve no user problem I currently have—or which you might currently have—and would ostensibly be just the same marketing problem Nikon had with the original Df. I might be interested in an iZ camera if it were small and capable enough without removing advanced control of critical items.
