I am an amateur photographer, and I can't understand why the major camera brands (Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fuji, etc.) aren't open at least to the concept of SDK's to control their cameras (let alone opening the lens mount specifications)...
It would make their cameras much more flexible and useful, thus perhaps gaining some users that currently use smartphones where it seems there is greater control over and integration with the cameras. On the other side, if one can implement in software what the producer doesn't want to implement in firmware, they might miss some future upgrade sales...
I am currently thinking on buying a FujiFilm X-T4, and I was pleased to see there is a SDK, but now, finding out that using the SDK is practically forbidden (until the warranty ends), it makes me stop and think about my decision... What could the SDK do to the camera so that it voids the warranty? (On the other hand, given the quality of camera brand produced software, I can imagine the quality of the code that went into it...) :)
For the bigger players, they miss out on market segmentation. An EOS M with Magic Lantern has a number of features that are featured on Canon's cinema line, for example. The M is perhaps no longer competitive in key ways, but had ML been available with today's level of polish in 2012, it would have eaten into higher-margin products.
Fuji is perhaps best poised to enable open development -- their pricing structure is more around hardware variations on a common sensor/processing than strict differentiation in capability.
The far future of camera development probably does look like open-source (or, at a minimum, common-versioned closed-source) software/firmware riding on commercially-manufactured hardware platforms (just like computers today). We're not there yet, but the technical success of Magic Lantern shows that the door is open.
A dark-horse entrant like Sigma could, in addition to Fuji, be a hardware vendor that could crack open a "commoditize your competition" market.
In the meantime, everyone except professionals and image-quality obsessives has moved to phone cameras, for which Google and Apple have developed incredible software. It's been obvious for at least ten years that camera makers need to improve their software, and they've not done so, or very minimally done so.
I don’t think that Canon and similar could offer anything to compete with smart phones. While smart phone cameras have gotten much better, the real secret sauce is that everyone already has a smart phone. It’s not that smart phones beat DSLRs, its that they got sufficiently good and everyone got them for other reasons. Not having to buy and carry a second device is quite the market advantage, it turns out.
Frankly, no dedicated camera is ever going to win back users with software features, and it is extremely unlikely that Canon or Nikon could out compete Apple and Google in this area. It makes much more sense for Canon to continue to serve hobbyists and pros with features that phones cannot offer, rather than trying to complete on software.
Maybe they're working on something big, but Canon, et al. to me appear to be headed the way of Kodak, at least in the consumer market.
They would have a hard enough time with casual users just because the camera on their phone is "free" (included in the price and perhaps more importantly, the form factor). But I don't even see any attempt to compete with Apple or Android cameras.
I use a full-frame SLR, and love my lenses. But I put it at even money whether I will ever buy another.
My experience is that the phone can do just as well as the real camera for shots which are easy to take. I still go for the real camera in situations where it's not so easy. (High zoom, need to focus on something other than the foreground (say, an animal with vegetation in the way), slow shutter speed to compensate for inadequate light etc.)
For me it is not a matter of obsession, I just enjoy using the equipment. I also take loads of photographies with an iPhone and an Android phone and, invariably, they fall short of the full frame or APS images. Specially when you print them on anything larger than A4. I agree that for screen only, phones are enough.
Raw video on M magic lantern looks absolutely stunning unless you explicitly need 4K to my eye and manipulation beats hands down droll quality of compressed video.
> I am an amateur photographer, and I can't understand why the major camera brands (Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fuji, etc.) aren't open at least to the concept of SDK's to control their cameras (let alone opening the lens mount specifications)...
At least Canon and Nikon do.
I use the Canon and Nikon SDKs in a product for work, and there are plenty of third party applications which allow control of their cameras.
They might not officially offer support for them, but they do keep them updated for new cameras and I have had bugs fixed and questions answered.
There are open source projects using these SDKs - See NINA [0] as just one example.
The Sony mirrorless cameras used to have some third party "apps" that were pretty cool but apparently are now all discontinued. And what the Magic Lantern team did for Canon cameras (especially the 5DmkIII) was absolutely amazing. I still miss features to this day.
If you are looking for a new camera also definitely checkout the new Panasonic Lumix line of full frame cameras - they are damn amazing. Extremely intuitive UI, tons of features you do not find in other cameras, amazing video (especially with an external recorder - you can do 6K raw video) and built like a tank. And they all use L-Mount which is shared among multiple camera manufacturers with tons of lenses available from Sigma and others. The Panasonic lenses are pricey but also extremely high quality (probably because they also design super high end cinema glass)
I strongly suspect it's just easier from a customer support point of view, if you develop an application that causes the camera to overheat and fail.
They really don't want to send you a new camera. The dangerous thing with code controlling hardware directly, is absent safe guards you can easily exceed the mechanical limits of the device.
This is why seriously overclocking a CPU will definitely void the warranty, but at the same time CPUs are often marketed based on how well they handle overclocking.
But in this case, the camera processor still retains final control over the commands from the SDK. This isn't a customer firmware, just a networking interface that simulates pushing buttons and changing menus. The firmware has just as much ability to reject damaging commands as it would if the user was physically entering them.
An external intervalometer can. And in any case, both in both the SDK and the intervalometer case, the camera's OS is free to just stop functioning, to prevent any possible damage to the sensor or shutter mechanism due to overuse.
That was my thought, also. You very well might be able to do things with the SDK that no human can do. The Therac-25 disaster comes to mind--a sufficiently skilled operator could inadvertently command it to become a death ray. (The trigger condition was to change it's operating mode while it was still executing the previous mode change command. Your average operator couldn't enter orders fast enough, but the fastest people could. It was supposed to work at high power with a target in the way to convert the electron beam to x-rays, or at low power as a direct electron beam. Confuse it and you got the high power mode with no target in the way and a fried patient.
So if an application on your PC makes it overheat and break the PC is at fault for being defective and you get to RMA it? What about a laptop? And a Camera is different how?
In the end it would be faulty / bad design that makes the Camera fail. And that is absolutely a valid reason the RMA it.
> So if an application on your PC makes it overheat and break the PC is at fault for being defective and you get to RMA it?
Kernel code can absolutely brick your PC due to how much it can do. This could be fixed at a UEFI/microcode level, but not without taking a lot of control away from the OS and the end user.
Japanese gov/corporations have a natural aversion to directly dealing with customers at scale.
They’ll want a proxy layer of third party corporations, which can then deal with the minutia of exposing it to end customers. Canon/Nikon/Fuji/Olympus have SDKs and partnerships, they just don’t want to deal with the individual customers.
If I had to put it another way, it's in their DNA to outsource scaling problems to middlemen.
The country's whole economic structure is a pyramid of sub-contracting companies that live and die on absorbing the scaling/operational risks for the bigger fishes.
> I can't understand why the major camera brands (Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fuji, etc.) aren't open at least to the concept of SDK's to control their cameras
Because why give something out for free when you can offer that stuff only in the most expensive models?
Well, the camera is already ~1.5-2K EUR (without lens), thus I think the price already covers it... But if I must put a price on it, I would say ~100-200 EUR, but then it should come with at least 5 years of updates, and it should work on Linux. :)
Also, just supporting some basic features, like shutter and all the exposure settings, shouldn't be that hard... I bet all of these are already implemented, because many cameras have smartphone applications that do allow to control all of these.
Thus, the largest cost would be mostly documentation, packaging and support for the various OS. Which, although might end up being quite a non trivial amount, it could be seen as money well invested in brand building, especially since now, in 2022, only professionals or invested amateurs are buying these dedicated cameras...
> Which, although might end up being quite a non trivial amount, i
Right. Engineers usually underestimate how much this really is. Often by an order of magnitude or two.
I'm pretty confident their margins aren't fat enough they'd be happy considering eating 1-2% (i.e. your numbers) on something that might help a fraction of install base. Hell they may already not be making next to nothing on these bodies.
So it would be a real project, and it would cost them enough that (using your rough numbers) they'd need to sell probably a few thousand support contracts a year to justify doing it properly (supporting multiple cameras, customer support, testing etc.). So I imagine if they have looked at it, they've balanced that against the "brand building" as you put it, and aren't sure it's a net win.
The prosumer space is funny for stuff like this, as people are often quite capable but not really willing to pay enough to justify the cost of real support. Some companies solve this by throwing something unsupported/unofficial over the wall, others (or their lawyers) decide the whole thing isn't worth the hassle.
I would happily pay a subscription for an iOS app. The usual argument against this is being commodified, but for the vast majority of the market, Canon has already been commodified in the shape of Apple and Samsung phones. They have to compete now on how good their hardware is, but their "stupid" hardware doesn't cut it without smart software. Their time in the broader marketplace is gone. They can get a small amount of marketshare back if they can make their hardware work with iPhones and Galaxies. Possibly just iPhones.
I've got the cash for a great canon camera. I used to carry one around with me all the time. The size isn't what's stopping me. It's the UX.
Canon has an app for that. Actually, a couple of apps for Android and iPhone. They also have desktop apps (mac and pc) that I use to control everything from focus to shutter speed, etc. Very useful to nail the focus on a large screen for reprography work.
I'm not sure they have looked at it, and I'm not sure they'd even examine this from an ROI point of view.
Camera makers (even camera divisions in more "high-tech" companies like Sony) are very much traditional hardware-first companies, I'm fairly certain he idea of opening up the cameras is just alien to them.
For a while in the late 1990s, there was a nominally-open camera OS called Digita. I had a camera that it ran on, and none of the skills to take advantage of it, but I remember someone built DOOM for it so that was neat.
People were writing Digita programs to do things like eat NMEA0183 GPGLL sentences and stuff them into the EXIF tags, because USB wasn't ubiquitous yet and a lot of cameras still had RS232 ports and cameras certainly didn't have native geotagging yet, but someone figured out it would be useful.
It was pretty wild, and I don't know why it flopped.
In terms of mount spec, I think Four Third and the successor Micro Four Third is open specification, then the Sony E mount later (not at launch time) open the specification.
The later might not be true, may be it is specification available but not open.
And practically any mount has been reversed engineered in their electronic protocols. (Edit: but each company has their own secret sauce here.)
As a digression, there are open source projects for running softwares or at least custom firmware in cameras. Famous examples are 2 projects on Canon compact and DSLR lines. Others includes firmware on Panasonic cameras, and then apps on Sony cameras. Sony may have killed the app capability due to this in recent models (or may be they only killed it because the store isn’t profitable.) If true that proves your point that they hate people tinkering it.
Canon always has been silent about the custom softwares running on their cameras including the famous 5D Mark II for raw videos. But later on as there’s rumors that the ID C cinematic camera ($10,000+ specialized in cine) is not much different than the then current 1D mode (may be 1D X, can’t remember) and it may be possible to hack it and install the 1D C firmware on the 1D camera (which is a relative bargain around $6000 or may be more.) Those rumors call out the open source project for help, and Canon for the first time spoke about the subject and signal that they will sue if anyone tamper with their flagship camera. Then the open source project responded saying they are not interested.
So again it’s another support on how much they hate us to tinker with our camera.
I’m guessing it may be a Japanese culture thing. Nintendo also has similar behavior. But may be not.
> In terms of mount spec, I think Four Third and the successor Micro Four Third is open specification, then the Sony E mount later (not at launch time) open the specification.
They're not. MFT can be licensed by "anyone", Sony E can be licensed only for producing lenses under additional NDA-covered criteria. DSLR mounts were sometimes licensed in a somewhat similar fashion, e.g. Tokina had a license for Nikon's F-mount.
> I am an amateur photographer, and I can't understand why the major camera brands (Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fuji, etc.) aren't open at least to the concept of SDK's to control their cameras (let alone opening the lens mount specifications)...
I don't know about the other brands but Nikon cameras have implemented PTP in full forever which allows you to set virtually every option remotely, albeit over USB. I'm assuming the other brands are similar, because that's how tethered shooting works. There is no camera-specific SDK or driver needed for this. The bluetooth and Wifi stuff is proprietary ad vendor-specific as far as I know, though.
This is a bit off topic, but I have a Sony a3000 and a6000. I have a non-sony USB camera timer/remote [1], and I'm pretty pleased with it. There seem to be similar products out there.
If there is no USB SDK released by Sony, how are these manufacturers creating this USB control devices? Do they partner with camera vendors behind NDAs? Do they reverse engineer the protocol? Just curious.
Not sure, but wanted to toss out there's apparently a github project that does USB Control for at least some Alphas. [0].
In the case of USB type things, it's probably a bit easier to 'sniff' traffic and reverse engineer the protocol if one wants to. And while some MFGs are notorious for being 'protective' around their protocols (i.e. lenses) I think remote controls are likely not as much a bread and butter to them, so there's less incentive (especially without obsoleting a lot of existing kit.)
Gating features allows them to wait for a future model to release them there and drive sales. There's not much blood left to wring from the digital camera stone.
They don’t want to cannibalize the other product markets. Canon for example was caught up with the video features that they added to the 5d back in the day. it sparked a video revolution, but destroyed their camcorder sector. same thing again when they released “cinema” specd cameras, that really just had different firmware than the photography cameras, but priced much higher.
A standard camera lens will not remain in focus while zooming. Cinema lenses have to--imposing restrictions that cause the lenses to be a lot more expensive. (A cinema lens works fine for still photography, but why pay the price/weight premium?)
Parfocalness can be emulated in firmware (by adjusting the focus as the zoom changes).
What you probably should have pointed out is the opposite property: keeping the same focal length while changing the focus distance. This can't be emulated in software because camera lenses don't have a motor on the zoom (plus primes don't have a zoom). Some cine lenses do achieve this by moving a zoom-like group (I think all the ARRI master primes do) and not just by being telecentric on the exit side.
Most big global brands are getting into rent seeking because the technology allows it, even company's like GE aka General Electric have diversified from making light bulbs to making money from finance activities so there is bound to be a reason for this avoidance to have an industry wide sdk. They may also want to avoid being labelled a cartel like this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel because legislation isnt brilliant either, just look at dieselgate, all the major motor manufacturers were engaged in the activities but because of US and UK national debts and deficits, Obama went after Merkel and Germany to get them to spend some money and they didnt so dieselgate appeared! Things are never what they claim to be in the news either.
However the flip side is, many global brands sponsor directly or indirectly university's around the world, and research is not cheap, if you saw the recent iphone lens exploded diagram a bit like this one https://wccftech.com/apple-working-new-iphone-camera/ you would see there is a lot of work going into all sorts of devices and the low hanging fruit from optics was harvested decades ago.
> Most big global brands are getting into rent seeking because the technology allows it, even company's like GE aka General Electric have diversified from making light bulbs to making money from finance activities ...
That's factually wrong. While Finance was a big part of GE in the early 2000s it all pretty much unraveled after the financial crisis[1].
Money quote :
"GE Capital is the financial services division of General Electric.[1]
The company currently only runs one division, GE Energy Financial Services; it had provided additional services in the past; however, those units were sold between 2013 and 2018."
The sony cameras support a fair amount of external control, I’ve never written code for it directly but third-party apps have no issue other than the requirement that you connect to the camera as a wifi access point, which is a pain but understandable.
It would make their cameras much more flexible and useful, thus perhaps gaining some users that currently use smartphones where it seems there is greater control over and integration with the cameras. On the other side, if one can implement in software what the producer doesn't want to implement in firmware, they might miss some future upgrade sales...
I am currently thinking on buying a FujiFilm X-T4, and I was pleased to see there is a SDK, but now, finding out that using the SDK is practically forbidden (until the warranty ends), it makes me stop and think about my decision... What could the SDK do to the camera so that it voids the warranty? (On the other hand, given the quality of camera brand produced software, I can imagine the quality of the code that went into it...) :)