gdanmitchell
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 p.7 #15 · Fujifilm X100V Coming soon! | |
Let me preface what I'm about to post by writing that the X100v looks like an excellent camera, with improvements that seem like they would be welcomed. I have not used it, though I have used the X100f, and I liked the form factor and design of that camera a lot — and I was impressed with both its usability and the image quality it produced.
But those specifics aren't quite what I want to address.
My point is about the magnitude and important of changes, even when the changes are important, and our susceptibility to misjudging their significance.
If my accounting is correct, we've now seen the X100, X100s, X100t, X100f, and X100v. If you go back and read contemporary reviews around the time that each of these was released you will find a similar range of descriptions. At one end of the spectrum we read glowing, passionate descriptions that remark on how magical the camera is and how it exceeds anything that came before — one common sort of review works for added credibility by including something along the lines of [I]I used the older thing, it was OK, it didn't amaze me, but this one is amazing, profound, life-changing![/I]. (Another approach is to point out that the new one incrementally improves some of the weaknesses of the old one.)
Let's think about that for a moment. Someone claimed that (despite its less advanced technology, in the light of what we know now) that the X100 was "that camera" — the amazing, life-changing tool that would "take your photography to new levels!"
Then the X100s came out. Someone — sometimes the same people! — told us that IT was the amazing, life-changing super-camera that would forever alter our world... and that the formerly amazing X100 was now a deficient, sub-standard tool that should be replaced by the new Wonder Camera.
You know where I'm going with this, right?
On the arrival of the X100t... yes, we saw the same level of enthusiasm and claims, and the same charges against the older camera. (The facts about the improvements are real — it is the evaluation of their significance that we need to look at more closely.) Then the X100f arrived and IT was apparently an order of magnitude better than the now-deficient X100t.
Today the X100v arrives, and by some accounts — even though no one has had a chance to use it all THAT much yet — IT is the new Amazing Super Camera whose performance will Change Your Photography Forever!
In a couple of years there will be a X100w or something. It isn't hard to predict that when it arrives, with whatever improvements it implements, that we'll hear how it Finally Achieves What The X100 Series Was Aiming For, and that it is the Amazingly Consummate Super Camera.
First, an acknowledgment. Every single one of these successive models has been an improvement over the previous model in various ways. The sensor has improved, going to 16MP, then 24MP, then 26MP. AF performance has continued to improve. Now a tilting LCD has been added. Interface improvements have arrived with each new model. And so on.
My point is not that the newer cameras are not better. They are.
However, the question is "how much better?"
If your tendency is to regard the improvements in the new camera as making it stupendously better, twice as good, orders of magnitude beyond the previous model, something that will profoundly change your photography...
... you might want to chill out for a moment.
Folks had the same attitude, including a lot of the same reviewers and similar, to each of those earlier cameras. (I recall specifically how sexy the X100 looked to all of us way back when it came out.)
Imagine that each new iteration was actually, say, twice as good as the previous one. A bit of basic math is cause for suspicion.
X100 — Good
X100s — 200% of the X100
X100t — 200% of the X100s and 400% of the X100
X100f — 200% of the X100t, 400% of the X100s, 800% of the X100
X100v —200% of X100f, 400% of X100t, 800% of X100s,1600% better than X100
Really?
;-)
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