2021 has been a busy year for flagship cameras from Nikon and Canon and while Sony made a significant impact after finally announcing the a7 IV, the company might feel that it is now behind the competition. With that in mind, what does it have in store for 2022?
Tony Northrup has put together a series of predictions regarding Sony’s plans for the coming year, suggesting the arrival of four new cameras, one of which would be very different from everything that has come before. While I think Northrup might be right, I wonder if Sony is still failing to capitalize on its camera and smartphone divisions and I’ve long criticized manufacturers for the fact that it’s easier to send images from a fridge than it is from your full frame camera.
Camera manufacturers have long struggled with connectivity. Wifi eats batteries and connecting is rarely an intuitive process, and Bluetooth is notoriously unreliable, with full automation crippled by its tendency to drop packets of data — something that’s fine for audio, but catastrophic for images. As a manufacturer of both phones and cameras, Sony has the opportunity to design a new system and establish a new standard of how these devices talk to one another.
By the way, if you think fingerprint authentication is the future, you might be surprised at how easily it can be hacked.
What do you expect from Sony next year? Let us know in the comments below.
If the supply chain doesn't sort itself they'll have problems mass producing anything.
Most of my shooting is in the wilderness and outside the US and there is no network access of any kind. Camera connectivity is the last thing I would ask for.