Once upon a time – from the Bronze age onwards, humans used little known exotic materials like metal and leather to make tools.
It twas ever the case, until something strange happened with digital cameras.
Suddenly the ability to mass produce a tool for profit became more important than the tool itself.
And ever since the bronze age faded into history and the age of the DSLR began, I have been gripping a revolting lump of plastic.
So I have decided to start a campaign, to bring real materials back into the world of DSLRs so they can once again look like the first ever SLR.
Which as you can see, the Contax-S from 1949 is quite a bit nicer than a 550D.
Metal and leather, exotic they may be in the lexicon of the DSLR designer’s handbook, are actually quite cheap materials. I recently bought 4 table legs from Ikea which were made of steel. The price? 2 euros each. I’ve also bought a pizza cutter, a fork and a drawing pin – all considerably cheaper than the Panasonic GH2.
Sometimes I wear a tasteful jacket made of leather. This cost all of ÂŁ100 and it’s made of more leather than the Canon have put on camera hand grips in the last 20 years. That’s some serious economising going on there.
So really, how hard can it be? Should materials like aluminium, carbon fibre and leather feature in our DSLRs? Of course they should.
Letus make a viewfinder from carbon fibre called the Hawk. Tripod legs come in carbon fibre flavour. Cameras costing 5x as much strangely don’t. A bulky and heavy faux leather coated magnesium alloy body with plastic trimmings is the best we get!
A small sheet of leather shaped round a camera hand grip in place of faux rubber would cost a manufacturer probably ÂŁ2 more per camera in materials plus probably ÂŁ20 more per unit in machining and tooling. That, by the way, is a complete guess, but you get the idea. I’d happily pay ÂŁ200 more to have that on my DSLR. Okay – maybe not that much, let’s not give them an excuse to rip us off even further.
Recently Fuji took a step in the right direction with the innovative X10. This actually has a design which isn’t embarrassing.
The only issue I have with the X10 is that it’s high quality materials seem to be an excuse for a retro design, but I’d like to see brave new futuristic designs with high quality materials. Not just the aping of the past.
Imagine a GH2 with a carbon fibre body, leather hand grip and metal dials. It doesn’t even have to be that bling. Just a stronger lens mount would be nice!
Imagine too how good a metal bodied 60D would look in dark red with silver alloy trimmings. Like a premium version of the red GH1. That’s so much better and more forward thinking than *yet another* magnesium alloy DSLR with plastic bits on the back, or worse the usual plastic body with even worse plastic bits which drop off!
So just to recap – A light carbon fibre shell, steel lens mount, aluminium dials and buttons plus a real leather grip on the 5D Mark III please Canon. And make it pronto.
