Riddle me this...

Lightmancer

Legend
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Sunny Frimley
Name
Bill Palmer
Triggered by Amin's recent thread about a camera that can upload to a phone in realtime, I would like to pose the following questions...

1. Why are there no cameras with SIM cards?

2. Why are physical SIM cards still a thing anyway?

3. Why does my phone have a biometric sensor but my camera doesn't?

Now, I know that the imaging capabilities of portable telephones are improving, and that some manufacturers, notably Panasonic and Samsung have produced what I would refer to as "converged devices" - essentially telephones with Zoom lenses bolted on - but why can I not today buy a pro-spec DSLR with full connectivity built-in?

Which brings me to my second point. Why do portable telephones still rely upon a SIM card anyway? Why, in short, do we have a physical dongle? The tech is there - when you get a new laptop, tablet, TV, etc, you simply log in. Why the SIM? It feels like an anachronism.

Which brings me to 3. When I leave the house to take pictures, I carry a £1000 portable telephone and a £1600 camera plus lenses. If I am mugged, my portable telephone is protected by a biometric sensor; it is useless without my finger to fire it up. But my more expensive camera can be picked up and used by anyone. Similarly my lenses are "unprotected". Again, the tech is there to protect high end cameras with biometric sensor tech built into the grip; it would be a simple matter to "pair" lenses with a specific camera body or bodies and render it useless if connected to another camera.

Someone like Sony even has all the necessary tech in-house to do all of the above.

Am I missing something...?
 
I can only guess that the engineers and designers decided that photographers do not want those things in their cameras. Or that blue tooth/WiFi phone connectivity is enough. As for the continued use of SIM cards. I don’t even have a guess there.
 
SIM cards are mini computers, powered by the host mobile device. It's not trivial to port them over into phones but that's what currently is happening with "eSIM" technology. It's still very young technology.

I predict within 5 years we get new kinds of mobile plans where you subscribe to a plan and then you make yourself these virtual eSIM "cards", one for each of your devices (they all share the one subscription).
 
Triggered by Amin's recent thread about a camera that can upload to a phone in realtime, I would like to pose the following questions...

1. Why are there no cameras with SIM cards?

2. Why are physical SIM cards still a thing anyway?

3. Why does my phone have a biometric sensor but my camera doesn't?

Now, I know that the imaging capabilities of portable telephones are improving, and that some manufacturers, notably Panasonic and Samsung have produced what I would refer to as "converged devices" - essentially telephones with Zoom lenses bolted on - but why can I not today buy a pro-spec DSLR with full connectivity built-in?

Which brings me to my second point. Why do portable telephones still rely upon a SIM card anyway? Why, in short, do we have a physical dongle? The tech is there - when you get a new laptop, tablet, TV, etc, you simply log in. Why the SIM? It feels like an anachronism.

Which brings me to 3. When I leave the house to take pictures, I carry a £1000 portable telephone and a £1600 camera plus lenses. If I am mugged, my portable telephone is protected by a biometric sensor; it is useless without my finger to fire it up. But my more expensive camera can be picked up and used by anyone. Similarly my lenses are "unprotected". Again, the tech is there to protect high end cameras with biometric sensor tech built into the grip; it would be a simple matter to "pair" lenses with a specific camera body or bodies and render it useless if connected to another camera.

Someone like Sony even has all the necessary tech in-house to do all of the above.

Am I missing something...?
1. Maybe the camera companies are anticipating #2.
2. Why are physical SIM cards still a thing anyway?

3. I understand this one, but I can also see the shot of a lifetime getting away because the zit-pattern sensor suddenly got fussy.
 
Some good answers here.

But.

The tech is cheap and widespread. Convergence is almost a natural law. I'll never forget a calculator I saw in a branch of Dixons in the late 1970s. It was a bog-standard four-function thing of the sort that we used to amuse ourselves writing "71077345" on. But flip it over and you could see that it had assimilated a dictaphone...

What is the modern portable telephone if not a talisman of convergence? Communication device, map, compass, GPS, music player, camera, mirror, book, television, radio, calculator and of course, dictaphone.

I have a pair of those snazzy earbud things. You charge the case, pop the buds in, and it charges them up for you. But it also charges my portable telephone - or my camera. No more carrying a separate charger.

Take two bottles into the shower...?
 
In many ways you are predicting what is actually happening, i.e., phones are replacing cameras for photography. The free standing camera does need access to the phone to send pictures quickly. OTOH, I don’t want too much security that could prevent my camera from starting quickly. That’s a chance I’ll take. Of course, internal security to stop my camera from getting hacked over wireless is then needed. I guess my camera could start challenging my phone at some point.
 
The question isn't with phone/camera convergence. Every tool you use, you use it because of its efficiency, it's efficiency VS everything else. I can't imagine why my vaccum cleaner can't be integrated with a space heater, but I clearly understand why no one will make it that way. When the efficiency gain outweighs negative effects, you will see such convergence happen.
 
1. Why are there no cameras with SIM cards?

2. Why are physical SIM cards still a thing anyway?

3. Why does my phone have a biometric sensor but my camera doesn't?

Because Canon and Nikon owned the photography market for decades. They had no competition, and they had grown complacent with each other, they're not competitors against each other. They had the technology to make some spectacular jumps in camera technology but they held back in each generation. We know they had the technology know-how because Magic Lantern hacked Canon's DSLRs and found that hugely improved tech (ISO, raw, 4K video) was available in the cameras but they were intentionally suppressed by Canon with intentional programing in the cameras.

Instead, with each new release they'll include some miniscule improvements in megapixel counts, or ISO, or they'll shift the menu settings and buttons around. There is no real competitive drive to really improve. With each new release with miniscule improvements, photographers jump on them nevertheless and pay big bucks for the latest thing. So it's two-fold, there's no serious competition between Canon and Nikon, and the consumers facilitate every single bit of this by lapping up every new camera model with those miniscule improvements.
 
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