Intelligent lenses and not so intelligent design
// March 12th, 2009 // Photography
Here’s an interesting one; we all know that everything we use is getting smarter, but did you know that even your lenses are now considered ‘field upgradeable’? According to DPReview, Olympus has just released a firmware update for their 9-18mm lens. On the surface, this seems like a good thing – if there’s an issue, it’s fairly easy to fix. Delve a bit deeper though, and it’s not so rosy; one of the banes of consumer electronics introduced by the Internet and the ability to be perpetually online is that manufacturers and developers can adopt a ‘just ship it and fix it later’ approach to design. Software’s famous for this – prior to the Internet when fixing a bug required shipping out a whole new set of media at the developer’s cost, people were a little more careful about what they released lest they go through what Sierra went through with King’s Quest VII.
The Internet gets rid of a lot of this pressure, unfortunately; software that gets patched after release is the norm, as is stuff that just flat-out frequently doesn’t work. So, it’s quite possible that this’ll be two firsts; one of the first lenses to get a firmware update, and one of the first examples of a slackening of pressure on the manufacturers and a move towards fixing things in software rather than getting it right in the first place.