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.
Sorry but Oly has been upgrading lens firmware for a while now. It goes way back before the 9-18mm. While your ‘release the beta now and fix it later’ is valid to some extent, it has it’s good points. For instance, Oly is involved in the Four Thirds and micro-Four Thirds systems and some of the lens and body upgrades have been to improve compatibility with Panasonic, Leica and Sigma – in fact, Olympus have released upgrades for lenses by those makers when used on Oly bodies and to improve the usability of their own lenses on Panasonic bodies, a worthy initiative.
My main complaint with Olympus is that I have to use their software and connect the camera to the computer directly in order to upgrade (Canon allows me to download firmware upgrades to a card and just install). As I use Adobe software and prefer to quarantine devices when possible, this is annoying.
I think you overstate the implications. Encouraging laziness in manufacturers and developers? – of course, they never, ever release underdeveloped product and (to be fair) they cannot possibly foresee every possible problem. It’s nice to be able to fix a problem like the slow focus of the Oly E-P1 with a firmware upgrade. Yes it should have been better out of the box but there were significant competitive pressures. Other firmware upgrades have been for things that could not have been pre-tested – I’m happy that my old lenses can be upgraded for new bodies with a few keystrokes.