No Training Wheels

Out on the web doing some research on the Canon EOS-1D Mark III for a future review here, I came across this excellent blog post written by a guy who'd acquired one in 2017 and was doing a sort of 10th anniversary retrospective review on it.

I did find one observation of his to be interesting, though:

"Bulk aside, the most peculiar aspect of shooting with it was the lack of auto ISO. I typically shoot aperture priority, with auto ISO enabled, and use exposure compensation to bias the exposure whichever way I need it to go.

On the 1D Mark III, ISO can only be automated by a system called Safety Shift, which works about the same but doesn’t allow you to specify a minimum shutter speed or a range or anything like that. Makes me appreciate how far we’ve come with technology, and how skilled photographers had to be before all the contemporary conveniences."

This betrays a little bit of a misunderstanding regarding the nature of the pro bodies from Canon and Nikon.

It's not that Canon lacked the technology for auto ISO in 2007 when the 1D Mark III came out. After all, my 40D of the same vintage has auto ISO, as does my old 20D which I've handed down to my roommate.

On the other hand, none of my pro bodies (Canon 1Ds Mk II, 1D Mk III, and 1D Mk IV, as well as Nikon D1X, D2X, and D3) have an auto setting for ISO sensitivity. In much the same way, they don't have the range of presets like "sports", "landscape", et cetera, or the fully automated mode represented by a green rectangle on the mode dial of a Canon or "AUTO" on a Nikon's dial.

The target market for these cameras was assumed to be working pros who wouldn't need or use those settings, and so they're just left off.

Scooterin' Santa snapped with an EOS-1D Mark III

Too Late to the Party

Return with me to the distant past of...oh, let's call it 2005 or so. Cell phones are everywhere, but not yet universal. While a significant percentage of high school students have their own mobile, a cell phone is still a "going off to college" thing, as often as not.

Facebook and YouTube are in their larval states. AOL Instant Messenger is still extremely popular. Various phones were integrating limited browser functions, but with mobile phones like the RAZR, texting was still the primary form of communication.

It was into this environment that Sony, a company known for being willing to try weird experiments, released a device called the "mylo COM-1"in September of 2006. The name stood for MY Life Online, and it was a little miniature tablet thingie with a slide-out keyboard. It could run a web browser and do email anywhere there was a wifi signal.

Thing is, despite being targeted largely at teens who didn't have cell phones, it had a sort of jellybean Playskool "My First Toy Handheld" look about it and cost $350 at launch. That was a lot of clams for something that looked like a kiddie toy and had a crude 2.4" 320x240 pixel display.

So less than a year and a half later, in January of 2008, Sony dropped the "mylo COM-2" on the market. The COM-2 was slicker and more adult-looking, sharing its form factor with the PlayStation Portable.

It had a tack-sharp 3" 640x480 LCD that added touchscreen functionality, and a tethered stylus was included, attached to the neoprene carrying sleeve. They keyboard was improved, and was now backlit. There were menu shortcuts for the most popular communications apps of the day...

The browser now supported Flash for playing YouTube videos and online games. There was a 1.3MP camera on the backside with a convex mirror next to the lens for taking selfies. The desktop could be configured with your most-used apps.

It had its own built-in music and video players, and a photo album. It had a feed reader and built-in games. It could transmit music and pictures to other nearby mylos. 

It was really a slick little device...

Thing is, between the launch of the COM-1 and COM-2, it was almost instantly rendered obsolete by the announcement of the iPhone, which could do all of this stuff and then some. Plus, you know, you could use the Apple device to make phone calls.

The COM-2, launched in January for $299 (yes, all that added capability over the COM-1 came with a fifty dollar price cut; Sony could see the writing on the wall) and by the 2008 holiday season was being fire-saled for $199. Slow sales caused it to be quietly discontinued by the end of the following year.

Smartphones and tablets killed a lot of categories: They decimated handheld GPS's and cheap cameras and palmtop computers; they cut deeply into the sales of calculators and handheld games and MP3 players. The one thing they killed that almost nobody remembers is the "smart not-phone", since it was only around for a year or so and sank without a ripple.

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"Eat up Martha"

I met up with TD at the NRA convention this past weekend. He'd been hinting that he had a totally awesome piece of swag for me that would surely make a good subject for a Digital Fossils column. He wasn't kidding:



Bonus supergeek points for getting the reference in the post title...

Trivial Pursuit:

The original SimCity, one of the seminal computer games of the late '80s and the Sim that launched Maxis, will fit over 1200 times onto the 2 CD's that SimCity 4 takes up.

If you're an original SimCity fan, by the way, you don't need a whole computer to play it anymore; it's available for the Palm OS.