Hi, Pablo here
When new is not better
One of the hobbies that has stuck with me for decades is photography. I've shot a few hundreds of film rolls, and some non-recorded amount of digital pics.
It all started out when I was a slouchy teenager. One day I was diving through old cages at my parents house when I stumbled upon their old Pentax P30n, which had been dusting away for years, perhaps decades.
This little bad boy caught my eye and I started shooting with it for a bit. My father noticed the passion building up and decided to promote it by making sure I would have as many film rolls and print services as I needed, within reason.
Unbothered by the expense each shot meant, a long passion started, and it has walked with me for most of my life, with some high and low activity periods, as well as some brief adventures into digital photography which never built up to anything. I've ended up being an analog guy.
A couple of years ago I stumbled upon that same Pentax P30n. It had been dusting away for another season (this time shorter) and in a shelf of my own instead of my parents. I took it out one day for some fun and sadly found it not working at all. I tinkered a bit with it back at home, but nothing seemed to fix it.
Beaten down by my ignorance in guerrilla camera repairing, I brought the camera with me to a local shop with a technical service. They diagnosed an issue in one of the electronic components of the main board, and provided me with a budget. The budget was not expensive at all, but it was dramatically close to the price these type of cameras will typically sell for in second hand markets nowadays. The heart told me to just fix it, the brain to evaluate other options.
I started an interesting discussion with Sara, my favourite film dealer, about my options. At some point in the conversation I asked her about the nature of the fault, and she explained how electronical components of these cameras will always end up failing and are rather hard to fix, because the parts and knowledge slowly disappear from the market as the cameras grow older and put more years being discontinued. As we covered this, she pulled out a Minolta SRT-101 out of a shelf and put it into my hands. The weight of it (almost two times that of the Pentax) caught me by surprise and I almost dropped it.
She then proceed to just say: "This issue doesn't happen with cameras like this one", referring to the unbelievably-heavy-for-its-size piece of metal that had just landed in my palms. I innocently asked why, and she proceeded to explain how that Minolta was purely mechanical. Not only it didn't have electronics: it simply didn't need electricty at all to work. It did have a small battery which would operate a rudimentary lightmetering system, but that was completely optional. The camera could operate fully without power. This was very different from my old Pentax, which would call it a day if its battery died.
I then looked back at the Minolta in awe. I knew enough about photography to know you don't need power to take pictures. If you're not familiar with the topic, let me fill you in: all you need to take a picture is to place something sensitive to light (like film, or a digital sensor) inside a dark box. You then proceed to open the box through a small hole for a short period of time. And that's it, picture taken. There's obviously much more to it in terms of picture quality, ensuring you get the right amount of light, avoiding mistakes like a hole in the box, etc. But the core is as simple as that.
So, why was I in awe with this Minolta? Well, I knew you could take pictures without power, but I didn't know you could have a camera as sophisticated as the SRT-101 work fine without power. Except for the lack of automatic speed selection and detection of the film roll's ISO sensitivity, it had every single feature my father's Pentax P30n had. It felt like I had some piece of alien technology between my fingers, which I had stolen from a time and place where things we couldn't even imagine were possible. As if someone had given me a car that didn't need gas to work.
The discussion with Sara then swerved towards the Minolta. Sara told me about how the SRT-101 was much simpler to fix than my old Pentax precisely because of the lack of electronics. Even though the Minolta did have some very sophisticated mechanisms in its guts, the mechanical nature of it made them easier to understand and patch. The lack of electronics also meant simpler parts sourcing.
I was instantly sold on the Minolta, which has become my workhorse ever since.
Old aluminium and young copper
Now that I've delivered my long rant on how I fell in love with my Minolta and it's simplicity, I want to jump into the lesson that I learned from this whole story. Well, actually, I don't think I've strictly learned it from the Minolta only, but from many other similar situations when dealing with human engineered things. The Minolta is probably just an incredibly clear example.
The lesson is simply that new technology and features are not always better than the old, previous stuff. Just like there is no silver bullet for complexity, there is no silver bullet for adding fancy stuff into a camera without sacrificing something. And I want to argue that not all of the combinations in the feature richness/complexity spectrum make sense.
Let me focus on the example of my two cameras. Again, the features that the Pentax does provide and the Minolta doesn't are (1) detecting automatically the sensitivity of the film roll and (2) having an AUTO mode for the shutter speed, which adjusts itself to the set film sensitivity and shutter aperture so that the shot gets the "right" amount of light.
The Minolta doesn't detect the film itself. Instead, this is solved by... you setting it. This is done in a second by simply adjusting it on the same wheel where you select the shutter speed. Not challenging or inconvienient by any means. You don't even need to know what the number means. Roll says 100? Just rotate the wheel to 100.
On the shutter speed, the Pentax has the auto mode and the Minolta doesn't. That's it. Other than that, both cameras are capable of a wide range of useful speeds.
Those are the two features we get with the Pentax. But what have we lost? Multiple things.
First of all, the inability to operate without power. Battery died midway through the wedding? Too bad, hope you packed another one. Then, we have the maintenance bit. The Pentax electronic circuits are key to operating critical elements like lightmetering or the shutter. If the board gets fried, the camera is unusable. And getting someone to repair this kind of stuff is becoming a harder to find, more expensive to pay service by the day, as demand fades away. This contrasts with the Minolta, because there's a lot more people familiar with the mechanical operated internals, which also tend to be shared across many cameras.
So here I am, stuck with a beautiful 1968 piece of heavy metal that almost does the same that cameras made in the 80s and 90s, yet is much simpler to maintain. I find this a beautiful case of when new is not better.
When new is not better
I think a lot of us, a lot of time, confuse new with better. After all, we're progressing, aren't we?
In engineering, there's a lot of good engineers that know this is not the case. This gets embodied in ideas such as that everything has trade-offs and there are no silver bullets. So every time someone comes into the room with some fancy new candy that seems to be perfect, flawless, and completely superior to previous technologies, a good engineer will quickly start searching for the drawbacks that must be hidden somewhere. Or the call to choose (old) boring technology.
There are still young (or unprofessional) engineers which will go crazy over new stuff without judging if it's the right tool or if it's better than what we already have. Obviously, we might try new stuff for fun. But at work, we should choose the right, good stuff, not the novelty.
Outside of engineering, I think things are looking way more bleak. I see large chunks of society swallowing new tech like crazy with no critical judgment of whether what's being put in front of them is truly better that what they already have. And I think a lot of new tech is outright negative.
I can see how Skype was awesome when it came out, for example, but I can't see how Instagram is a net positive for society widely, and for each individual that's using it individually. Electric cars? It feels dauntingly similar to my camera story. I've already seen several full electric and pluggable hybrids in my social circles see their batteries go below 70% capacity in less than five years. Replacements for those are super complex and crazy expensive. If only we had engines that could refuel for 1,000 kms in two minutes... And let's not get into how vehicles in the 60s where highly repairable at home, parts could be sourced from a million places and people would even have fun tinkering with them to change their behaviour. I've had grandpa stories on pops operating the gas of his Seat 600 with a guerrilla-like set up with a string coming in through the driver's window cause the gas pedal broke. How beautiful is that?
Or videogames! 90s and early 00s game development was crowded by studios which were doing art. Beautiful stories, innovative experiences, pushing the boundaries of tech to get what they wanted. Working on their pieces to be great. For its own sake. Now we just get some kind of soft-porn version of slot machines, and the fucking companies that built it proudly state that they "build unforgettable games that delight millions of fans". Dear God.
Anyway, now I'm truly ranting.
I wonder why this happens, and whether it has always happened. I want to think the problem wasn't this intense some decades ago. People were more skeptic on new stuff. This probably had it's downsides in terms of limiting adoption of great new things, but it also protected us from plenty of nasty stuff that's pouring out now.
I guess we're in an age of such fast-paced change we're just having trouble judging everything that flows into our lives. The world is changing fast, and lots of tradition and culture are just not being able to keep up with it. I've also noticed how people have such terrible short-term memory. Again, I don't know if this is a modern ache as well or it's been like this since the dawn of age. But it seems people forget about why we do things in a certain way, and then we something new comes around, they jump into it without appreciating the virtues of what they already have.