Last Updated on 12/11/2018 by Mark Beckenbach
Your phone is most likely weather sealed, so why aren’t all cameras made to the same standards?
The year that this post is written in is 2018: for some really odd reason, all cameras aren’t weather sealed at this point. But it’s beyond that; camera manufacturers need to find some way to step their game up across the board. Let’s start out with point and shoots–last year Fujifilm unveiled the absolute astonishing Fujifilm X100f. The biggest feature it’s missing is weather sealing. Then this year, Sony gave us the new Sony RX100 Mk VI and is charging nearly the price of the X100f. Again, no weather sealing. Why? It boggles my mind.
One can go ahead and make excuses. “Oh well, the battery compartment is a possible issue.” This or the SD card port could indeed be potential issues but with the right locking mechanisms (that all manufacturers have demonstrated they are capable of making) you can seal off the card door. I’m specifically referring to the card door because I think, in regards to point and shoot cameras, manufacturers can once again take a page out of the mobile phone world’s book. After a long time, phone manufacturers have been making phones with batteries that don’t come out. Apple’s iPhones have done this for years, and I switched to iOS maybe three or four years ago. I haven’t had major complaints about the battery life.
So then why, in 2018, can’t we have a point and shoot camera with an internal battery that lasts a long time and that can be charged via a wall charger and the same cord you’d use to charge your Android phone? It doesn’t sound that insane, especially if you have a car charger, go into bars/cafes in big cities, and generally end up carrying the cords with you anyway. The internal battery would add to the camera’s weather sealing–a person can spill a coffee or their Bud Light onto my iPhone and it won’t completely bug out. So why can’t we do this with point and shoots? Arguably, they’re cameras that can have less contact points than ILC options.
Even for what you pay for an interchangeable lens camera, there is no solid reason why anything and everything from a Canon Rebel and above shouldn’t have weather resistance in it. One could say that they’re designed with at least a bit of splash protection due to their inherent design anyway, but there is nothing that is completely marketed and specified. Why? I think a weather sealed, two lens, Canon Rebel bundle would sell like hot cakes on Amazon during holiday season. Why? So many folks don’t necessarily know about the mirrorless options.
Despite my previous statement championing the mirrorless cameras out there, it still boggles my mind that camera manufacturers like Fujifilm, Olympus, and Panasonic aren’t putting weather sealing into their lower end products. If Ricoh Pentax can do it, why can’t the others?
But more than that, why can’t camera manufacturers work to change the industry even more and add even more connectivity options and make their cameras seriously compete even more with phones?