Senior Manager of Product Planning at Sony, Yutaka Iwatsuki, talking about the future of photography.

Still and Video world will continue to get closer. And Sony will continue to improve dynamic range and High ISO performance.

And he’s definitely right on that. I’m not sure if there is a point where the two will simply converge but after having used Live Photos for the past 6 months, I can’t imagine capturing pictures any other way. On the subject of touchscreen:

It’s yet not Sony’s priority to add touch screen. Sony wants to improve other “areas” first.

I find this a little baffling, seeing how you can pretty much stick a touchscreen on anything at minimum cost these days. The layering for it has gotten so thin and inexpensive that I can’t help but think the problem isn’t hardware related and instead software. After all, for years we saw terrible Android devices with slapped touchscreen functionality as Android was never developed with touch in mind. Only after Apple unveiled iPhone did Google go back to the drawing board and incorporate it into it.

Same goes for Sony’s Alpha line, which includes a menu system that’s designed to be navigated with via buttons. Simply slapping a layer of touchscreen will only hurt the overall experience at the expense of some short term gains. However, I hope Sony is working aggressively on this front.

More after the jump.

So how about 2016?

The A7rII was the highlight of 2015. And Yutuka adds: “but 2016 will be even more impressive!“

Last Yutuka talks about the future of A-mount cameras, believing there are two reason to keep them around:

The first is that the A-mount has certain advantages over the E mount and, for now, we can not have all the same functionalities between A and E mount. The second reason is that “we have many customers that we can not give up. It is a promise to our customers.“

The first reason is one that time and technology will solve. However, the second reason is more of a legacy thinking and generational grind. The truth is that there are still a ton of people shooting with glass and Sony can’t simply abandon that market.

Discuss:

What do you think Sony needs to bring with their future cameras?

[Via SonyAlphaRumors]