FInding The Light Switch

When you enter a dark room in your own house most of you reach for the light switch...but you don't look for it. You have long since learned where it is and even if it is pitch back in there you generally hit it accurately. If you are carrying an armload of laundry you might be aiming with your elbow, and if you are simultaneously stepping on the cat and the Lego you may not be on target perfectly...but eventually that light comes on. On the other hand, you've all had the experience of going to a strangers' home and trying to find the toilet light switch in the dark...and discovering that the builder wanted to be a humorous pest and put it where it would least be expected. How often have you sat there in the dark and wished a curse on the electrician...? Well, we're in much the same position when we take up someone else's camera - or worse - camera system. For very few of the manufacturers have ever come to an exact agreement upon where things should be. The ergonomic language changes at each border post. We all know about the different focus rotation for the Canon lens vs the Nikon lens...right? And we've all seen the variety of places that an aperture control can show up in different lenses; front of the barrel before the focus ring or back of the barrel snugged against the mount. Again, it can click into stops and semi-stops...or not...and can go from left or right. It can jump off the lens and be found under a thumb wheel or a finger wheel. And the fiends in the firmware department can put an option in to let us reverse the direction of any of these controls - even before we get to the body and start to consider what to do with the autofocus. We can even be hard-pressed to find out how to turn the wretched thing on - and the only solution is to try each control in turn and give it a hard press. Debate is still ongoing as to whether it is better to have a quick flick lever under a finger or a larger switch set well away from the run of normal finger activity. I'm sorry to have to say this, but eventually there is bound to be something silly like a fingerprint switch or a sound switch that only turns your camera on when you yell a password into it. It'll come on a year when trade drops and they need novelty. Do you like finger poking or knob twisting? You'll have your fill on a digital camera as you try to access all the options with which it is loaded. Oddly enough, the rocker switch has somewhat gone away except for tele-wide control. LCD screen are the new digital playground, and the mobile-phoneists are in commanding position to operate their cameras faster than the old folks. They have thumbs of fire. Will we ever see the advent of magnetic or inductive switches in other parts of the cameras? Is there a future in which we Mandrakes of the camera make hypnotic gestures to get our way? I'm hoping for a mirror-less body that is made of cast iron with one button only and the ability to charge up on top of a wood stove. Winter would be heavenly. Until then I would ask for one thing above all from our camera designers; make your decisions about what things do and where things go just the once at the start of your design career. Keep to that plan as you work and give us your camera series in such a form that we can find the controls in the same place each time.