" Paint Your Wagon " with Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood. Great movie musical from the days before they wrote lyrics using bad language. We're not dealing with beans or wagons here - we're dealing with hands - and cameras. We're also dealing with batteries, but on a speculative level. Draw up your pad of lined paper and yellow pencil and lets design.
This column has suggested that some digital camera maker take the step of making a left-handed camera in the manner of Ihagee in the old Exakta days. The southpaws of the world will buy it by the millions. The righties will avoid it like the plague. But what if you made a camera that had an attachment point on
either side of the central body and that took either a right or left-hand grip.
You could certainly incorporate a battery in that grip - as well as a shutter button, front and back control wheel, function button, etc. The communication with the body would be by locked sliding contact much like a hot shoe does now.
Make right and left-handed modules that you buy when you buy the camera kit. Your choice - same price.
Now let's pencil some more: What if we wanted the camera to be a smaller travel type, or a standard grip type, or a big-battery long-life setup? Just incorporate different batteries in different grips. This would also solve the problems that big or little-fisted people have with average-sized grips.
What do you do with the unused side of the camera once you've decided your choice of grip? You make a flash gun module for it. Or a timer module, LED panel, macro light, or plug-on selfie screen. Or any number of other
cool-looking accessory choices. Make a bolt-on mic with good insulation. Or a sturdy Arca-Swiss foot.
And all of a sudden you have factory-made accessory super-customisation that just begs the customer to add on more. That's good trade...
