Comment by adrian_b
1 day ago
What you say about innovation has been true mostly in the distant past and mostly for technologies that are used in business-to-business products.
For consumer products from recent years, like smartphones or computers, the vast majority of innovative products are Chinese, even if the quality or documentation is frequently subpar.
Now I see very frequently cases when US companies or Japanese companies should better start to copy the Chinese if they want to stay competitive, but instead of doing that, they push for the same kind of tariff protections for which the US heavily criticized any other country in the past and blackmailed them in various ways to force them to remove the tariff protections against US companies.
I think it goes both ways for sure. My Sony mirrorless camera is incredible - and there's been lots of R&D work over decades that have made my camera possible.
But I got a DJI Ronin (handheld gimbal) the other day. Its a gamechanger. With the camera mounted on the gimbal, I can do handheld shots that you could easily use in a blockbuster movie.
The only downside is that the whole thing (camera + gimbal) is a very awkward package. The weight is in the wrong place. And that means the gimbal needs to be bigger and bulkier to compensate - which in turn makes it even more awkward to use. You could make a much better product by integrating the gimbal and camera. Put just the lens and sensor on the gimbal, but move the screen, battery and CPU to the "outside" package. Then you could shrink the gimbal itself and remove all the mounting hardware and manual weight adjustment sliders.
Apparently DJI has started making $10k cinema cameras along exactly these lines. I really hope the Japanese camera brands take notice. From a product standpoint, its a big deal - and I'm sure it won't be long before DJI makes much cheaper video cameras that start seriously eating Sony & Canon's market share.
In the OLED example people were indicted in 2018 and went to prison in 2023 or 2024. You are making it seem like it’s an old story, but it’s not really true.