There's a pretty significant misunderstanding here of why people shoot with film or use any high-end camera; it's got very little to do with the end result. After all, very few people evaluate an image based on what camera it was captured on.
No, it's much closer to the reason car people still have manual transmissions. Shooting a rangefinder or TLR are completely different experiences than an SLR. Shooting a Hasselblad feels like sexy magic. It's as far removed from shooting with a phone and applying a filter as driving driving a Civic is from driving a fancy European sportscar around a track while wearing leather gloves.
I thought I covered that when I said "I get that lots of people derive inspiration from the process and the medium". I.e. people enjoy the act of shooting film.
But there's also a lot of people who covet the "film look" and the "character" of vintage lenses, even if that's not something you personally care about.
I personally love the look of movies that are shot on film, though I have no desire to ever try it myself (way too expensive).
You don't have to be a "gear hoarder" to enjoy the manual process. It has a different pace from digital photography, especially if you're using a vintage camera with no automation. Then you can process the film yourself, too, if you want even more of a sense of craft about your image-making.
I'm genuinely curious what a site designed to sell a niche, enthusiast camera could say that wouldn't be "fake marketing bullshit". Could you take a stab at how you would approach designing a sincere sales site for a product like this.
"Discover the worlds hidden in every moment with WideluxX™" -> "Take sweeping panaromic analog photos with WideLux"
"The WideluxX™ is not a nostalgic return to the past. It exists alongside contemporary tools, offering a different way to create." -> this is AI slop, but still, you could say "We've updated analog film technology with the absolute best in modern engineering" (assuming that's factually true)
"A Contemporary Tool, Not a Retro Gesture" also AI slop, something like "A contemporary version of a beloved retro style" or something is factual and earnest.
"Each WideluxX™ image is created in a single continuous exposure, capturing space and time as they unfold, right in front of your eyes." -> "Single continuous exposures panaromas over (whatever aspect ratio / etc) which split the difference between photographs and short films, giving the appearance of active motion" (or whatever, I didn't read too much about what it actually does)
"Who's it for? WideluxX™ is for photographers who enjoy shaping an image through timing, movement, and perspective — and for those drawn to finely made mechanical cameras." -> this is alright, but not great; I'd prefer it to be less fluffy, like "WideLux is for lovers of finely-made mechanical cameras and film photography who want to play with a new style of photography that opens up new artistic opportunities.
"Working with WideluxX™ means allowing space for surprise—images shaped by light, movement, and the unfolding moment." -> ugh. just delete this entirely.
"Designed to endure, the WideluxX™ can be adjusted, repaired, and restored—much like a mechanical watch." no shit it's mechanical of course it can be. this one isn't terrible but it's not great. delete the "designed to endure" (and de-sloppify it a bit)
also personal preference but having "^tm" on everything cheapens the hell out of it. I'm sure there's some sketchy legal reason for it but it looks stupid and makes everything feel plastic and corporate.
Anyway, the trick (which is not a trick) is to write things that are true and sincere and treat the reader like a human being. If you wouldn't say something to someone's face without them wanting to punch you, don't write it on your website. If you don't have factual things to say that make people want to buy your product, make a better product. No opinion about whether this is better for sales funnels, don't even care. But it will make me respect the company more.
I believe that you made your point, and yet I also still think it's not a binary. There's certainly room for more flowery, metaphor-driven descriptions in marketing even if it's not as bluntly spec-driven as you'd prefer. For a lot of customer demos, it's trying to strike the right balance between intimidating and approachable.
I do think that people need to chill out on the knee-jerk declarations of AI slop every time something isn't as tight and poetic as they'd like. I remember (and am still bothered by) commercials in the 90s showing eg smiling moms shaking empty McCain frozen French fry bags upside down to illustrate how they are so desirable, you literally can't have enough of them.
In other words, what you're uptight about is not slop so much as late stage capitalism.
well I do hate late-stage capitalism... but mostly I am just disappointed in people. Why can't the individuals who make these sites respect their customers? why can't people respect each other? Why doesn't everyone else even view writing sincere words as an important form of respect? Because it's not normalized, I guess... but surely I am not the only one who remembers when it was more common? So I wish for the people at corporations to feel more shame about doing work they're not proud of, and I wish for customers to be much madder about other people jerking them around, such that it's extremely bad for business to treat them disrespectfully.
(Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't try to start my own tech company that respects people to my standards so as to make all the other ones look worse in comparison. Of course I don't know if I would succeed... but heck, maybe all it takes is caring a lot? I'm not an entrepreneurial sort of person but when I think about doing it, this is why: to try to put the asshole companies, which is most of them, out of business.)
In this specific case though I just want people to read my criticism and maybe realize that they agree---that, yeah, you know what, maybe Jeff Bridges' bespoke camera company should be better than this; writing that crap on your site should be embarrassing for them.
anyway, yeah, we've been drowning in slop our whole lives. The only thing AI did is automate the creation of it and make it easier (for now) to identify.
I have a Fujifilm G617 in a hard shell case a few feet away, and it's a beast. There's nothing whimsical or convenient about it. It's a tool but it's not a fun camera to use. In fact, it's one of the only cameras I've ever used that penalizes spontaneity.
I've never used a Widelux but having used the Pano mode on my iPhone, I kind of get the concept so I can say that nothing about shooting Widelux is like shooting an actual 6x17, and that's almost certainly a good thing.
When you're evaluating high end cameras, ultimately the most meaningful data point is how they make you feel when you're shooting them. A Hasselblad feels like what I picture driving a Lincoln Continental feels like. I suspect that the Widelux-X would make the user feel things, too.
I've been patiently waiting for this to drop for ~5 years, and I was hoping that it would somehow be under $1000.
Oh my god. $4400 is... a lot of money. $175 shipping had better include a Jeff Bridges Cameo video.
Don't get me wrong: I suspect that he's spent millions of dollars getting the project to this point, and that it's a mechanically perfect instrument. Huge respect for caring this much and seeing the project through.
I feel better now about the $700 I spent buying a 35mm panoramic film back for my medium-format Bronica SQA. It seemed like a real splurge at the time, but for the price of this new camera, you could get a whole Bronica system - including four or five lenses, an alternate viewfinder, a couple of 120 backs, and the panoramic film back - with enough left over for a year's worth of film and processing.
People must really like that swing-lens effect. It's not for me, but I imagine that this camera must seem much more compelling if it's what you're after.
> Huge respect for caring this much and seeing the project through.
Second that: product development is hard, and manufacturing is really expensive in small quantities.
It’s an esoteric enthusiast product handmade in Germany to extreme mechanical precision. It’s a miracle they got it down to $4400… I bet they’re not making much money on this, and it’s more of a labor of love.
I saw an old Soviet-era model that was working and seemed similar to this one, it was bought by my photography instructor, he showed me his weird collection. It used to be attached to the underside of spy airplanes to take panoramic pictures not just satellite imagery and earth maps. Maybe you should look for swing-lens cameras on the used/vintage market today. Look for Horizon line from KMZ, their later models continued under Russian production rather than being brand-new Soviet stock.
I kind of expected that pricing - although even worse, in Europe, after VAT, it reaches $6000. Yeah it's not for me, and 350 units is probably capturing the whole target audience at this price.
The good part that could come out from it I would hope for would be new parts for old cameras. I managed to snag a Widelux F6 for about $800 last year that would need some servicing - sometimes it suffers from the infamous banding...
You can get a new panoramic film camera for $69 - the Sprocket Rocket [1]. It makes images with grungy lomography charm - edges are soft but center is surprisingly sharp for a plastic lens. I really like the look of the images it produces. It has a hot shoe and a bulb setting.
While cool, there is quite a bit of difference between this and what the widelux is. The widelux rotates the lens as the front cover moves, which creates a drastically different look.
Yeah, I've been waiting for it for years too. I thought it was going to be substantially more than $4400 (more like $6-7K). Under $1,000 is unfortunately simply impossible. Used Wideluxes go for a fair bit more than $1K.
That said, too much for me right now. Maybe someday.
I don't know much about how this camera is priced, but I think you're underrating the human desire for exclusivity. I won't be surprised when that first run sells out.
For reference, a new Leica film camera body is ~$7000, and another $500-$2000 for a lens. Lecia is sort of the Rolex of cameras - obtainable by "normal" people, but it takes strong desire to do so (vs going on a really nice vacation or whatever).
So by that measure, this is in the ballpark. It's a niche product, you'd have to be really into film photography, want a panoramic that uses 35mm film (vs a 6x9 or 6x12 medium format camera).
On the flip side, if you want to get something similar on a budget, you can 3d print a body and get a used large format press lens for <$2000 all in. But, that's far more on the tinkering/project side of the market, where the Widelux is very much in the luxury end.
Personally, I don't find it hard to imagine at all that there's 350 photographers who whom $4000 is not a big deal (many of them on this site), who are looking for something interesting and new.
There is a whole class of people out there that think about money in ways you and I cannot comprehend, and this product is for them, not us. It'll be successful without us little folks.
I would put this in the luxury goods category, which has been doing really well. Photography has a lot of gear horders too, so I wouldn't be surprised if on that alone it sells out. Then people who actually want to use it will stay priced out.
It's my biggest peeve with artificial scarcity markets, speculators or collectors buy everything and people who actually want to use the item can't afford it.
A new Leica M6 goes for about $7K at B&H. When you could still buy them, Rolleiflexes were about that much. A mechanical camera hand-made in short runs in Germany? Not gonna be cheap. If you can afford and think you'll use it enough to make it worthwhile, there are worse things you could spend your money on.
don't even have to get esoteric, a Nikon Z9 body only is $5000 at Target right now
completely different camera but it's a straight up camera and not strange format. for people who are serious/professional about photography multiple thousands is stiff but that's what they cost.
>and I was hoping that it would somehow be under $1000.
Does this product have iPhone levels of sweatshop manufacturing and economies of scale, that such a price point would be realistic to you?
From what I know, the price is exactly where low-volume hand-made artisanal hardware is in the west, especially given the supply chain geopolitical challenges Trump caused.
I fact, the value for such a niche boutique engineered product seems pretty decent. Just look how much Swiss watches cost.
>Like I said, I was hoping that it would be closer to what an iPhone costs so that a lot more people can justify buying one.
And as I said, the realities of profitably shipping boutique developed and manufactured HW, are vastly different that what you'd wish for them to be, if your only reference is products from the likes of Apple. It doesn't matter what you hope for, the math of economics is what dictates the end result.
>I believe that it's better for their long-term viability if they sell 1000 for $2000 instead of 300 for $4400.
That's like wanting 9 women to deliver a baby in a month.
Why doesn't Apple choose to sell 100 million units of their iPhone 17 Pro Max at 700€, instead of selling 30 million units at 1300€, so more people can enjoy it?
Most people don’t understand why or how stuff is priced, or that low volume items like this probably have a decent amount of expensive human labor included in the price. You aren’t going to set up full automation to assemble 350 cameras.
what’s the margin you reckon on that $160/hr your car mechanic is charging you? human labor is not that expensive, the margins of business employing human labor are. I recently needed a plumber, called up a company, plumber showed up, etc. got an estimate from the company which was outrageous. I was expecting this so I got plumber’s number. called him and asked him if he’d do the job for 1/2 the price - win-win.
I sell and run electrical service and project work for a living.
I’d guess they net 15% on average on that shop rate after accounting for all of the overhead. Some jobs will be high margin wins, some jobs will make a bit, some jobs will lose money.
The shop rate doesn’t just include labor, it also includes all of the overhead of the shop: equipment like lifts, alignment machines, tire machines, consumables, service writers, rent/mortgage, software, diagnostic tools, utilities, blah blah blah.
Btw I quote all residential electrical work at ridiculous prices because I don’t want residential customers, possibly you called a commercial oriented plumber first?
If you have people on your team that are valuable enough to demand a 40% compensation increase, then you should have been paying them 40% more without them having to demand it.
It never ceases to amaze me that the owner class is so continually shocked that the people who build the value that the owners leverage into growing their fortune might suddenly realize their value.
The entitlement is baked deep into the mindset that there are people who work and people who profit.
Often enough they don't care or realize it. I've seen all the data analysts that were eiter (1) senior or (2) also had data engineering skills leave.
They all got 25% more after leaving. And this is in the Netherlands, where pay is already kind of low. What was even weirder was that this company is a F500 company and the people that left, they left for all kinds of organizations (small and large) and still got paid more.
That includes me by the way. I was doing 4 roles (data analyst, pentester, software engineer through web development, AI stuff + data engineering and project manager). It was a lot of fun though. But it paid decisively mediocre.
Currently going to a fun job that pays way better.
It gets worse. I've seen some managers hold back strong developers because they want everyone to be a replaceable cog. They push for average work across the team so no one becomes irreplaceable--even if it means the product ends up weaker than it could be.
The employer and the employee have different goals and metrics for "success". This mismatch comes up all the time whenever "interviewing is broken" threads come up. Many interviewees think the goal is to find the best person for the job. It isn't. It is to find someone suffciently good to do the job for the least money possible. This mean that if you filter out "better" candidates, it's not a failure if the position gets filled anyway.
So the mistakes being made here are:
1. You think you're irreplaceable. You're not. "But--". "--Nope";
2. You think it's more expensive to replace you. Possibly but irrelvant. You see, if they give you a 40% raise, there now might be 10 or 100 other people who will demand a 40% raise. It's cheaper overall not to give you that raise.
This comes up all the time when landlords lose good tenants by raising rents $100-200/month. Tenants will rightly point out that they'll lose more with the vacancy period than they'll get from $100-200/month. Also irrelevant. The landlord will often have 10 or 100 or 1000 or 10,000 units. They give a $200 increase to all of them and not all of them are moving. The increased income from those who don't will exceed the losses from those who move.
Plus, the $200/month extra increases the property value. Someone may lend against that increased value to buy even more units;
3. Ultimately any enterprise can only increase profits by raising prices or lowering costs, particularly wages. Suppressing wages becomes the entire business of the company. That's what permanent layoffs culture is for (to get more unpaid work on those that remain and to stop them asking for raises). That's what AI is for. Supressing wages is THE product for AI.
Remember there's a fundamental imbalance here. If a company loses a particular employee, most likely they either won't notice (at least for awhile) or they'll simply be temporarily inconvenienced.
What happens if you don't have a job? You might lose your house, your car, your health insurance, your childrens' school and so on.
The stakes for you are so much higher so in any difficult hiring market, you will be squeezed.
I don't know if you simply haven't worked with people who are unreplaceable or what, but I assure you with genuine confidence that there are people who cannot be replaced without massive disruption and undesirable risk.
"Value" is not this objective measure that can be deduced from someone's output. It depends on many variables like cost of living, the job market, tech trends, and industry competition. Could very easily fluctuate 50% or more in a short period of time.
I don't sit down and decide "here's how much I'm going to pay the plumber." I call a plumber and get a quote. I can keep going until it feels worth it.
My enlightenment comes from talking to a bunch of plumbers and hearing what they're gonna charge. That's the market rate.
If I hire an employee and they get good at their job and someone else offers them a 40% raise, they'll probably leave. That's a lot of money.
Some companies care about retention, most don't really.
You're making the wrong comparison. If your plumber increases his rate by 40%, will you "fire" him and get another plumber which will also be 40% more expensive, or a plumber which costs the old price but isn't good, or accept his price increase?
Could you expand on that? I'm genuinely interested.
I personally identify as a leftist and it's my perception that the left is completely missing the moment on AI, to my great frustration. From my perspective, left-leaning people increasingly project an "AI evil" vibe even though most of them simply don't have any direct exposure beyond seeing Sora slop and hearing about data centres.
I actually think the anti-ai on the left is subsiding. More of my friends are using and asking about it, and I have become active in a local indivisible group, where more than half are using it. Those people were very excited to have someone with deep knowledge around. The remaining anti are softer resistance, more skeptical because they have heard bad environmental things. I'm personally more concerned about the social side and second order effects.
I'm trying to help them understand two things
1. Like all of computing history, we will become more efficient and have less environmental impact. The most likely slow down will come from energy availability. We need to step up our renewables, it's not so bad if it's good energy
2. We have moved up the stack. These are not simple text-in-out machines. The training and models are more sophisticated. We now give them tools, skills, constraints and have them operate in teams. Human in the loop is still important.
Getting off-topic, but as a successful high-school dropout I am compelled to remind anyone reading this that [the American] college [system] is a scam.
That's not to say that there aren't benefits to tertiary education, for many people in different contexts. It's just not the golden path that it's made out to be.
Many people currently in college are just wasting their money and should enroll in trades programs instead.
Meanwhile, nothing about being in or out of school is mutually exclusive to using LLMs as a force multiplier for learning - or solving math problems, apparently.
Care to actually refute? Interesting that even an LLM would give an attempt at it, but apparently those who only bother to hit the downvote button aren't even meeting that level of "intelligence".
> It is in the same way that educated guessing is.
I guess (heh) it depends on your definition of 'educated guessing'? Looking at the problem, considering a solution, discarding it, trying another and testing, iteratively, is how most people would approach any tricky problem.
Brute force is substantially different. It would be saying that, other than maybe setting some basic bounds and heuristics, I'm going to try literally everything and test each. That's not at all what the LLM did here.
No, it's much closer to the reason car people still have manual transmissions. Shooting a rangefinder or TLR are completely different experiences than an SLR. Shooting a Hasselblad feels like sexy magic. It's as far removed from shooting with a phone and applying a filter as driving driving a Civic is from driving a fancy European sportscar around a track while wearing leather gloves.
Still, clearly not for everyone!
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