@fuzzyfungus wrote:
It's unfortunate; but the price discrimination model used in cameras is precisely what both creates many of the problems that could so...gallingly...easily...be fixed with just a dash of software and maybe an RT5350 bodged in somewhere and provides an incentive for the manufacturers to not solve them.
The price for all the fancy moving parts, exotic glass, and slab of imaging silicon supported by a nest of lilliputian circuit boards connected by lots and lots of flex cables? An undeniably impressive value. One part technology-indistinguishable-from-magic, one part mechanical-watch-assembled-by-pixies-and-gnomes, amazingly cheap.
Now the fun part... Why doesn't your camera support histogram display? Well, if it were 1985 it would be because of the enormous cost of the extra RAM and computational power required. Since it's not, it's because the mostly-identical model that costs $50 extra does support those and screw you, cheapskate.
Why does the WU-1a/b cost 50-60 dollars, support interaction with a limited number of our cameras, and only a subset of its features on many of those, when generic wifi adapters start at under $10, and you can get a wifi module and a slab of flash memory stuffed into an SD card, probably using technology stolen from time lords, for half the price of our wifi-only module? Well. Because. We. Can.
The USB port? It only acts as a mass storage device on our cheap camera, a mass storage device and a remote shutter control on our midrange model, but offers full programmatic access to basically all camera functions on our expensive one. That's because our USB Interface descriptors are hand-carved into flash ROM by monks, and our Endpoint descriptors only grow in a single vineyard in Silicon Valley. Or, y'know, price discrimination.