Because they want you to buy a new camera. My theory is still
over competition in the consumer electronics sector. It makes no 
more economic sense for the consumer electronics vendors to provide
support after the product is EOL. And for consumer electronics
product, often EOL means 1 or 2 years or even less.

And it really takes a PhD to fully utilize the features of a 
new digicam. The industrial design aspect of digital cameras have
been focused on the sleekness, not the usability side (human
engineering side).

As for the firmware update, it is also a support nightmare.
The firmwares we are talking about here in digicams or new
phones are not the PIC16Fs (<=8k word). They are up to 10s
of Mega Bytes. That is why the Sony Ericson T610 would often
hang when it was first released. I'd better stick with my
old Nokia 8250. The human engineering of the small keypad
is also a nightmare to use for SMS. I just do not understand
why the people here in ASIA can type the messages so fast
using the small numerical keypad. It also promotes bad
English. The only reason is that it is quite cheap here
to use SMS (US$0.03 per message and often the subscribers
got free 100 or more free SMS).

Regards,
Xiaofan

-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Rolf 
Sent: Friday, October 07, 2005 5:30 AM
To: Microcontroller discussion list - Public.
Subject: Re: [EE] Industrial design of electronics product
...
There are many features that I like in the newer digital cameras,
but I can't seem to find them all in ONE camera, in spite of months of
looking. Camera makers COULD update their older cameras with features
found in their later models (record mode histograms, fine focus zoom box,
etc.)
but they don't. An update only seems to fix stuff that is badly WRONG
but never adds a useful new feature even though it's only needs firmware.
Why is that?

Robert
-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist