Are Cameras Designed to Age Gracefully?

design mind has an interesting post titled “Aged to Perfection” that explores the issue of whether or not consumer gadgets age gracefully as time and use wear them down. They specifically compare a 3-year-old iPhone with a 7-year-old Canon compact film camera:

The camera’s emulated metallic finish is only surface-deep and its wear tends to emphasizes awkward artifacts of the injection molding process used to create it. At this point the Canon camera’s shell looks like garbage while the iPhone’s is starting to resemble something more like an heirloom pocket watch.

They also make the point that a product’s original “new” look normally only lasts a brief amount of time, while the user is forced to live with the “aged” look as the product decays. It would be interesting to see how modern cameras compare in terms of their “aged” look rather than what they look like out of the box. Have your cameras aged well?


Image credit: Photographs by Remy Labesque of design mind

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