6 ms·

I think it's kind of sad that Sony's attention to detail and their status as a premium brand has been fading in recent decades. There are few product categories

I think it's kind of sad that Sony's attention to detail and their status as a premium brand has been fading in recent decades. There are few product categories these days where Sony really is state of the art, although it seems as if they're trying to position themselves as premium manufacturer again (audio players, projectors come to mind) - a development I welcome, as I think there's room for brands in consumer electronics that work with the care of a small shop but can manufacture on a large scale. edit: As other commenters pointed out there are some rather obvious categories I seem to have missed, including cameras and gaming consoles.

xedarius 9y ago
I'd argue they're top of the tree in gaming consoles, but on the whole I agree.
jrockway 9y ago
I'd say they compete favorably with Canon and Nikon with digital cameras.
lykr0n 9y ago
In my view, they make great-ish Smart Phones.
pipio21 9y ago
Sony digital cameras sensors are the best in the market. Guess what the Iphone uses, that is the number one camera in the world.
ubermonkey 9y ago
Sony's huge and complicated. Obviously they're still doing well as a purveyor of gaming consoles, and their mirrorless cameras are AMAZING right now, but at the same time their forays into other markets (computing, e.g.) haven't fared well, and they went from market leader to also-ran in displays. The thing that still shocks me, though, is the degree to which they blew their market leading position in portable music players. They OWNED that market in the 80s and 90s with the then-ubiquitous Walkman brand, which they extended into the CD era with "Discman" players that seemingly everyone had when I went to college in 1988. Internal politics (I assume?) kept them from introducing a reasonable MP3 player until far, far too late for them to catch up. Some of their early efforts literally required you to re-encode your music into another weird format to use (ATRAC, I think?) -- and this while smaller players (Rio, etc) had devices you could load by copying MP3s to a memory card. I assume this is because Sony Music was afraid of the Mp3 revolution, but my understanding is that Sony Electronics has always been far more profitable than Sony Music, so it's hard to understand how that tail ended up wagging that particular dog. (Oh, and there's also Sony's bizarre insistence on proprietary formats, like MiniDISC and MemoryStick -- that didn't help them, either.) And then, of course, Apple came in with the iPod and gathered up the high-end, high-margin customers that were Sony's constituency.
- kalleboo 9y ago
  Sony got screwed so hard by copyright owners in the US on Betamax and DAT, that they decided to buy up movie/record labels and become a copyright owner themselves. This put them on the wrong side of the tech war and they got mired in the DRM bullcrap which made their music players a PITA to use. [suggested viewing: the techmoan episode on DAT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4K1QKKPX_g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4K1QKKPX_g ]
- c3833174 9y ago
  >Some of their early efforts literally required you to re-encode your music into another weird format to use (ATRAC, I think?) It's not really different from iPods, those required iTunes to load music just like Sony's devices used SonicStage, with the difference of the iPod having an internal hard drive instead of a MiniDISC drive (and later CD walkmans with ATRAC/MP3 support).
  - ubermonkey 9y ago
    That's incorrect, because loading music on iPods didn't require you to re-encode anything. Sony's early digital players required your music to be in Sony's proprietary format, which was a whole additional step. And remember, 20 years ago, re-encoding took longer, so it was meaningfully less convenient. There's definitely a case to be made that requiring iTunes to load iPods/iPhones is annoying and needlessly complex, but I think it's clear Apple did this to make it more accessible to normal humans, not to exert control or in a quixotic attempt to sideline open codecs. (That Apple's current path is clearly away from iTunes sync and towards independent device connections to Apple Music kinda bears this out, I think, even if that's not something I'm interested in using.)
- dahauns 9y ago
  > (Oh, and there's also Sony's bizarre insistence on proprietary formats, like MiniDISC and MemoryStick -- that didn't help them, either.) The Memory Stick was bizarre, no doubt about it. Minidisc (and with it, ATRAC), however, was quite groundbreaking and had the potential to be huge. As a lossy psychoacoustic codec, ATRAC predated MP3 for years in commercial availability. Minidisc was both sturdy and flexible (esp. in comparison to DCC), had adequate audio quality (and later ATRAC versions became really good), and itcould have even been a contender for a 3.5" floppy successor in both capacity and speed. Sadly, this was the worst days of Sony hubris, both the physical format and the codec cost a lot to license, the use as a data medium was needlessly crippled, and as such it never really took off globally. I really wonder what would have happened if Sony and Philips could have reconciled and worked together on this like they did with the CD, instead of going all format war (with the DCC being the real head-scratcher here...).

xedarius 9y ago

I'd argue they're top of the tree in gaming consoles, but on the whole I agree.

jrockway 9y ago

I'd say they compete favorably with Canon and Nikon with digital cameras.

lykr0n 9y ago

In my view, they make great-ish Smart Phones.

pipio21 9y ago

Sony digital cameras sensors are the best in the market. Guess what the Iphone uses, that is the number one camera in the world.

ubermonkey 9y ago

Sony's huge and complicated. Obviously they're still doing well as a purveyor of gaming consoles, and their mirrorless cameras are AMAZING right now, but at the same time their forays into other markets (computing, e.g.) haven't fared well, and they went from market leader to also-ran in displays. The thing that still shocks me, though, is the degree to which they blew their market leading position in portable music players. They OWNED that market in the 80s and 90s with the then-ubiquitous Walkman brand, which they extended into the CD era with "Discman" players that seemingly everyone had when I went to college in 1988. Internal politics (I assume?) kept them from introducing a reasonable MP3 player until far, far too late for them to catch up. Some of their early efforts literally required you to re-encode your music into another weird format to use (ATRAC, I think?) -- and this while smaller players (Rio, etc) had devices you could load by copying MP3s to a memory card. I assume this is because Sony Music was afraid of the Mp3 revolution, but my understanding is that Sony Electronics has always been far more profitable than Sony Music, so it's hard to understand how that tail ended up wagging that particular dog. (Oh, and there's also Sony's bizarre insistence on proprietary formats, like MiniDISC and MemoryStick -- that didn't help them, either.) And then, of course, Apple came in with the iPod and gathered up the high-end, high-margin customers that were Sony's constituency.

kalleboo 9y ago
Sony got screwed so hard by copyright owners in the US on Betamax and DAT, that they decided to buy up movie/record labels and become a copyright owner themselves. This put them on the wrong side of the tech war and they got mired in the DRM bullcrap which made their music players a PITA to use. [suggested viewing: the techmoan episode on DAT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4K1QKKPX_g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4K1QKKPX_g ]
c3833174 9y ago
>Some of their early efforts literally required you to re-encode your music into another weird format to use (ATRAC, I think?) It's not really different from iPods, those required iTunes to load music just like Sony's devices used SonicStage, with the difference of the iPod having an internal hard drive instead of a MiniDISC drive (and later CD walkmans with ATRAC/MP3 support).
- ubermonkey 9y ago
  That's incorrect, because loading music on iPods didn't require you to re-encode anything. Sony's early digital players required your music to be in Sony's proprietary format, which was a whole additional step. And remember, 20 years ago, re-encoding took longer, so it was meaningfully less convenient. There's definitely a case to be made that requiring iTunes to load iPods/iPhones is annoying and needlessly complex, but I think it's clear Apple did this to make it more accessible to normal humans, not to exert control or in a quixotic attempt to sideline open codecs. (That Apple's current path is clearly away from iTunes sync and towards independent device connections to Apple Music kinda bears this out, I think, even if that's not something I'm interested in using.)
dahauns 9y ago
> (Oh, and there's also Sony's bizarre insistence on proprietary formats, like MiniDISC and MemoryStick -- that didn't help them, either.) The Memory Stick was bizarre, no doubt about it. Minidisc (and with it, ATRAC), however, was quite groundbreaking and had the potential to be huge. As a lossy psychoacoustic codec, ATRAC predated MP3 for years in commercial availability. Minidisc was both sturdy and flexible (esp. in comparison to DCC), had adequate audio quality (and later ATRAC versions became really good), and itcould have even been a contender for a 3.5" floppy successor in both capacity and speed. Sadly, this was the worst days of Sony hubris, both the physical format and the codec cost a lot to license, the use as a data medium was needlessly crippled, and as such it never really took off globally. I really wonder what would have happened if Sony and Philips could have reconciled and worked together on this like they did with the CD, instead of going all format war (with the DCC being the real head-scratcher here...).