A little food for thought;
Do you guys think that in 5 or 10 years, we will look back and say "can you believe that in the old days (meaning today) we had to manually adjust dope"? "Geez, that Swarovski Smartscope sure was ahead of it's time". I can't imagine that any of the other high end scope manufacturers (the smart ones anyway) are sitting around saying "awww.....look at those fools at Swarovski and their hair brained ideas". I suspect that other manufacturers have their own skunkworks projects going on right now, they're just not talking about any of it yet. Great glass, turrets and reticles are a wonderful thing, but in order to distinguish yourself against the competition, you have to have something new. You can only flog those "old" features so far, for so long. The hooks to draw in new customers is new technology. Something new, something different. Something cooler and flashier than any other competitor has. Something that looks more like the high res game I play on my computer or the high res movies or games I can play on my cell phone. The question from customers to manufacturers has become not "have you done this yet", but "why haven't you done this, your competition already has". Swarovski occupies the category of the competition that already has done it. I'm also confident they are already working on successive generations as I'm typing this. Look at the life cycles of cell phones. There is ten times the computing power in my iPhone 6 as what was in the Apollo spacecraft that took the first man to the moon.
I think a good analogy is slide rules being obsoleted by calculators, Landlines being obsoleted by cell phones, Sextant/compasses being replaced by GPS, etc. Could we be in the beginning stages of the same thing happening with scopes ? With electronics design, manufacturing and microminiaturization being at such an advanced level today, I can't see the electronics being a limiting factor. True, optics engineers are not particularly well suited to design advanced robust and rugged electronics, but there are no shortages of people that can handle the electronics design and software and do it well.
I'm thinking that in the not too distant future, we will find ourselves referring to various scope generations as either "Analog" or "Digital". When I was younger, my passion was professional audio (concert sound systems). I loved it, but it was feast or famine and I had a new family to feed. I got out of it at the tail end of the analog days. Pro audio sure went digital in a huge way. I'd bet money we are in the beginning stages of that happening in optics right now.
Thoughts ?
