In an interesting move from a company which is not among the top tier of professional digital photography, Epson just released the Epson RD-1, the world’s first digital rangefinder camera, clearly aimed at traditional photographers at ease with that kind of camera. (Read Luminous Landscape’s excellent article.)

The camera, which was jojntly developed by Epson and Cosina-Voigtländer, closely emulates the look and feel of Leica-style M-series cameras down to “loading" the next picture with a film-advance lever.

We will not go into the technical details of the camera here. What we find interesting, however, is that the Epson RD-1 strongly underscores a trend which we have been following for quite some time: the necessity of digital appliances to emulate analog counterparts wherever these have an advantage or are appreciated by the user.

This is the post-digital world at its best: taking the advantages of digital technology, and marrying it with familar and appreciated procedures.

We believe that the future belongs to technology which does not try to re-invent the wheel but aknowledges that the analog/physical world had already nicely figured out some problems.

We are not talking about design gadgets such as hiding a PC in an Art Deco inspired enclosing, but about combining a familiar way of working with the digital functionality we require.

As the dizzying novelty of digital technology wears off even for the average consumer, we can expect to see more and more developments of this kind.