Nikon Fixes “So Ugly He Broke the Camera” Bug

When the Nikon Nikon D6 released a few years back, it boasted of an “improved scene recognition system,” which could – among many other things – recognize when the photographer was shooting a portrait. The problem has been (though rarely) that sometimes the camera would recognize a portrait, but would refuse to fire when the shutter button was pressed, especially after taking multiple shots.

This finally made real the “so ugly you broke the camera” phenomenon. In truth, the attractiveness of the subject was probably not a factor, as the DSLR’s subject recognition system is far too primitive.

Today, Nikon releases a firmware upgrade to fix that. It is a bug that we will actually miss because of its poetic real-life rendering of an idiom whose first known reference is from 1898.