CIPA 2014 data published today

[Pioneer]

This is what my crystal ball says:

1. Advancements in photography have always been associated with greater and greater ease of use and sharing.
2. 95% of photography is practiced within the family to help perpetuate the memory of the family.
3. There is no "comeback" for film, never was.
4. Film will remain the cottage industry it has effectively become.
5. A small number of film cameras will continue to be produced and sold.
6. Silly boy, you are not considering all the facts, digital is not dying, it is only changing and adopting a different method of implementation.
7. The current digital camera is an unwieldy marriage of old film technology and digital technology.
8. Digital cameras in phones, ipads and other devices will continue to improve.
9. Connectivity will continue to improve and accelerate.
10. Digital imaging and connectivity will be served by much better software that is far easier for us to use.

Ooops, my crystal ball just blew up. Must have overheated with all this speculation! 😀

 

[shadowfox]

I'm new to this discussion, sorry if the following points have been made before.

1. Film cameras were - completely - obsoleted by digital cameras, except for the dedicated (and anachronistic) hobbyist. It started with the midrange of the film camera market (okay quality point and shoots), moved to the low end (cheap point and shoots) and the high end (SLRs, high end rangefinder).


3. Digital cameras were able to completely replace film cameras, because they could do everything that film cameras could, and were so much faster, cheaper and more convenient.

I respectfully, but absolutely, disagree with the above 2 opinions. 🙂

 

[Ranchu]

Yeah, I'm still waiting for the obsolete part, too. All the hype kind of falls apart without it. What's up with that? Tell me about the specific definition of obsolete you're using and make me laugh?

http://120studio.com/dynamic-range.htm

http://home.comcast.net/~nikond70/Charts/PDR.htm

https://www.flickr.com/groups/394039@N24/pool/page1

 

[willie_901]

Nikon is not doing well at all.

The recent high for Nikon stock (Tokyo Stock Market) was about 2,800 Yen in May 2013. Today a share sells for about 1,400 Yen. This is a disaster.

In my view not all of this decline is due to the irreversible loss of inexpensive P&S cameras. I believe investors thin the DSLR market is stagnant and Nikon is too conservative to cannibalize their DSL platform by offering high-performance mirrorless products, The V and J series product line flopped... or at least investors don't believe the V/J attempt to compete with m4/3, Fujifilm and others succeeded. Nikon has embraced new camera data/communication technologies at a glacial pace as well.

If you think my view is skewed, please consider Olympus' stock performance over the same time period (~ 3,000 Yen in May 2013, and 4,175 yen today).

One anecdotal example of Nikon's problem is comes from a good friend of mine. He pre-ordered every new prosumer Nikon DSLR beginning with the D100. I have never seen him without one of these cameras when he leaves home. When the D800 was released he asked me if it would be a mistake to keep his D700 and forego pre-ordering the D800. He said the D700 did everything he needed and the while the D800 had a better sensor, it offered no other improvements (for him). I told as far as I was concerned there was no reason to upgrade and he didn't. We had the same conversation about the DF. I told him when I played with one I found it to be lighter, but still too bulky. He tried one too and kept the D700.

The future for non-smart phone photography innovation and a contemporary user experience. Setting up the camera, full wireless operation, flexible data transfer, remote operation with robust iOS/Andorid Apps is important to many people who want to move up from mobile phone photography. Nikon is not well positioned to capture this market share. If it was the stock price would reflect optimism.

I am well aware Nikon offers non-camera products. Unfortunately, unlike Fujifilm, Canon, Panasonic, Samsung and they do not have vast non-imaging profit centers to sustain downturns in still-imaging sales. Neither does Olympus by the way, but they innovated their way to increased stock value.

And yes, stock price is not a perfect metric to evaluate camera companies. But it is the consensus of object observers.

 

[Daniel Teoli Jr.]

Today the December data and so of course the complete digital camera sales data for 2014 has been published by the CIPA:

http://www.cipa.jp/stats/dc_e.html

2014 was again another horror year for the digital camera manufacturers:
Total shipments decreased by - 30.9%.
Again about another 1/3 of the market is gone.
Sales continue being in free fall.

The manufacturers (and the distributors of course as well) are now thrown back far behind the sales level of 2003 (!!):
In 2003 about the same volume of digital cameras were sold.
But at that time the industry still sold 18,5 million film based cameras in addition, too.

In 2014 millions of film based cameras were bought - on the used market.
Because of the very attractive price level and because most manufacturers don't offer new film cameras (so customers are forced to buy used instead of new).
Leica is seeing a chance here and has introduced another film camera last Photokina. They reported increasing demand for their film cameras.
And there has been Photokina reports from Nikon and Canon, that they are thinking about / discussing new film cameras. Looking for profitable niches. Interesting to see whether they or others will go this route in the next years.

What needs to be added to the mix is an affordable Leica knockoff, a Japanese digital rangefinder.

 

[shadowfox]

I think your observation above make sense.

By throwing out all their film photography products out of the window, they are chaining themselves to the computer technology bandwagon. And as history reveals, only a handful of computer manufacturers are competing today compared to even 10 years ago.

Yes, there are still room for innovations, but the ceiling for camera manufacturers are human perception. Soon, no one would be able to tell the difference between 55 Megapixels vs 100 Megapixels (I personally stop paying attention beyond 16 🙂 ). Or 4K video vs 120K video. What is the point other than increasing metrics?

It is, in the end, a very narrow road to compete in if not a dead end.