Digital camera market is collapsing

[sdotkling]

the consumption of film is declining - not as quickly as in the mid-2000s, but enough that when separate digital cameras are in the ground, chemical won't be far behind.

Film and chemicals will probably always be with us. You can still buy lithography stones (talk about a complicated, obsolete and inferior technology!) woodcutting tools, and intaglio supplies, not to mention oil paints and canvasses. Film will be an art supply, and as long as people want to buy it, someone will make and distribute it. You won't be able to drop into the CVS to pick up some Tri-X, but you shouldn't be stressing too much about it. I see lots of young hipsters carrying old film SLRs, and my 18-year-old niece is very proud of her OM-2.

 

[burninfilm]

I try to remain dedicated but not serious... "Serious" is just too -- well serious.



Well so far my phone has never taken any photos on its own, but if Siri begins shooting her own photos with my (and her) phone, I would be willing to take a look at them. I just now asked her if she could take a selfie of me and she said "I'm afraid I don't know the answer to that."



FaceTube, perhaps you mean Facebook? -- I only look at what my friends post, and so far they post fabulous stuff. I have creative friends, but only about 150, a long way to go to the twenty billion! Anyway "better" is so subjective, personally I never worry about being better, I just plod along on my own.

LOL. Your comment about being "serious" cracks me up. Good stuff, and I totally agree with it. And let me know if Siri ever starts taking her own pics... that would be one hell of an Apple innovation...

The comment about "FaceTube" was probably an intentional combination of FaceBook and YouTube, insinuating that those two sites are where most images/videos are uploaded as part of social networking.

 

[p.giannakis]

Could this be the beginning of a film renaissance?

 

[KM-25]

Could this be the beginning of a film renaissance?

In all the manners of speaking that make the term "Photography" worth saying...?...I am banking on it, literally!

 

[pete hogan]

I expect to have a refrigerator, therefore I expect to have film.

 

[uhoh7]

Good future ahead for digital photography. Not to say there won't loosers, of course. But Schoph is certain Leica won't be loosing---just the opposite.

The iphone6 IS a camera and can be controlled manually. It's the new Instamatic. Obviously the P&S business was going to suffer with the rise of the camera phone, and the amateur DSLR users too. Today the non-phone market starts with the RX100 or similar, which will handily spank an iphone 6+, but....no 240fps LOL.

Anyway the underlying fact is that photography has never been more popular. People take more photos and share more photos.

Like the average conversation, some are interesting and some are not.

I think the phone thing is driving all sorts of photography curiosity and some will try film and fall in love.

I just want to see my M9 files on a 5k Imac LOL

And I hope my new 6 plus gets here soon so I too can join the unwashed camera industry killers 😉

 

[RichC]

Could this be the beginning of a film renaissance?

😱 😕 🙄 Ha, ha ha!

 

[mfunnell]

The iphone6 IS a camera[...] It's the new Instamatic.

That may be so, but at least for the moment it has some of the same types of limitations.

As it happens, I was chatting with one of my workmates about some photos I took at farewell drinks for a boss the other week and she commented that all the other photos (ie. the ones taken with smartphones) looked like cr*p, yet somehow mine didn't. I didn't have the heart to tell her that's because I used an actual, well, purpose-designed camera. I'll also note that nobody batted an eyelid at camera-phone photos but many were averse to having their photo taken with a "real" camera (yet many of them now want to see the "real" photos), so there appears to be some, um, cognitive dissonance there...

One of my takes is that often phone-cameras (and the small-sensor P&S cameras they're busily replacing) are used well outside their useful range (as Instamatics before them often were) but many people don't understand why they can take a good-enough photo in some circumstances (usually meaning "with good light") but produce pretty horrible results in others.

As is also typical, the lady I was chatting with asked that I delete the shots with her in them, but said the others were "good". That also seems somewhat typical of the zeitgeist: nobody wants to appear in a photo they didn't take themselves, of themselves, posed as they wish, as an exercise in "personal branding" but they do want to see photos of everyone else. (This is over and above the normal thing where no woman ever approves of any photo taken of them where they weren't deliberately posing and presenting their good side.)

Nothing I'm fussed about, but of a piece with things I seem to be noticing more and more frequently (though that could be just that I'm getting older and grumpier).

...Mike

 

[Michael Markey]

, the lady I was chatting with asked that I delete the shots with her in them, but said the others were "good". That also seems somewhat typical of the zeitgeist: nobody wants to appear in a photo they didn't take themselves, of themselves, posed as they wish, as an exercise in "personal branding" but they do want to see photos of everyone else. (This is over and above the normal thing where no woman ever approves of any photo taken of them where they weren't deliberately posing and presenting their good side.)
...Mike

Yes Mike ... I encountered that.
...... post processing to smooth the skin or loose a few pound ...whatever.

They want complete control over the output.

I just smile but make sure that I don`t take any more pictures of them.

There was one exception to that ,and I just handed her the camera and said ...delete what you want.

I`d lost interest quite frankly and already had enough film shots anyway . 🙂

 

[jsrockit]

It's not really silly, though. Go to the zoo, there are 98% cell phones, and maybe 1 in 300 dslrs. Plus some joe with a L35AF, that was me.

Right, and those are not photographers who are passionate about photography. Passionate photographers will always wants something more than the iPhone. And I'm not saying the iPhone cannot be a serious tool. Of course it can... but 98% you are talking about just are taking photos with their phone because it is a memory not because they are into photography.

 

[jsrockit]

Smartphones are going to force the legacy optical companies to...wait for it...focus.

They can no longer count on a bulk sale, mass market, channel stuffing P&S market.

Agreed completely.

But they are driving DSLR's into commodity prices to keep volumes up. The small DSLR and mirrorless are everywhere even during the smartphone onslaught. There is a steady if declining demand for "real cameras". No doubt.

True, but there will always be alternatives to camera phones. Additionally, new types of photography products will be developed in ways we can't predict.

 

[jsrockit]

It's not 'one product' it's a whole ecosystem of products: smartphones (Apple, Android, Windows), phablets, tablets.
And it's not the higher-end products that are being directly replaced, it's the volume market that sustains those products, and pays for the R&D and the 'niche' cameras used by enthusiasts. The whole market is disappearing from underneath - that's why it's happening without you even noticing.

I'm not blind... I notice it. However, I just don't think it'll kill the camera market outright. I think people confuse the everyday person who uses a camera to make a photo for memories / bragging with a photographer that takes their work seriously. There is a difference. Camera companies will adjust just as computer manufacturers have adjusted.

But as others have said, just look around: when I take a walk through the old town nowadays I'll see four or five digital cameras (if that), tens of people using phones or tablets to take pictures, and often a couple of young kids with film cameras. A few years ago those proportions would've been totally different - with no film cameras to be seen and DSLRs of some sort round every tourist's neck.

Photographing has become more popular with the advent of cell phones... those same people just wouldn't have had a camera with them in the past. However, I work on Broad St. in Manhattan and there are many different types of cameras in use. People come to see Wall St. and I can tell you that it's not all cell phones. There are a lot of cell phones, but I see all types of cameras.

I'm finding the same thing at work: only one of my colleagues (at a young startup with 26 employees) has a 'real' camera, but three of the others have already bought the larger iPhone 6, and by the time they really arrive in Sweden I'm guessing most of us will have one.

Well, what type of work are you in? Why would the people you are referring to need something else? My mom used cheap 110/126/ DISC P&S cameras in the 70/80s... she was never going to buy a SLR. It's the same thing now just expanded due to the internet and the fact that everyone brings their phone everywhere.

What I'm reading in this thread seems amazingly naïve: by all accounts the camera manufacturers are suffering incredibly fast losses. Massive industries can't adapt to losing so much of their market at such a pace, these are lumbering organizations with planning that has to project years in advance. They have assets and workforces, machinery and factories that need to be fully utilized or disposed of (often at great expense in itself). None of that is going to be fixed by a few enthusiasts hoping to continue buying their favorite cameras at the price level of the last decade, nor by 'better marketing', nor even by adding network capabilities to 'real' cameras. All of that is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

So, you truly think every camera manufacturer is going to be put out of business by telephone manufacturers soon huh? Seems equally naive to me.

 

[mani]

So, you truly think every camera manufacturer is going to be put out of business by telephone manufacturers soon huh? Seems equally naive to me.

I haven't said anywhere that I think they're all "going to be put out of business soon", but the landscape is changing much faster than you think in my opinion, and what's left of the digital camera market in just a couple years won't resemble what we've seen over the previous decade.

Many of the responses I've seen in this thread remind me of the IBM executives who questioned why anyone would want a computer in their own home, or the telephone companies who laughed at the concept of people walking around the street making phone calls. There's a paradigm shift going on in photography, and anyone who thinks the broad choice of digital cameras at affordable prices is going to continue for ever just because enthusiastic hobbyists want it to, is gonna get disappointed.

Incidentally, I work 200 meters from this:

http://goo.gl/64KS8q

so simply walking out the office door gives me a good, casual overview of what people are using to photograph their vacations these days.

 

[mfunnell]

What I'm reading in this thread seems amazingly naïve: by all accounts the camera manufacturers are suffering incredibly fast losses. Massive industries can't adapt to losing so much of their market at such a pace, these are lumbering organizations with planning that has to project years in advance. They have assets and workforces, machinery and factories that need to be fully utilized or disposed of (often at great expense in itself).

Let's not get too overwrought: if Canon and Sony and Panasonic never sold another camera, ever again, they'd still exist. Big time. I think Ricoh/Pentax would probably be fine too, though they'd take a larger hit. I'd like to say the same for Olympus but their state is, ummmm, let's just say they're still recovering from something well outside the camera business per se. Of the major Japanese camera companies I'd say it's Nikon under the largest threat in a falling camera market. Yet I don't really think they're threatened at all...

Korea? Let's just say "Samsung".

And while, closer to home, Leica Camera AG would fairly obviously go bust if they couldn't sell cameras, I doubt their business model is especially threatened by smartphones. (Nor, back in Japan, is Cosina Voigtlander as a not-phone-threatened niche player close to the collective hearts of RFF.)

And so on. As Douglas Adams once advised Don't Panic.

...Mike

 

[willie_901]

I agree with some of what Pioneer posted earlier.

Nikon's stock and earnings performance reveal a significant problem (link). Their nearly defunct P&S product lines us to provide a steady stream of cash. Back then earnings did not suffer if a part of the P&S cash flow was diverted for enthusiast/pro level product development. That option is gone forever. Those lost sales impact the future cameras and lenses we care about.

Nikon is hardly the only large corporation that is slow to adapt to a rapidly evolving technical landscape. But when you combine Nikon's inability to move quickly with the leveling of digital-imaging, data-stream advances, the response of the financial markets makes sense.

 

[mani]

Let's not get too overwrought: if Canon and Sony and Panasonic never sold another camera, ever again, they'd still exist. Big time. I think Ricoh/Pentax would probably be fine too, though they'd take a larger hit...

Mike - that's really sort of my point: camera-manufacture is peripheral to a lot of these businesses, and in my view no-one at the top of those companies will be worried if they "never sold another camera, ever again".

 

[jsrockit]

I haven't said anywhere that I think they're all "going to be put out of business soon", but the landscape is changing much faster than you think in my opinion, and what's left of the digital camera market in just a couple years won't resemble what we've seen over the previous decade.

Changing faster? It's changed. I can agree it will not look like it does now, but I just don't think we can predict how it'll look. It may be something completely different than cellphone cameras and current form factors in digital cameras. I think we are in agreement that camera companies have to change their strategies at this point. However, it will not be the end of serious digital cameras with camera ergonomics.

Many of the responses I've seen in this thread remind me of the IBM executives who questioned why anyone would want a computer in their own home, or the telephone companies who laughed at the concept of people walking around the street making phone calls.

No one is doing that here... we are all just speculating on what we THINK may happen based on what's already happened. Unless we are in the business, we most likely are off base.

There's a paradigm shift going on in photography, and anyone who thinks the broad choice of digital cameras at affordable prices is going to continue for ever just because enthusiastic hobbyists want it to, is gonna get disappointed.

Digital cameras are essentially computers... and just like computers, there will still be digital cameras at affordable prices until something else replaces it.

Incidentally, I work 200 meters from this:

http://goo.gl/64KS8q

Noted, and I'm sure if you really look around at what people are holding... you'll notice other cameras. Let's face it... you would see tons of crappy P&S cameras at tourist spots in the past with a few SLRs thrown in during the time when film was king. The casual snapshot / vacation photo person has always used cheap and easy tools.

 

[mani]

Nikon's stock and earnings performance reveal a significant problem (link). ....

Good link! This is part of a linked news story about Canon which was on that page:

“Demand for compact cameras declined sharply because of smartphones,” Makoto Kikuchi, chief executive officer at Myojo Asset Management Co. in Tokyo, said by phone. “Canon was too aggressive with their SLR sales forecast. People who want them have already bought them...”

 

[mwoenv]

I think it's safe to say that people on this site are more serious about photography and would not be considered part of the "mass market". So it's interesting that so many react to mass market trends and news - sure, the mass market has shifted to phone cameras as the easiest means of taking images that are of good quality to them. And this is driving the decline in sales of dedicated, better cameras. In the past, would serious photographers be concerned about trends in sales of Instamatic cameras?

 

[RObert Budding]

Yes, new film camera sales are close to zero. But there's a huge supply of legacy cameras out there.

The digital camera market, on the other hand, has matured (I shot my Nikon D700 for 6 years before upgrading). So manufacturers will have to restructure so they can remain profitable on smaller volumes.