Peak Camera?

[Mike Farley]

In an interesting interview, Canon CEO Fujio Mitarai has claimed that the current market for digital cameras will halve from 10 million units by the end of next year. As a result, Canon plans to concentrate more on corporate sales and other areas such as surveillance rather than consumer products. So far as cameras we use are concerned, it is indicative of a mature market and probably more akin to the film era when there was less need to replace or upgrade equipment. In other words, the cameras we use today are likely to be very similar in specification to those available in a few years time. There are no new technological developments which are going to revolutionise the camera industry in the same way that digital did.

Article at DPReview: https://www.dpreview.com/news/411568306 ... 5-6m-units

[Mike Farley]

Thom Hogan has pronounced on the Canon story. He is not quite so pessimistic as Fujio Mitarai; he thinks annual sales will eventually decline to 8 million units. He also points out that a lot of the decrease to date is mainly accounted for by falling sales of compacts rather than cameras with interchageable lenses.

https://dslrbodies.com/newsviews/nikon- ... clama.html

Based on the number of new camera launches from around the time of Photokina, superficially the market would appear buoyant. With one exception, they have one thing in common; all have been mirrorless models priced in excess of £2,000. Most have also been full frame, Olympus with its pro spec E-M1X being the outlier. The exception? The Nikon D3500 which is merely another minor variation in its long running D3000 series. There are a lot of companies all chasing the lucrative high end market which probably accounts for around 10% of sales. It does not seem sustainable to me.