The Light at the End of the Tunnel
In its post of the 8-Jul-2011, PetaPixel reported that CNBC has declared the end of the point and shoot cameras. This has been reported many times by many business analysts.
Point and shoot camera sales are down, significantly. The top 2 point and shoot camera manufacturers are:
- Canon
- Sony
And they represent 65% of the worldwide market. This year, Canon has introduced only 1 new camera, and Sony only 2 new cameras. Yes, there was the earthquake, but there wasn't many more new point and shoot cameras in 2010 either!
Why? Sony is killing the point and shoot camera market, because they can make more money and have an almost monopoly. Sony is the largest manufacturer of CMOS/CCD sub-assemblies. Sony sell those to anybody and everybody. Sony does the sensors for Sony, Nikon, some Canon, Pentax… and for most camera phones. Most new smart phones have either a 3 or 4 megapixels camera built-in. That's good enough for most people for their photos to be posted on Flickr, Facebook, Picassa/Google+… Sony is making an 8 Megapixels subsystem for the iPhone 5!
Why buy a separate camera to carry when a camera phone is good enough? Depending on who's reporting, 2010's point and shoot camera sales went down from 40% to 66%! The most popular camera on Flickr is the iPhone4!
And now for the light at the end of the tunnel, this is becoming good news for professional photographers:
- People are already refusing to pay for photos taken with an iPhone.
- People will have a harder time switching from an iPhone to a “real” camera.
- There will be lot less competition.
- People are already asking me for jobs because they want something better than an photo from an iPhone. “You're a pro, so you must have a good camera!”
- We are going back to the 1970s and the 1980s when the number one camera was the Kodak Instamatic.