old-pr-pix said:
their smart phone instead. I anticipate general market consumer level sales of ILC's will continue to erode. Enthusiasts and pros will continue to use dSLR's and ML and argue amongst themselves which is better; but the millions of consumers who fund the industry are going away.
We are talking about two separate tasks. Photography has always been made by two separate processes, the image taking one, and the storage/display/sharing one. If to watch a daguerreotype you would have needed a clusmy camera, I don't think they would have been a success.
The smartphone can cover both of them, obviously, but still with some limitations. The storage/sharing part is not fully covered by smartphones, because local space could still be limited, especially in budget models, and devices may break, be lost, stolen or replaced - not many consumers use microSD cards in their phones, and not all model can use them, the most notable example being iPhones, and still, if the device is lost or stolen you lose everything.
Hence online storage and sharing, especially on on social sites is important for consumers, as they also work as a "backup".
To display photos to a larger audience, TVs or monitors are still better than phones (although they can be the source of the images), and you won't mail your phone to your aunt.
Just, Kodak had really no presence in any of these markets, and in many ways it probably made more money from prints than films - and not surprisingly negative films, and its prints, survived past reversal ones, because there is still some money coming from them.
Cameras are not really suited to be display devices, even for those who will keep on using ILCs, and you'll need more functions to publish images than to access them for display.
It's just like when audio recordings became easily available, the music performance and most of its fruition became separate processes using different devices. Today you don't need a piano in your house so you and your hosts can play and sing, or have people bring their instruments to listen to some music. And no one thought to add recording capabilities to them just so you could bring around your piano and use it to play a recording.
old-pr-pix said:
Smartphones are an equally disruptive technology. Not scientific, but big family gatherings have transitioned from Instamatics and disposable cameras to digital P&S, perhaps a few Rebels, now to smartphones.
How do you explain the Fujifilm Instax sales? Nor photo printers disappeared yet. It looks sometimes a physical artifact still has some value.
And for important events, i.e. weddings, if the hired photographer showed up with a smartphone only I guess he or she would be lynched, and finished by the bride with the wedding cake knife... ;D
It's just a matter of convenience - most people never liked cameras or photography, they just wanted the images. They will use the easiest tool to obtain them. Just, when images becomes really important for any reason, they will pay homage, maybe unconsciously, to skill, performance and quality.
