Infographic: Camera Industry Sales Facts for 2016

[LonelyBoy]

I watched that video a while back, it makes good points (points where Nikon is still failing miserebly and Canon is arguably still the market leader), but I can't believe that the primary force in the current market is anything but saturation.
Digital happened, people bought in because one digital camera is worth a lifetime of film, and now that half the world has a good digital body that fills all their needs, sales are dropping off.
People are sold on the idea of good dedicated digital cameras, and by now practically everyone has bought one.
It was a sales burst that lasted less than five years, what did people expect?

What I really want to see is modern camera sales compared to the last 50 years of sales, that's the market everyone is going to be fighting for over the next decade.
Kind of like how a good modern laptop will probably remain a useful practical tool for decades to come, the only time people actually need to replace their 1Ds MkIII is when it gets dropped in a river.
My current camera body is an 1100D, and that's after I bought and sold a 5D2 because it didn't add any significant capabilities to my photography.
If that's the case coming from an enthusiast, pretty much everyone else who bought a camera around that time is probably thinking that any DSLR is about 10,000% overkill for their needs.

User friendliness is important to take back some of the P&S market from cellphones, but the sales levels seen around 2010 will never be repeated, that was simply the market responding to a disruptive technology reaching maturity.

Part of this is there is a demand today for more total photography than there was two decades ago.

In those days, if you wanted to sell your old "whatever", you did it with a classified ad, at the neighborhood yard sale, or at a swap meet. Today, you use Craigslist or eBay, and having an SLR (and being at least vaguely competent with it) help a great deal in selling things on those venues.

In those days, if you wanted to show pictures to your friends, you had to make a big heavy album with (probably) 3x5 or 4x6 prints that you'd insist they look through when they come over, or invest in a slide projector, have slides made from your negatives, and then annoy everyone by sitting them down on the couch for an hour to show off your vacation snapshots. Today you can put them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, and a million other places, and people can look through at their leisure, if interested.

In those days, if you wanted to send pics of your kids to your parents, you'd have to print out and mail them those same prints from the album, probably paying for more copies and then hefty postage, and hoping they don't get bent. Today, the grandparents can look at the pictures on those same platforms as above.

These uses, and other similar ones, all create the demand for more (digital) pictures, artistic and skilled or otherwise. However, none of them demands the latest SLR, or even the latest P&S. Today, many of those uses can be satisfied with a newer smartphone camera, or an old T1i, S120, or similar. Digital photography is becoming a mature market of gearheads and infrequent replacements instead of a growth market to meet this new demand. You posted about laptops, and then the same thing happened with tablets, which exploded for a while and then slowed down. Now even Apple still sells the iPad Mini 2 which handles most tasks for most people, even though the hardware is a few years old.

 

[LonelyBoy]

How many people that purchase Rebels with kit lenses to only photograph their kids, pets and families, ever take the camera off the Automatic settings?

Ha, I did, though I'm still far less skilled than most of the people on here. And I spent years with my old D40 (not 40D) afraid to leave the green box until a long time later I picked up a 7D and started at least learning something.

Then again, I'm also one of the few who showed up at a bike shop to get a bike "for group rides and maybe some triathlons" and actually went on to race triathlons for years and years, so I'm already an outlier.

 

[SkynetTX]

To stop the market shrinking camera maker companies should simply explain smartphone users what the difference is between their phone and a dedicated camera when it comes to taking pictures.

1. Smartphones have a lens with fixed focal length of about 27 mm or so. The focal length of the DSLR lenses vary from 16 to 800 mm.
2. Smartphones have a fixed aperture of about f/2. The aperture of the DSLR lenses can vary from f/1.2 to f/36. It means that you can never take a real macro photo with large DoF using a smartphone. With a smartphone the DoF can be changed only by increasing or decreasing the distance between you and your subject.
3. Using an ND filter you can set a long exposure time even with wide aperture on a camera so the people or the cars won't ruin your picture when you want to take a photo of a statue or building (or whatever you like) and the picture won't be too bright.

These there reasons are more than enough for me to use a DSLR camere instead of any smartphones.

 

[ahsanford]

To stop the market shrinking camera maker companies should simply explain smartphone users what the difference is between their phone and a dedicated camera when it comes to taking pictures.

1. Smartphones have a lens with fixed focal length of about 27 mm or so. The focal length of the DSLR lenses vary from 16 to 800 mm.
2. Smartphones have a fixed aperture of about f/2. The aperture of the DSLR lenses can vary from f/1.2 to f/36. It means that you can never take a real macro photo with large DoF using a smartphone. With a smartphone the DoF can be changed only by increasing or decreasing the distance between you and your subject.
3. Using an ND filter you can set a long exposure time even with wide aperture on a camera so the people or the cars won't ruin your picture when you want to take a photo of a statue or building (or whatever you like) and the picture won't be too bright.

These there reasons are more than enough for me to use a DSLR camere instead of any smartphones.

Sure, but you are talking like a photographer. That's not the issue here. Average photographers will skate right past f/numbers, tripod applications and macro DOF.

People don't want to bring a second device with them, so the camera must do things the cell phone simply cannot do. Don't try to sell them on DOF or waterfalls, think much higher level than your examples -- tell them a dedicated camera will be able to zoom optically, focus much more quickly, capture usable low light shots at concerts, etc.

(And re: #2 above, I think you've got your DOF math in reverse. An f/2 shot on a 1/3" iPhone sensor has similar DOF to an f/14 on the equivalent full frame setup, so you usually have bags of DOF with a cell phone. It's small DOF that cell phones are poor at.)

- A

 

[Mikehit]

I see very much the same issue in hifi.

Hifi still sells itself as a way of playing music and has never managed to market itself as a lifestyle product that the mass-market aims to own simply for its own sake. Music is a commodity and people treat it as such - why pay for better music when an iphone will play music. Cameras and picture-taking have the same problem with kudos.

Contrast that with cars: 4 wheels and an engine with some body work is what you need. What people in general want is a flashy status symbol and 'afficionados' they spend oodles putting an expensive music system into what is (musically speaking) a crap environment but they don't care because it is part of the car. 'Look at my flash new car and listen to the music system' = 'Look at my great new phone and it also has a fantastic state-of -the-art camera'

I realise that hifi has issues with space needed for many systems but that does not really explain the the issue around kudos of cameras/phones vs hifi/cameras. By the time people earn enough to have a large enough pad to have hifi, it is nowhere on their list of lifestyle priorities.

There was another thread recently about how many TV adverts have we seen for cameras. Similarly how many adverts do you see for quality hifi? Both have a problem with image and neither have managed to sell themselves as luxury items so there is not the mass-market desire to own them.

 

[hbr]

The way I see it, there are photographers and picture takers. The photographer might use a smart phone to take a photo because he knows why he is using it, but the picture taker does not want to know the details. They only want to snap a photo and either share it or just look at it later. The equipment used to take the picture has no value to them.

The question is, can the manufacturers recapture a sizable slice of this market?

 

[LonelyBoy]

People don't want to bring a second device with them, so the camera must do things the cell phone simply cannot do. Don't try to sell them on DOF or waterfalls, think much higher level than your examples -- tell them a dedicated camera will be able to zoom optically, focus much more quickly, capture usable low light shots at concerts, etc.

Yup. It's why iPods went from common to rare, dash-top nav systems went from uncommon to rare, Walkmans went from common to extinct, voice recorders went from uncommon to almost extinct, pocket calculators are almost gone, alarm clocks are declining, and on and on. The more things you can cram into one pocketable device, with at-least-acceptable quality and usability, the more the discrete items will be gutted. Now it's happening to pocketable compacts. Next it'll be... well, if I knew, I'd be inventing and investing and able to afford all the SLR toys I want.

 

[retroreflection]

Beginning of time, nobody had a camera.
Photography gets invented, serious entrepreneurs, artists (not accepted as such), and serious enthusiasts get cameras. Very low market penetration.
Kodak introduces the brownie. Enthusiasts show up in sizeable numbers. Eastman gets rich.
Film stock improves (mostly faster, nobody talks about dynamic range). Every newspaper gets a photographer, police forces, large corporations, etc. boost the market. Enthusiasts and new parents also get cameras in greater numbers. The time delay of developing film limits the market.
Digital shows up. No film development delay opens many people's minds to photography. Market growth is now limited by cost - everyone will buy a camera, some at 50¢, some a lot more. Size matters, too. P&S sales volume is all about small and cheap. A percentage of P&S customers get upsold to dslrs, it's bound to happen.
Smart phone cameras get good enough to supplant the P&S hold on small and cheap (well, I was getting a phone anyhow so it's kinda free. Right, honey?). You loose the chance for upselling.
And, the smartphone is a better solution. Back with the emergence of digital I pushed to have P&S cameras available to all of my engineers. When something photo-worthy appeared we would go get a camera. Things had to exceed a certain fairly big threshold before we would bother. Now, the limit is in how fast you can get the phone out of your pocket- unless the image is beyond the capability of a smartphone. We are back to one guy in the company with specialized camera gear.
As it was said, the market is not gone. It is just down from a crazy height.

 

[LonelyBoy]

And, the smartphone is a better solution. Back with the emergence of digital I pushed to have P&S cameras available to all of my engineers. When something photo-worthy appeared we would go get a camera. Things had to exceed a certain fairly big threshold before we would bother. Now, the limit is in how fast you can get the phone out of your pocket- unless the image is beyond the capability of a smartphone. We are back to one guy in the company with specialized camera gear.
As it was said, the market is not gone. It is just down from a crazy height.

Seems a bunch of us are saying more or less the same thing. I'd note that "the smartphone is a better solution" is true on in certain situations, but you definitely pointed out one good one. Another one is things like being in the grocery store and sending my wife a picture of an ingredients list to see if it passes muster for her, or if some other item is actually the correct one. That concept didn't exist a decade ago in any real capacity, but now I can get an answer in seconds. Couldn't do that with film, still can't do it with a DLSR.

 

[Hillsilly]

Fuji sold 5 million Instax cameras last years. But that's not relevant to the stats on the camera market? Does that make this infographic fake news?

 

[dolina]

I read a lot of denial.

That's why I am thankful there are numbers to back up the infographic.

Digital camera technology will still advance because of revenue from smartphones.

Smartphone cameras have come to a point that having a dedicated camera is an inconvenience rather than a necessity.

Most phone owners tend to renew their smartphone on a 12/24/36 month cycle with postpaid plans. So new cameras gets "pushed" to them. You really need to be a photog with $$$ to do that actively.

Regular folk who want a camera just want it for taking of photos of people. So a focal length of 24-70mm is already sufficient.

 

[dolina]

Fuji sold 5 million Instax cameras last years. But that's not relevant to the stats on the camera market? Does that make this infographic fake news?

infographic covers digital.

 

[Hillsilly]

Ok, thanks - I see the fine print.

Seems odd to produce a document that suggests that the camera market is declining when 5 million+ cameras are excluded.

 

[dolina]

Ok, thanks - I see the fine print.

Seems odd to produce a document that suggests that the camera market is declining when 5 million+ cameras are excluded.

Japan Camera industry excludes film cameras.

 

[Loswr]

Ok, thanks - I see the fine print.

Seems odd to produce a document that suggests that the camera market is declining when 5 million+ cameras are excluded.

Japan Camera industry excludes film cameras.

So you're saying a company that makes both digital cameras and the Instax line of film cameras, and is headquartered at Midtown West, 7-3, Akasaka 9-chome, Minato-ku, Tokyo 107-0052, Japan, is not part of the Japan Camera industry?!?

Care to defend that assertion?

 

[old-pr-pix]

The Infographic chart is just a reformatting of the CIPA data. Fujifilm Corp. supplies both digital camera data and interchangeable lens data to CIPA as do many other camera manufacturers. CIPA makes it clear their data and graphs represent digital camera shipments. According to CIPA, they stopped reporting film camera data in January 2008.

 

[Loswr]

Exactly. My point was that CIPA is not synonymous with the Japanese camera industry.

 

[TAF]

Look to all those who keep going on and on about the 'declining' market for cameras i call bull----. Why? Camera sales are coming down from historic and unsustainable highs.

What we are doing is returning to more stable and realistic sales numbers. Those sales are going to be higher value lower volume because the volume market, P&S's, are effectively dead. Seen over a longer time frame there is no cause for concern, just another wave, not a sinking.

I think this is something that a lot of people are missing. The early years of digital photography saw very fast development (and obsolescence) of technology. We had a combination of something new with something that was changing very fast.
There is no doubt that phone cameras are having an impact, but they are really mainly playing in the market that was served by Instamatics and Polaroid. The people who used 35mm or MF cameras in the 70s and 80s are still using DLSRs now, they are just not replacing them as quickly.
problem for the industry is that all the camera manufacturers thought that the digital photography bubble was the new normal. It isn't.

It seems to me we are returning to the pre-digital days of photography, when you bought a body expecting it to last a good long time, and then you added lenses when you could afford them. I bought my Canon F-1 in 1979 fully expecting I would not need to replace it for at least 20-30 years. Obviously I didn't see digital (and Canon killing off the FD mount for the EF) coming :-( (I do still have it and use it occasionally, anyway)

In the early days of digital, each new iteration was worth upgrading. Now the curve is flattening. So of course sales are slowing (or returning to more normal levels if you like).

As for the drop-off in P+S, its not like this hasn't happened before. Remember the Kodak Brownie? The Instamatic? Both highly successful but eventually 'overcome by events' camera tech.

As long as digital imagery exists, we'll be able to buy decent cameras. Of course, if something totally new comes along...

 

[dolina]

The Infographic chart is just a reformatting of the CIPA data. Fujifilm Corp. supplies both digital camera data and interchangeable lens data to CIPA as do many other camera manufacturers. CIPA makes it clear their data and graphs represent digital camera shipments. According to CIPA, they stopped reporting film camera data in January 2008.

In the same way the music industry does not report sales of audio cassette tapes.

When film camera becomes more significant as LPs then perhaps CIPA will report sales of these cameras.

 

[dolina]

Not everyone will buy the latest and greatest and upgrade to next year's model.

It might apply to this forum but not to the public at large.

Typical consumer will buy 1 camera and use it until it breaks down or gets lost. If the person becomes passionate and if the spouse allows they will then upgrade years down the road. They might talk the talk about the latest and greatest but wont buy because they got no money to buy.

Cameras on smartphones have come to a point that point and shoots arent worth batting an eye at unless they have a larger image sensor.

Most will say "you can't photograph a flying condor 100m up in the sky with an iPhone" well then not everyone wants or even needs a camera for that as not everyone is a birder.

CIPA did right by not including film cameras. They cater to a way different market segment.

It seems to me we are returning to the pre-digital days of photography, when you bought a body expecting it to last a good long time, and then you added lenses when you could afford them. I bought my Canon F-1 in 1979 fully expecting I would not need to replace it for at least 20-30 years. Obviously I didn't see digital (and Canon killing off the FD mount for the EF) coming :-( (I do still have it and use it occasionally, anyway)

In the early days of digital, each new iteration was worth upgrading. Now the curve is flattening. So of course sales are slowing (or returning to more normal levels if you like).

As for the drop-off in P+S, its not like this hasn't happened before. Remember the Kodak Brownie? The Instamatic? Both highly successful but eventually 'overcome by events' camera tech.

As long as digital imagery exists, we'll be able to buy decent cameras. Of course, if something totally new comes along...