Since the below really stepped on a few toes, please let me explain my view.
At the turn of the millenium, more or less everyone had a camera. The market was gigantic, with room for everyone to produce cameras, lenses, flash... There were billions of cameras around and they all needed film and development and prints that people very rarely did in their homes, so it supported a gigantic service economy too.
About at that point in time, digital cameras took off, going from an odd curiosity priced out of range for most to viable for the masses in the span of roughly 5 years. In 2006 or thereabout, the digital option became better than film for most uses (varies a couple of years depending on who you ask, but most I've talked to center around 2006 at least). There were phones with cameras built in, but if you wanted a photo good enough to print, you had to use a dedicated camera. This caused the masses of people who wanted to still have a camera but transition to digital to buy enormous numbers of compact digital cameras over a span of a surprisingly low number of years.
The smartphone was introduced to the masses in 2007 with the iPhone and quickly followed up in 2008 with HTC Dream as first commercially available Android phone. They had cameras just like the featurephones and they were still crappy. However, they came with a big invention: they completely changed the way we treat pictures. No longer did we primarily take pictures to print and put in albums but we took pictures to share. And not just postage-stamp-sized expensive MMS sharing but reasonably high-resolution images that felt like slightly more than a gimmick: photos of whiteboards in conference rooms, the food we ate in restaurants, selfies... The smartphone invented new ways using pictures but also new ways of sharing pictures. A decade later, you still can't share pictures with your friends from your camera without going through a smartphone.
So, the declining sales we are seeing in the compact camera segment is likely to be dampened to a large extent by people that forgot they now have a smartphone, people that need slightly better pictures than can be had with a smartphone or people too old to learn how to use a smartphone.
Any sort of middle segment (you remember the bulky crossover "prosumer" cameras large as a DSLR but with a fixed zoom lens and tiny sensor?) is even more dead, because there was never any real big target audience anyway.
The DSLR segment would be in free-fall too if it wasn't for the still sizable community of enthusiasts. I don't believe the number of professional photographers is large enough to sustain such a system as Canon or Nikon have. There wouldn't be a market for even a million cameras a year if only professionals bought them.
We haven't seen the end of the decline in the camera market. Enthusiasts are even rediscovering film, which might lead to even fewer digital camera sales since there are billions of old cameras that are still perfectly serviceable so little to no incentive to produce new exists. I believe we'll see the market shrink by dual-digit percentages year on year for a few more years and then slowly stabilize a bit with only single-digit percentage decreases as the people who knew how to handle film slowly die off.
Unless some real innovation happens again. We are getting used to talking about innovation when all we are really getting is spec bumping and a few convenient features. Sony in particular are masters of this.
We've seen two real innovations hit the camera industry in the last two decades (digitalisation plus picture-sharing-centric photography). If we could have something like holographic or light field photography that really needed larger cameras, we could see the transition away from smartphones as primary cameras. Likewise if smartphone cameras couldn't be made much better but the sharing was properly built into the cameras. Otherwise, people like me who take digital pictures for the print will be but a parenthesis in history.
hne said:
What happened to the photography industry in 2016?
Innovation in 2007-2008 and feature maturity around 2012.
What we are looking at is the dwindling sales of an arcane product to a diminishing loyal customer base (and a very low number of people that make a living off of them, or bizarre hobbyists, much like the vinyl collectors).
If the phone cameras had a little bit of zoom, say a 24-70/4 equivalent, and a way to trigger external flashes, what would you still use a large clunky camera for? Bird in flight and... some sports perhaps?
If the phones were way larger such that you kept it in a bag/backpack and your camera could send images directly to your friends/nas/dropbox/printer, would you still take photos with your phone?
