nationalpost: Point, shoot, collapse: Why big camera companies...

nationalpost:

Point, shoot, collapse: Why big camera companies are the next BlackBerry

Sometime last year, a once unthinkable trend began to manifest itself among camera retailers worldwide.

Sales of compact, point-and-shoot cameras had long since gone off a cliff, steeply falling opposite the astronomical rise of capable smartphone cameras. But now, a disaster scenario was truly beginning to show, as sales of single lens reflex cameras (SLRs) also began to exhibit a decline for the very first time.

These are the cameras of photo enthusiasts: people who cannot imagine compromising any aspect of their picture’s quality, care about have absolute control over exposure and might even get a little giddy about saving up for a better lens, a brighter piece of “glass.”

For Canon Inc. and Nikon Corp., these people were their high-margin growth customer. With half a century of dominance in the film camera business, the stalwart Japanese camera giants had traded on this reputation to ride the digital wave. A boon for SLR sales. It was long believed that the clear inferiority of smartphone pictures would ensure the safety of this stronghold.

Now, Nikon shares are down 33% on the Tokyo Stock Exchange so far this year, and Canon, which at least has other business lines to fall back on, is down almost 7%. Smartphones — especially today’s batch of modern, capable, high-resolution shooters — have proven more of a threat, harder to emulate, and even harder to beat, than anyone could have thought.

Instead, it is Apple Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Google Inc. and even Microsoft Corp.’s Nokia that, have become consumer photography’s new guard for the typical shooter and even the avid enthusiast. (Photo: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg News)

I dumped Canon after years because … why the fuck do I still need a mirror and a camera the size of a tank?

I don’t think they’re going to die, Canon and Nikon, but they’ve invested so heavily in the SLR system and the market dominance of that style of camera that they neglected the benefits of the up and coming mirrorless systems.

Their current mirrorless offerings that still utilize their lens mounts are in a word: retarded and to use a phrase, half baked.

They do a lot of really amazing things with their SLR lines, truly spectacular, but the mirror is going away and they should have started that shift four or five years ago it should have been a serious shift so they could be running SLR and mirrorless bodies side by side, working through the kinks, to make a simple transition instead of whatever their plan is right now.

A lot of high end camera users, not all, but some are finding systems like the Sony NEX, Fuji, and Leica digital systems more and more appealing in size, innovation, and feature sets so why not switch? Or transition into mirrorless with a second camera type, running side by side?

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