fmw
No longer a newbie, moving up!
I just finished reading an interesting article in the current issue of Digital Photopro magazine. It talks about where the camera manufacturing industry is headed. He made some interesting, if not controversial prognostications.
Nikon announced that they will stop manufacturing film cameras in 2007. The author believes this will be the case with all 35mm camera manufacture very quickly. He believes that film will become prohibitively expensive for pros to use and will disappear faster than film photographers think. He believes only the amateur market will keep it alive for a while.
Bronica no longer makes cameras. He believes there won't be a medium format film camera left to manufacture at all in short order. He sees companies like Mamiya and Pentax disappearing.
The industry believes that the sale of point and shoot digital cameras will peak in 2007 at around 27 millions units and will decline after that to be around 23 million by 2010, and go down from there. He thinks there is still growth in the DSLR segment of the business but not in the point and shoot end.
He sees a big shakeup in the DSLR business. Companies like Pentax won't make it. Canon will be the ruler and Nikon the #2 survivor of the shakeup. Electronics companies that have entered the market recently (Sony, Panasonic etc.) may or may not continue to make DSLR's into the future depending on how their experiments in the industry go.
My crystal ball isn't even as good as the author's so I have no way to judge the comments. It is interesting fodder for debate, though.
Nikon announced that they will stop manufacturing film cameras in 2007. The author believes this will be the case with all 35mm camera manufacture very quickly. He believes that film will become prohibitively expensive for pros to use and will disappear faster than film photographers think. He believes only the amateur market will keep it alive for a while.
Bronica no longer makes cameras. He believes there won't be a medium format film camera left to manufacture at all in short order. He sees companies like Mamiya and Pentax disappearing.
The industry believes that the sale of point and shoot digital cameras will peak in 2007 at around 27 millions units and will decline after that to be around 23 million by 2010, and go down from there. He thinks there is still growth in the DSLR segment of the business but not in the point and shoot end.
He sees a big shakeup in the DSLR business. Companies like Pentax won't make it. Canon will be the ruler and Nikon the #2 survivor of the shakeup. Electronics companies that have entered the market recently (Sony, Panasonic etc.) may or may not continue to make DSLR's into the future depending on how their experiments in the industry go.
My crystal ball isn't even as good as the author's so I have no way to judge the comments. It is interesting fodder for debate, though.