Hi everyone,

Long term I don’t see a very rosy future for the camera manufacturers unless they wake up and smell the coffee. It seems that the only way that they can try and entice everyday folks into buying their gear is by incorporating more and more useless tech and pushing the illusion that these features will magically enable folks to take amazing photographs and/or video that their smart phones aren’t in any way capable of and, in order to do this for a shrinking market they’re making their gear un-realistically priced and un-affordable to many which is in total contradiction to selling their products and this, the size, bulk, complexity and weight of the gear isn’t going to temp that many mobile phone users into buying their gear. A camera is just that a one-use tool, one more thing to buy and carry around whereas mobile phones have many uses, they’re smaller, cheaper, easier to carry and affordable to upgrade. as well as being second-nature to operate for many, especially those of a certain generation.

The camera manufacturers need to seriously re-evaluate their strategies else they will sooner of later, probably sooner, find themselves producing ever more costly cameras for a dedicated niche market in a law of diminishing returns which can only have one outcome and those of us that enjoy using a camera will find ourselves sustained by the used camera market until we are confined to history . They’ve lost the plot, it’s not just all about how many megapixels or AI etc., it comes down to affordability, rational design and inspired marketing, look what David Bailey did for the Olympus Trip, I still have folks, old enough to remember, come up to me sometimes and say “who’d you think you are, David Bailey?” (wish I had his money) 🙂 that’s clever mainstream marketing, we don’t ever see any camera adverts on TV nowadays, nothing to raise awareness, tempt people and capture their imagination so what’s to make people aware of a thing called a camera? and why they might want to buy one. What little marketing one does see is largely aimed at photographers, we know what a camera is and what it’s for, preaching to the converted!, they’re repeatedly fishing in the same small pond. Is this a mixture of arrogance and complacency on the part of camera manufacturers? if so as the old saying goes “pride cometh before a fall”. Yoshihisa Maitan’s inspirational vision to empower people with affordable, lightweight, well-built cameras to take pictures has never seemed further away.

CC. OM Systems, Nikon, Fuji, Canon, Sony et. al.. 🙂

Here endeth the lesson for today 🙂 🙂

Kind regards

Leigh