[ad_1]
Mirrorless didn’t just win the battle, it won the war. Last year – 2020 – was a landmark as more mirrorless cameras were shipped than DSLRs. It is the first design choice for manufacturers and therefore it is the future of the camera. However, the future of photography undoubtedly lies in the smartphone.
It seems so obvious looking back over the past decade that it seems inconceivable that mirrorless was not considered the future of camera design when it first appeared. . However, CaNikon’s vested interests kept the dream of the DSLR alive – along with their sources of revenue – which allowed other manufacturers to look into what was of interest to the market. And they did it after Olympus and Panasonic launched Micro Four Thirds, with Sony, Nikon, Pentax, Canon, Fuji, and Leica all presenting new systems. This has to be seen in the context of global camera shipments which peaked at 121 million units (1,643 million yen) in 2010. Okay, of those, some 109 million were built-in cameras – large quantity, low value – but this generated significant revenue and profit for the manufacturers who partially funded the development of the system. But as soon as that peak in revenue arrived, it quickly started to fade away with 2020 marking a new low of 9 million units shipped (420 million euros).
The following year, 2011, the mirrorless device also made its first appearance in CIPA data (below) which showed 4 million units shipped, meaning adoption was rapid by consumers and mainly focused on Panasonic, Olympus and Sony. As DSLR shipments have imploded, mirrorless cameras have remained stable in a declining market, meaning they are growing in share. 2020 was a pivotal year as more mirrorless cameras were shipped than DSLRs; 33%, versus 27%, of total shipments.
This is quite important in itself, however, it is the financials that are more impressive. Mirrorless was close to shipping values for DSLRs in 2018 and exceeded them in 2019. In 2020, they accounted for 54% of all camera shipments, compared to 25% for DSLRs. Of course, by this point Canon and Nikon had both launched their own mirrorless systems and essentially stopped developing new DSLRs while cutting production. While it is true that consumers wanted to buy mirrorless systems, manufacturers also stopped making them in volume.
Will manufacturers stop making digital SLRs? Of course not. As long as there is a minimum viable number of clients, someone will fill this gap. Apparently it’s Pentax at the moment. Not only that, but there will always be a large number of active DSLR shooters who want to buy lenses and accessories. You wouldn’t necessarily say the mirrorless device won a decisive single-player battle, but rather slowly eroded that seemingly impenetrable DSLR exterior. The biggest problem came with the Sony a7 in 2013, showing that a full frame mirrorless model was viable; in fact not one model, but three. The battle was won no later than 2016 when Canon and Nikon turned to developing their own systems. Were the cameras smaller and lighter? Or have these significant improvements in on-chip focus delivered significant benefits? Or that shorter flange distances allowed for a range of interesting lens designs and adaptation of existing lenses? Or maybe high burst rates? Or maybe it was just because it was a new system. Either way, the traction is now there and DSLRs have become a niche.
Mirrorless is the future of camera design.
Long live the Smartphone
Mirrorless cameras are only half of the photographic equation. This dramatic drop in CIPA camera shipments from 121 million in 2010 doesn’t mean there are fewer camera shipments. Far from it, because in 2019, some 1,500 million smartphones were shipped, depending on what numbers you think of. Each of them had a camera in it. It may be obvious that the smartphone has all but killed the camera industry, but the sheer scale and enormity of putting a camera in the hands of 7.5 billion people, or about 96% of the world’s population, is truly amazing. We’re really at a point where pretty much everyone takes a picture; no wonder google stopped unlimited free photo storage!
Obviously, smartphones do a lot more than just take pictures, but it remains such an important part of any phone design to the point that there has been a continual arms race from the original iPhone, which shows no signs of it. sign of slowing down. Speaking of Apple, they held a 14.5% market share in 2019, behind Huawei (17.6%) and Samsung (21.8%). Does this sound familiar to you? Yes, three companies control around 54% of the smartphone market, so what they do with their cameras is critical not only for other smartphone makers, but also for camera makers. In fact, while we see some forays into partnerships between smartphone and camera makers, it’s surprising that it’s not more prevalent and, indeed, partnerships don’t work both ways. Hasselblad recently teamed up with OnePlus, but we’ve seen Leica and Huawei, Zeiss with Sony (and a number of others) and maybe Samsung with Olympus.
What is interesting is that the developments we are seeing today reflect in some ways the introduction of the Kodak Brownie in 1900. Until now, technological development had been rapid but largely focused on incremental improvements to the device. large format photo. Photography was an expensive business and the Brownie democratized it to the extent that, while the cost was not negligible, anyone could afford it (it was $ 1 at the outset, equivalent to $ 31 today. ‘hui). For example, it targeted soldiers and even children. The Brownie was born out of the development of roll film and the realization that anything for taking a photo could be included in the box (cardboard) and then returned to the manufacturer for processing. This then led to a loss on the sale of the camera but a profit on the film and processing. Two strands of photography were then developed around large format cameras and low cost roll cameras. In some ways, these shutters were at least in part reunited with the release of the Leica 1 in 1924, when 35mm roll film was associated with a technologically innovative development.
Do we see the same thing with the smartphone? Two drivers are at play here: on the one hand the need for eye-catching images that look great on social media and on the other hand strict design requirements. The latter involves small, low-cost devices that have fixed lenses. Smartphone makers are aware that in order to get better images they can – to some extent – calculate their solution to the problem, a charge led by Google. However, they are inevitably limited by the hardware they have. It is therefore a wise decision to involve camera manufacturers.
The different design criteria led to a divergent direction for the development of the camera, which is arguably now the direction photography is taking. Smartphone manufacturers are incorporating new and creative hardware designs to work alongside their software implementations. What we don’t see are camera makers developing innovative stand-alone cameras. Computer photography has been a staple of smartphone photography for a decade, but we’ve seen limited implementations by camera makers and certainly nothing that rivals Apple or Google. It is now becoming a yawning gap that has the potential to render camera manufacturers irrelevant or even allow a new manufacturer to enter the market.
We will still need high-end cameras for high-end photography controls, but the gap between smartphone and camera has narrowed significantly to the point that it is indistinguishable for many applications. , which Ben Von Wong pushed with his commission for the Huawei P8.
Main image courtesy of Pexels via Pixabay, used under Creative Commons.
[ad_2]
Source link