Dire Predictions

• I don't subscribe to the Nikkei (the Nihon Keizai Shinbun, the world's largest financial newspaper) and I don't speak or read Japanese, but according to the Google-translated intro to this interview with Canon President Fujio Mitarai, Canon fears that that market for digital cameras could shrink by "about half" in the next two years.

The estimate is a likely a worst-case scenario and the culprit is most likely the rapid improvement of smartphone cameras. The market in higher-end stand-alone ILC cameras will remain sizeable. However, the coming years may in some ways be just as volatile and uncertain for the industry as the early years of the digital transition.

This doesn't have to affect photographers, who will continue to be able to get what they need for their work. And it may just be that photography is changing into something different than we once conceived it to be, something we can't quite envisage yet. One thing's for sure though: the years of vigorous growth in the camera industry as we've known it appear to be ending.

• Meanwhile, according to an article in Witness ("a magazine for new thinking and new talent in visual journalism and storytelling" published by the World Press Photo Foundation) by Lewis Bush, photojournalism itself might be in jeopardy. He begins by assigning an approximate centenary (now) to photojournalism itself, and, wondering whether it will survive another century, poses what he considers three key questions: "who are we photographing, and why?", "how are we photographing these things, and why?", and "who are we photographing for?"

He ends on an up note, but it sounds a tad forced. There are many reasons why the relationship between democracy and the press is less stable now, and not all of them relate to the upheaval in technologies and established business models.

An interesting read for photographers and other citizens.

Mike
(Thanks to several readers)

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Harsh reality

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

D. Hufford: "May I be a selfish SOB and say 'who cares?' If the market for digital cameras falls by 50%, why should I care? I have the cameras I need and can get nearly any camera that I imagine that I would want. Should the market actually shrink by that much, I think I will be just fine. My problems with my photography have little to nothing to do with cameras or the market for them.

"Of course you already more or less wrote that. No doubt photography is changing into something new and different than it was. It has to. It cannot continue being more or less a rehash of past photography only with more megapixels and sharpness. Technology has advanced much further than photography."

Glenn Brown: "It is dire right now for me as a pro business photographer in Toronto. Firms have found someone in their staff that is 'good' at taking photos: and they now do the internal photos. I still am hired for the executives and that means about 30 people a year and not over 100 as before. Other run of the mill jobs for cheque presentations etc. do not exist. I used to earn $160 to $180k per year; now that is $80k. Luckily I will retire in May and always planned to have a few clients to 'keep my hand in' so I will be OK. I worry for young people just starting in the profession.

"P.S., Glad you settled into the tea world. My wife was pleased for you."

Thom Hogan: "I'll much more to say about this soon (I've already written one article on Mitarai-san's comment). It's not as dire as he made it sound, but it's real. The compact camera market continues to collapse, which is what really drives the numbers most. Interchangeable-lens cameras (ILC's) are on a long glide slope down. The two together make for a real problem if your business is based upon number of cameras of all types you sell, which is sort of where Canon Imaging was. Sony announced their numbers this week, too, and their unit volume is down significantly, and it's all again in compacts. Almost 20 million camera units were shipped in 2018. So 50% is 10m units. That very well could end up as 8m ILC and 2m compacts in a couple of years. Indeed, based upon the other things Canon said at their financials, I believe that to be Mitarai-san's thesis."

Benjamin Marks: "For those who ask, 'why should I care?' the answer is simple. Supply and demand. As the demand shrinks, the supply will too, and then prices will rise because the cost of making a new camera will have to be spread over a smaller number of units. Also, innovation will slow, because there will be fewer engineers working on advancing the tech, because the profits won't support a larger number of problem solvers, whose salaries also come from the sale of a smaller number of units. Finally, smaller brands, like Pentax, may not be able to compete and will go the way of Konica, Contax, and so on. In a general sense, we (photographers) have been very lucky over the last decade or so. Many choices, many price points, quite low price-per-shutter actuation compared to the days of film only. So maybe that will be changing."

Comments

[Stan B.]

It's not just photojournalism that's in danger, it's journalism itself- particularly local (bought up by conglomerates) and investigative (woefully underfunded). Add almost daily authoritarian attacks from on top concerning the veracity and even the necessity of a free press- and it's the very democratic process that's in danger.

[Eric Brody]

This kind of talk makes me really wonder why companies like Panasonic and Olympus just released super-niche cameras. Panasonic's new Lumix is HUGE, and NEW, with very few lenses, unless you're a Leica SL fan with lots of cash. The new Olympus also suffers from size bloat despite its smallest viable ILC sensor. Can't recall now but believe I read that one of them, or maybe both, are actually larger/heavier than the Fuji GFX 50R medium format camera! Are these companies just flailing, or do they really think there's a significant market for these at least amongst still photographers. I neither care nor am interested in video. They are up against Sony, Nikon, Canon, and Fuji. How can they prevail or even survive?

[John Krumm]

Well, I finally have a current iPhone that can shoot raw (moved from the 6 to the Xs). Using an app like Halide to take the photo, which is very good at getting correct raw exposures in auto mode, and then editing in Lightroom on the phone, it's pretty easy to get somewhat high quality shots in at least OK light. If you can keep the iso at base 25 the raw file looks quite good. I'd say it's up to about the quality of my old Panasonic LX3, but without the nice handling and ability to add a better flash. That's good enough for a lot of the shooting I do, but it's still not my fun hobby camera.

[Moose]

For a more detailed, and nuanced, take, Thom Hogan has weighed in.

[John Holmes]

The continued market reduction is due to many factors in addition to smart phones.
1) The projections of a global recession will lead to less free money. This is coming on top of inflationary forces that have diminished available loose funds in the lower half of the economy.
2) The camera market is saturated. We passed the point of sufficiency a long time ago and very few folks need the additional capabilities being added to the latest cameras.
3) the camera manufacturers have shifted to large expensive cameras that fewer can afford.
Bottom line ... the market will collapse further.

[John]

Haven’t read the article, but I’m a long-term optimist when it comes to journalism (and as a former journalist, a short-term pessimist). Before journalism came into its own, newspapers were a platform for political hucksters and bogus information. As they matured, they created the basis for solid journalism, because real information has value and because advertisers need a trusted platform to present their ads on. It’s going to take a while though, I’m sure.

[Thomas Wiegold]

I would add another key question: Who is going to pay for it? Obviously, corporations etc. are willing, media more and more are not able to. So I fear we'll see much more photo PR and much less photojournalism.

[Tim Bradshaw]

Although you are clearly right about phone cameras, I think there may be another factor. There was a fairly long period from some time in the late 1990s to some time after 2010 when there were significant improvements in digital camera performance each year. During that period you could get a really noticeably better camera if you just scrapped the one you bought a year ago and bought a new one. This wasn't true in the film era: improvements happened much more slowly. And it's not true now: digital cameras are now so good that improvements are just not visible the way they once were.

The consequence of this is that the camera makers went through a golden era when they could sell a new camera to a large number of people every year or so. That golden era has overshot somewhat as people continue to buy new cameras even past the point that improvements actually mattered. But it's ending now: the replacement cycle will move back towards its historical average (five-ten years?), with resulting catastrophic effects for companies (sales dropping by factors of more than two).

[Tim Auger]

Maybe vindicates the very cautious approach to investment shown by e.g. Pentax (Ricoh). It's the big boys with big mass-market share who will be most vulnerable.

[David Bateman]

The recent increase in camera prices is a sign that high volume sales are ending and the companies need to make some money per sale. Rather than loosing money per camera, hoping to make money on lens sales.
But camera sales may have just been too high anyways. People may have just switched fads. I think even phone sales will slow down, now that there is not much difference in model to model. We will have to see what the next fad is. Maybe electric or driverless cars.

[Rob de Loe]

I'm not sure photojournalism has 10 years, let alone 10 decades. The juggernaut of computational photography is going to wipe out any trust most people have in the idea that photographs show things that really happened. I don't think it's going to be long before photographs and paintings are seen as equally trustworthy representations of reality.

[Rob Campbell]

Crowd sourcing of images and motion will be the end of it.

Everything boils down to the bottom line; it always has, and today there are more options to save companies money, money that they may be finding increasingly difficult to raise via publication of news... 24/24 tv news stations also tend to get some material from the public these days, so the rot, if your living depends on supplying content, spreads ever wider.

Nobody shed a tear for the lost livelihoods of professional stock photographers, so why for the news guys? Joe Shamateur can make his piratical penny there, too. It's called freedom, baby, and if you don't declare that penny, it comes tax free!

As a society we have become totally desensitized to crime, violence, war and all the rest of it. Who cares any longer about watching people flee from falling bombs, refugees tramping through mud, marsh and desert and crossing mighty seas in rubber dinghies? Charity commercials pop up on the tv screen every day; do we really give a fig any more about kids walking miles with a pot of dirty water on their head, about babies trying to draw milk from dry breasts? No, we look silently and unthinkingly, or change channel. Emotional overload/overkill has done for pretty much most of the better instincts within the human creature.

Just this morning the tv was telling me about so-called ghost guns, that you can buy as kit parts and have delivered to your door via the mail, assemble yourself, and that have no identification numbers on them, all apparently perfectly legal, and making money for a chain of respectable firms. As with the existing US gun laws, if the government doesn't care enough about its citizens lives, cares excessively about its backers' money pots, then you have to accept that the rot is already too deeply into the timbers of that society to cure with a coat of preservative.

[Paul]

I don't think these are dire predictions for photography. Just bad news for establishments who are NOT adapting to the new forms of photography.
Look, photography isn't as much about equipment as so many think. It's about expressing a visual personal point of view. Nothing else. As long as we can still create an image, be it a phone camera or whatever machine the future holds for us everything will be OK.

[Michael Martin-Morgan]

“There are many reasons why the relationship between democracy and the press is less stable now, ...”
The main one being that what they call democracy isn’t.

[Frank Grygier]

The Canon CEO Mr. Fujio: "To combat the declining revenue from ILC sale Canon plans to shift its focus to corporate sales rather than consumer sales over the coming years.

And then: CANON’S NEXT EOS R MODEL IS ENTRY LEVEL, COSTS $1,600, AND HAS ONE CARD SLOT, ANNOUNCEMENT FEB 14.

What am I missing here?

[Not sure I see a contradiction...they just said "shift focus," not switch over lock, stock, and barrel. Right? --Mike]

[tex andrews]

Wow, 2 juicy topics in one post. On the first, I believe you have pointed out that we've been here before, early in the 20th century, then again mid-ish century. Here we are again---a boom in new camera tech that then levels off and then a period of declining sales (because the people who were going to buy, have bought, and a big percentage of them don't need anything more).

This one feels slightly more permanent to me, though. The cameras we have truly are exceptional, and those who truly need more than is currently available is vanishingly small, I think. The kit I have is absolutely as good as anything I need for work, and for my artwork only maybe one more upgrade on the medium format side if Pentax(since I am in Pentax DMF) does something significant.

Other aspects of photography are the roadblocks for me at work, such as file sizes, processing times, transfer and uploading rates and headaches, storage issues, etc, and on the art side of the coin the cost of huge prints AND their framing, and then storage of that.

On the photojournalism side of things...well, the journalism industry somewhat has itself to blame, as it has increasingly focused on celebrity and sports ephemera than on important events. But because all of that is ephemera, here in this nanosecond, gone the next, it's not like we need professionalism to the same degree---no knock on professionals who do that work, but what someone is wearing an some red carpet somewhere is hardly important to democracy.

[PaulW]

My skeptic meter pegged when I read the Nikkei article. To what end would the CEO of the largest camera company announce that business is falling off a cliff? This smells like marketing speak to me.

[Peter Gilbert]

Thom commented on this, here
https://www.dslrbodies.com/newsviews/nikon-2019-news/january-2019-nikon-canon/the-canon-doomsday-proclama.html

[Dave Van de Mark]

Curious - does that mean Canikon & other outfits will be asking an arm and a leg for what's left of their market? Or will the phone competition force a price hit too?

[Richard Tugwell]

Totally agree with D. Hufford (featured comment). For a while now I haven't been too bothered about the camera market. I've got what I need, and in any case I'm spending most of my useful photo time reviewing, editing and selecting from the photos I've already taken over the last 40 years.