Open Mike: I Worry

Y2K—Anno Domini 2000—wasn't that long ago in grumpy curmudgeon years. The best-selling vehicle in America then was the Ford F-150 pickup truck—same as now. The best TV sitcom was "Seinfeld"—same as now. I was young, dynamic, nimble, had a full head of hair, and was a chick magnet—same as now*.

But it was a long time ago as far as the camera market is concerned.

Then, each new generation of cameras seemed to offer amazing strides forward. Many photographers still hadn't "gone digital," but more and more did every day. Every year, digital camera sales rose. Hopes were high, the world was young, the sky was the limit. Photography (which I called digital imaging in Y2K) was booming.

And where the camera market is concerned, I was worried about the same thing then as I am now.

What worried me was the lowest common denominator. It just seems to me that with all kinds of products, first companies compete by trying to make their products better, and then, later, they compete by trying to make the products cheaper. And, eventually, cheaper dominates.

Digital cameras are truly high-tech products. Unlike, say, a view camera, they require technology that no individual, no matter how clever, can fabricate alone. What would happen, I fretted, when the mass market decided it had what it needed, and digital cameras became commodities to be mass-produced in huge numbers for the largest possible segment of the market?

You see, it's always been my contention that, to us, the market doesn't really matter and that fashions and styles and trends don't really matter. What matters, to my way of thinking anyway, is that photographers have the freedom and the tools they need to do the work they want to do. So what would happen if the digital camera market devolved to the lowest common denominator and the equipment and supplies that serious photographers needed became casualties of market forces?

Back then, those concerns were, shall we say, shouted down. According to the responses, I was an idiot**, the world would always need cameras, they would always give us what we wanted, new cameras were coming along all the time, the market was huge, there'd always be a niche, etc.

Which could well be correct. But I worry.

It looks like that lowest common denominator product, the one I was worried about in 2000, has at least assumed a shape. Here's what it looks like:

Credit: Samsung

It's an amazing, incredible achievement, don't get me wrong.

It's also not enough of a camera for every serious creative photographer.

We can still buy high-quality cameras, obviously. The competition to make cameras "better" is still ongoing. But, there's at least a little to worry about there, too. You might not have been paying too much attention over the last couple of years, but the camera industry has been in decline. All five of the top brands have seen their sales take a swan dive. The companies are obviously still being creative—witness my lately-beloved X-H1; and the market is still dynamic—witness the recent en masse shift to full-frame mirrorless; and, just like it was doing in Y2K, Canon is still putting downward pressure on prices—witness the full-frame Digital Rebel, the RP.

But it's not same-old same-old. The day that was dawning then is heading into, let's say, late afternoon now. Is that an allowable metaphor? Is it possible that we're fated to live through the entire lifespan of digital cameras, like some of us did with, say, cassette tapes?

We were okay when this happened with film. Granted, there hasn't been a whole lot happening in the 35mm-film-camera manufacturing segment in recent years: there's no latest-and-greatest tempting our wallets there. A fair number of those players have gone the way of all things. But it's a fair bet that everyone who who still needs film for their work (admittedly, there are fewer and fewer such people) can still mostly get what they need, within certain limitations. They're not being catered to any more, but they're okay.

Will it be that way with digital?

Could be.

Or, we could all end up stuck with only what the mass market wants. Like I say, I worry.

But then, I always have.

Mike

*TOP's official statistician is out to lunch, so there might be anomalies in this data.

**Which might be true, but the fact was not relevant to whether my argument was valid.

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.

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

Pete_S: "Why worry? Do like most of us: start using a mobile phone for everyday photography. I have a phone, three years old. In June I bought a new camera. It looks like phone, everybody confuses it with a phone, but it is not a phone for me. It is a camera with three lenses. I don't use it like a phone. I take pictures with it and share them, sometimes instantly. I have a good DSLR with many lenses. I use it for 'serious' photography and for fun. It suits me perfectly. But sharing is pain. So on I just enjoy taking pictures with it. Mostly not seriously, enjoying just like I would walking on a beach on a beautiful day. No hurry. Just pure joy."

huw Morgan: "I think we're looking at something like the turntable market here. A mass market for cameras will disappear and will be replaced by a healthy niche market. The great masses have already shifted (my Facebook is filled with back-to-school pictures of the kids of friends and relatives—all taken with phones). The question is: what will the niche market look like and who will satisfy it? Will the large companies like Canon, Nikon and Sony leave the market and be replaced with smaller players? Or, will they persevere and just reduce the size of their camera divisions? In any case, if the turntable market is anything to go by, we'll still have lots of choice. Innovation will continue."

Thomas Paul McCann: "There is nothing in this world that someone can't make cheaper and worse."

marcin wuu: "As one of the people still working with film I gotta say, I'm feelin' less and less okay as the time flies. Not only because of the middle age crisis, mind you. The costs skyrocket, quality and availability of services plummet. I'm slowly planning to move to digital, but damn, it's a shame—I truly believe that for what I do, digital is really not the way to go."

Dennis: "Check out Thom's article '2019 Starts Badly.' It ends with an outlook that's neither rosy nor gloomy. Worst case, I think we end up with the situation you describe at the end of the article. Imagine if Sony didn't come out with an A7XIV and an RX100MCI in 10 years! What if the A7III was replaced in, say, four years instead of one year? And what if Nikon didn't come out with a D6 in time for the Olympics? It's really astounding to me that we still are seeing so many product releases—cameras, lenses, third party lenses, tripods, bags, bags and more bags, even medium format gear. I guess everyone is fighting for market share at this point. The market is big enough for 'stuff.' How much, how often, and for how long, I don't know, but enough to keep me happy, I'm sure. Just so long as I reserve the right to grumble about what's not available."

Mike replies: Thanks for the heads up. Very interesting article, as usual. I'm glad he thinks Nikon is negotiating the contraction well.

Comments

[Mike Ferron]

Fickle me just auctioned off all my (not worth a lot) digital equipment and a few lenses and with that money purchased a Sony A7ii with kit lens and a few accessories. $998 is a super deal for this camera much like the Fuji X-H1 deal. I really like this camera. We click.

Being a enthusiastic hack I just don't need the latest and greatest. 5 year old tech and 24mp works just fine for me. This is why I believe sales are slowing. It's just not the improved image quality of phones that hurt the market. It just might be things were already good enough for most?

[Rob L.]

I am worried as well, as while film is relatively easy to make, if somewhat harder to make profitably, as you said the pipeline of a digital camera is far more complicated. We'll have lenses and accessories for long after the bit rot sets in. My F2 is still purring along better than I have, and unlike me, hasn't had a CLA or work done yet(we're the same age) - but my Contax G series bodies had failing LCD panels, and several digital cameras have given up the ghost.

I think we're due to see a major player bow out, but it's hard to say whom. Nikon is at risk, with Photography so central to their business, Canon and Sony are likely the least likely to poof. I'm not sure how Pentax is a still around, and Olympus does not have a compelling case for much longer, it seems.

I'm fearful about Fuji - they have a history of being rather practical in their cutting off products - so I'm just going to shoot my X-H1 and be happy and come to terms with reality when it hits me in the face.

[Speed]

The question should be, is there a need (demand) for photographic pictures? If yes, then what is the device or suite of devices that will make the range (quality, size format etc.) of photographic pictures needed.

The picture is the product. First determine the product specifications (size, resolution, sensitivity, media) and customers (amateur, commercial) and then specify the tool (camera) needed. Will a phone do?

It may be that the still pictures and cameras will be replaced by videos and video recording devices. In the digital realm, which is growing faster, YouTube or Flickr? Over the last 10 years Canon has invested heavily in video products.

[Tom Burke]

I'm not saying you're wrong to worry, but I'm not sure about one of your statements: "the recent en masse shift to full-frame mirrorless". Is that actually happening? I've tried to track down the figures (Thom Hogan does regular posts about the state of the market), but IIRC the interchangeable lens camera (ILC) market in 2018 was still dominated by Canon (though not as much as heretofore); and Canon don't have that many mirrorless cameras. Basically, they're still shifting a lot of digital Rebels and other, small, cheap DSLRs.

I know that the photographers we see on TOP are buying mirrorless, and even FF mirrorless, but your readership may not be typical of the ILC market as a whole. Which might be a good thing!

[Ken]

Let the few remaining professional photographers worry. For the rest of us, if they stopped making digital cameras tomorrow, we'd still have at least a few years of use out of our existing gear and computer software. By that point, there would be something else to catch the hobbyists' fancy. In my case, I'd probably go back to shooting film if film is still available at that point. Or maybe printing my existing photos (which I currently don't do) becomes my new hobby. And if not, well, I guess there is always time to learn how to paint watercolors.

[Brian O'Connor]

Hi Mike

its natural to worry, but we probably shouldn't. Climate change not withstanding; check out

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24332460-900-the-world-is-getting-better-so-why-are-we-convinced-otherwise/

The world is getting better...

[Simon]

Worrying about something you can't change is a waste of energy. Better to direct that energy into something positive.

[Tim Bradshaw]

I don't think there is a strong cause to worry, if what you are interested in is photography. If what you are interested in is the gadgets involved in making photographs, and particularly that there should be endless new and better ones, then there is certainly cause to worry. There is nothing at all wrong with such an interest of course.

It's clear that the arms race in digital cameras is essentially over, because cameras are now so technically good that improvements are becoming undedectable by the human visual system.

A small number of people will drive the technical quality of cameras well beyond what is actually perceptable in the same way that has happened for other technologies. However this group will move out of the mainstream fairly quickly, as it becomes economically unviable to manufacture equipment which meet their requirements.

A good comparison is Hi-Fi: Hi-Fi nerds now focus on equipment which is objectively rather low in quality, because the cost of making equipment which is objectively very high in quality is so enormous, if it is to be made in small numbers: there's nothing strongly preventing anyone making a digital audio system which makes 96-bit samples at 100MHz (obviously most of the bits of each sample would be noise), but the engineering considerations mean that making such systems in tiny numbers gives an absurd unit cost. So instead people obsess about valve (tube) amplifiers and turntables which can be made for a relatively small unit cost, even in tiny numbers (I have made a valve amplifier, I probably could make a turntable, and certainly people have done that).

The situation is worse for digital cameras: making a sensor is a much more technically-demanding process than making a two-channel A-D converter suitable for Hi-Fi, say. So although there's probably nothing very much preventing the construction of sensors with billions of pixels, because the demand for them will be small they will remain out of reach of even very rich individuals. Very likely this means that the technical-quality-at-all-costs group will wander off into similar objectively strange places as they have for Hi-Fi. The obvious 'strange place' is, of course, film (or wet plates perhaps).

(An aside here: although it might seem that I am poking fun of these people I'm not, because I substantially am one: I have two valve Hi-Fi amplifiers, several valve Hi-Fi tuners, four valve guitar amplifiers, and a large-format film camera. I know people who do wet plate.)

So progress in the technical aspects of camera & lens design will tail off. With luck there will be progress on the ergonomics of camera design for rather longer although I am not very optimistic about that. We will use cameras for longer replacing them with rather similar models when they fail (and, being extremely complex electronic systems, they will eventually fail in ways which means they cannot be repaired in ways that film cameras did not). But these cameras will be more than adequate for any reasonable photographic purpose: they just won't change as much from year to year in the way that we've become used to. People who are interested largely in cameras-as-gadgets will move into some other area where the gadget development rate is higher. People who just want something for making snapshots will move to phones.

During this transition several major camera companies will die or leave the business. I have my opinions on which ones but they're probably wrong. But not all of them will go away: so long as enough people are interested in using non-phone cameras there will be companies who will service that demand. There's a small chance that the underlying demand is so low that it will become uneconomic to manufacture non-phone cameras but I think the chances of that happening are very small.

And I've written too much here already, but I think this is a good thing for people interested in cameras as machines for making photographs. It takes a long time to become fluent in using such machines, and if the pace of development is high enough you never do become really fluent, but rather are endlessly battered by learning how new and different machines behave. I have a Gibson ES-175: I've had it for more than twenty years, and I'm getting the hang of it now. In another ten years I might really be quite good. If something happened to it my first action would be to buy another identical one if I could. If Gibson made a souped-up-but-incompatible version of it (with seven strings, say, or five pickups, or a different layout of controls) I wouldn't even think about buying it instead. Cameras will, I hope, become something like this.

[Peter]

I've always been with you Mike!! When I was 15, I had fully caught the photo bug. I was also filled with despair upon learning that the world silver supply would soon be depleted and photography would no longer be viable. (Remember buying those kits to capture silver from spent hypo?) Then in the '80's when I had two Nikon FM2's, I was sorely tempted to buy a third because I just knew that good mechanical film cameras were going to be phased out and my only choice for replacement would be one of those new auto-focus, auto-exposure ones. And I just now checked B&H and I'm a bit stressed because they don't seem to be stocking any new Lumix GX8's !!

[BERND REINHARDT]

Why worry? If you are into photography because of the love for technology, then you will be excited to see what the future brings, even if it is limited to phone cameras.

If you are into photography because of the images, then everything you could possibly need to make good pictures already exists.

[Dave Hodson]

Om Malik has an interesting article on his blog here

https://om.co/2019/09/03/camera-sales-are-falling-sharply/

Missy Mwac notwithstanding, (blog - These photos aren't for you) and sad as it is, his comment "no one on WhatsApp cares if you made a photo in 50 megapixels or 12 megapixels" seems salient.

I wonder who'll keep the software updated for the in-camera, software-corrected lens I just sold my first-born for.

Regards
Dave

[beuler]

And yet no one has made a successful ILPC (Interchangeable Lens Phone Camera) that has the technical abilities of a mirrorless system with the communication abilities of a smartphone.

[tex andrews]

I'd say more like 10 am around the summer soltice.

[Jim Arthur]

Don’t worry too much about what may occur. If it should come to pass that all cameras become tiny specs used only for surveillance, we will still be able to edit and imagine altered images using PS-SmartSense which will be surgically implanted between our cerebral hemispheres for the low, low cost of only 50 credits per lunar phase. :-)

The old tech always lingers on long enough to keep devotees and the nostalgic happy until something acceptable (6MP digital) comes along. I’ve been driving my trusty Tacoma for 18 years and its combo CD/Cassette player still works like a charm. Every few years I’ll get nostalgic, pull a 1990’s Maxell mix tape from the back of the closet, take up the slack with a pencil, and give it a spin. They always work perfect. That’s not bad considering how many dirt roads that cassette player’s been bounced down.

If the camera market, as we know it now, should get worse and worse until its spit out the bottom of the porn industry* we will survive. Artists will always find a way.

*Seinfeld reference

[John]

We're all familiar with the affliction whereby we hear a tune and cannot get it out of our head. I have a similar problem when it comes to pithy quotes. A week or so ago I came across a William Gibson line to the effect that "The future is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed". Each reference to the future immediately snaps me back to Gibson's line and provides some "interesting" ways of looking at it. I'm sure I'll get over it soon.

[Joe Kashi]

All technologies mature - film, digital photos, computers, aircraft, autos, trains, social media, microwave ovens, etc. Every mature technology inevitably becomes a commodity item. Most of us recall when '70s CB radio and the personal computers of the 80s and 90s were hobbyist crazes.

When a technology is mature, it's more than good enough for most needs and sufficiently easy for most people to use, most of the time. There's little practical reason to spend the time and hassle to upgrade constantly.

When that occurs, replacement cycles lengthen, the hobbyist cachet is gone, and the market contracts.

That's not really a bad thing - we can then concentrate on actually using a mature and facile technology for useful tasks like productivity and art.