A few decades back a camera or videocam was an essential buy for all families. How else could you capture the memories of your kids, etc. The camera business must have been gigantic. Then came cellphones and gradually they totally usurped the role of the traditional camera. Who needs them now other than professional photographers?
How did the big camera firms survive this onslaught?
They are still fighting it, and the final outcome is still to be seen.
Most are dumping their low end products and focusing on a higher tier that will never be addressed by the tiny sensors in Cell phones.
Although a small player FujiFilm is probably the best example, and they have targeted that line with the X series APC sized cameras and their new Medium format offering.
The following website shares opinionated but informed articles on the industry.
But the entire industry of “Professional Photographer” has mostly disappeared, so it is really the enthusiast market that is the primary market that remains.
A tiny cellphone sensor will always be limited to extremely deep depths of field and limited low light performance due to the reality of physics, so unless that market segment is willing to allow for a dramatic increase in physical size the more artistic market should be around in the future, the question is to the size of that market.
Many didn’t.
Kodak - dead.
Poloroid - dead.
Konica and Minolta - merged, mostly a copier company.
Ricoh - now a copier and printer company.
Nikon, Canon, Sony, Olympus, Pentax and a bunch of others are all fighting for a slice of the “prosumer” market. Like cellphones, most of them are losing money, or making very little. Nikon and Canon have the lion’s share.
Here’s a graph showing camera sales:
Here’s a graph (from 2104) showing how the market was divided:
https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-1564d97b0f193e95d9ddb70b7ffb04f4-c
Note that things are looking pretty bleak for the camera industry. Just like MP3 players have killed HiFi systems, cellphones are replacing “real” cameras with something that is just good enough for the average Joe.
Not always terribly well?
Kodak went bankrupt in 2012. They’re still around, but they are largely (if not entirely) out of the consumer products business, now focusing on business imaging. Based on their Wikipedia entry, they’ve also been doing development in 3D imaging, and were, at least a year or two ago, working on a smartphone.
Polaroid went bankrupt in 2001, having apparently not anticipated having to deal with the switch to digital. The brand itself is apparently still around, though there’s also been years of legal and financial wrangling over the brand name.
Nikon has largely transitioned to digital cameras (including DSLRs), and has apparently gotten out of the traditional film-based camera business, for the most part. But, I wouldn’t be surprised if their absolute level of sales is lower now than it was before (as casual photographers moved to just using their smartphones).
And the brand is used for tablets and phones. (As well as cameras, film, and other products.)
Ironically, I have been seriously unimpressed with the cameras on my two Polaroid devices…they can take good pictures, but they take very particular lighting conditions to accomplish that.
This is a bit of an exaggeration. There are still a large number of sports photographers out there; I also have not noticed a decline in the number of landscape/nature photographers. People still hire wedding photographers. Probably there has been a decline in the number of portrait studios, but at least a few years back there were still school and sports team portraits. Not sure how the number of commercial photographers has declined.
Much of the Canon/Nikon range is geared towards these various professional markets. They are still coming out with new models of 400mm f2.8 lenses (sports photographer’s workhorse), cameras able to shoot at high frame rates. The medium format manufacturers (Hasselblad and Mamiya) make very expensive digital backs for their camera.
Nope. They acquired Pentax which merged with Ricoh’s own camera division, and it is very much alive as the Ricoh Imaging Company. They still use the Pentax brand for some of their cameras.
You also neglected to mention Panasonic which is doing pretty well in the prosumer market by focusing on HD & 4k video capabilities.
If anything professional photography has become far more approachable with the transition to digital. I know several people making solid livings as professional photographers.
A few points, with a handful of exceptions landscape/nature photographers have always required another source of income, like through inheritance/marriage or another job or teaching etc…
Wedding photographers are the exception, and sports photographers have mostly been pushed to the freelance market, as an example Getty received more than 50,000K images from the Superbowl, yet only a handful of photographers, and less than 1500 images found any buyers and the price per image has been declining.
But consider that 400mm f2.8 lens, at $11,196 it is 33% the median income for a photographer $34,070
There are still people with the passion, but is almost exclusively a second job or a monetized hobby.
Now I have an uncle that feeds his family making wagon wheels, but the industry that use to exist around that market is gone.
But look at the sales over the past few years,
Some product refreshes bumped those numbers up this year, and China is helping a bit too, but overall the industry from the manufactures standpoint is in decline.
There is also the issue for manufactures that significant gains in quality are harder to obtain, and as most people view images on an iphone the required quality has dropped.
There is also the issue of the rise of video, content buyers are more and more interested in video.
But I am fully open to data that shows growth, it is one of my primary hobbies and Nikon is my system of choice, but with the leaked reports it seems that the government of Japan has been asking FujiFilm to help bail them out after they ignored the mirrorless market and instead delivered a small sensor interchangeable lens product that lacked a sensor large enough to significantly differentiate itself from a cell phone.
So, in this modern world, can Peter Parker still make a living taking pictures of his own adventures as Spider-Man?
I haven’t actually been to one in decades, but last I heard stores with portrait studios (Macy’s, J. C Penny, some Wal-Marts) they will literally take your photo with a cell phone now to save money on operating costs. Of course at portrait studios you only really cared about the high quality physical prints anyway and if a cell phone can do the job it shouldn’t really matter.
The overnight photo print shop has disappeared. I haven’t seen one in at least 15 years.
They were often in a small booth in parking lots.
I think Walmart still develops and prints film. But their biggest business is digital prints.
I know of at at least two companies that are making major coin in the semiconductor business.
(We need their equipment in the manufacturing process)
Polaroid makes a hybrid digital/instant camera these days that can even print pictures from your smartphone using Bluetooth, although reviews are mixed on the camera’s quality.