(Corrects company affiliation of NPD’s Liz Cutting)
By Jeremy Wagstaff, Asia chief technology correspondent
SINGAPORE, April 25 (Reuters) – While most attention in the
gadget world is on the breakneck pace of innovation in mobile
phones, tablets and computers, another device has resolutely
refused to die: the camera.
Despite the onslaught of camera phones – the iPhone 4 has
this year become the most popular device for posting snaps to
the photo-sharing website Flickr – cameras are still being sold.
Japan, the world’s largest manufacturer, shipped nearly three
times as many cameras in January as it did in the same month of
2003, when the camera phone was still in its infancy.
“For several years, it has been predicted that smartphone
adoption would cut into digital camera sales,” said Prashant
Malaviya, Associate Professor of Marketing at Georgetown
University’s McDonough School of Business. “In fact, the exact
opposite has happened.”
Driving this is a number of factors, analysts and
enthusiasts say. And, while most point to a continuing role for
cameras for both professional and personal users, the device’s
future is far from assured.
Firstly, photography is personal. We may be happy taking
snaps with our cellphone or simple point-and-shoot camera, but
it turns out that most of us won’t entrust key memories to such
basic devices. Surveys by NPD Group last November show that
while more than a quarter of all American photos were taken by a
smartphone, more people were buying cameras with detachable
lenses or cameras with optical zooms of 10x or more.
This, says NPD Group senior digital imaging analyst Liz
Cutting, is because those people taking important family photos
don’t want to trust them to a device that isn’t up to the task.
“Camera photography is certainly not dead,” said Cutting. “We’re
just seeing a skewing towards what the smartphone can’t deliver.
People are recognising that and are going for a higher end
camera.”
This in turn benefits the established players, because users
are reluctant to entrust their photos to an untested brand. We
may be ready to try out a new brand of cellphone, laptop or TV,
but when it comes to family snaps we’re more conservative. “It’s
part of who you are, showing the kind of brand of camera you
have,” Cutting said. “But it’s also trusting the quality of that
memory because that’s how you remember your life.”
This has helped entrench several key players, some of whom
have dominated the scene for a generation or more – Canon Inc
, Nikon Corp, Sony Corp, Olympus Corp
, Pentax, Fuji and Panasonic Corp
.
CANON FODDER
Canon has been one of the main beneficiaries of this,
maintaining a strong brand from the professional high end to the
point-and-shoot bottom, says Christopher Chute, global imaging
chief at International Data Corp. Canon has seen its camera
business grow as the proportion of its overall sales to more
than 25 percent in 2008 from below 11 percent in 1999. In a
survey of more than a quarter of a million users of
Ontario-based gadget website Sortable.com, Canon was the most
popular brand, with a third of the vote.
Not that its rivals are standing idle.
Panasonic, Olympus, Pentax and Nikon have in the past few
years launched a new kind of camera that matches the quality of
lenses of a professional model with the sleek, light body of a
pocket, point-and-shoot device. Although these mirrorless
cameras aren’t a lot cheaper than the professional digital
single lens reflex (DSLR) model, they are lighter and more
compact.
This has won them fans among both those trading up and those
looking to replace or supplement their professional gear. Ong
Hock Chuan, a hobbyist who runs a Jakarta public relations
company, recently sold his heavier Canon EOS 50D for a
mirrorless Sony NEX-7. Price wasn’t a factor. “I was tired of
lugging around an SLR and getting a hernia for it,” he said.
Canon has yet to announce a mirrorless model.
Not only are camera manufacturers seeking an edge over each
other: They’re battling the encroachment of camera phones on to
their territory.
At the bottom, Nokia and other mobile manufacturers have
long partnered with lens makers like Carl Zeiss to improve the
quality of photographs and phones, a trend which has meant many
mobile phones now do a better job of a point-and-shoot camera.
The appeal of the camera phone has also grown as social media
services like Facebook make it possible to share a photo
with friends and family as soon as it’s taken.
This leaves the compact point-and-shoot camera segment of
the market vulnerable.
In markets such as the United States and Japan, says
Japan-based IHS analyst Kun Soo Lee, there’s not many more
people who want to buy one. On the one hand, this is eating into
sales that Canon and others traditionally dominated. On the
other, the ease with which photos can be taken on a phone is
feeding an interest in taking better photos, expanding the
middle of the market into a “pro-sumer” segment of devices which
cost a bit more but offer the user options so far unavailable on
the mobile phone: An optical, rather than digital, zoom, for
example, better flash, and image stabilization.
CANNIBALISATION, INNOVATION
This is driving manufacturers to push more and better
technology from their upper end models into cheaper devices.
Prices have fallen dramatically in the past decade, says Mark
Walters of U.S.-based website TechBargains.com. Ten years ago a
3-megapixel DSLR camera would cost $3,000; now a better quality
18-megapixel DSLR can be found for less than $500. “The
technology that has trickled down into the more
consumer-targeted DSLRs is incredible,” he said.
Lowering prices and raiding the technologies of formerly
professional models is not without danger. “This pricing
strategy has certainly caused some cannibalization of sales at
the higher end for the likes of Canon and Nikon,” said Walters,
“but they make up for it with volume at the low end by selling
more critical accessories like lenses and flashes.”
Manufacturers are also competing through innovation.
Apart from mirrorless cameras, there have been improvements
in sensors and a technology called high dynamic range (HDR)
imaging, which layers images at different exposures. “There’s an
amazing amount of innovation in digital photography equipment at
the moment,” said Melbourne-based Sydney Low, a former Internet
entrepreneur who now takes sports photos for a living. “More so
in many ways than Apple, HP and other computer
manufacturers.”
While enthusiasts like Low believe that still cameras will
eventually be replaced by video cameras – from which scenes can
be grabbed – others believe that eventually mobile phone and
camera will start to look and feel more like each other.
A range of cameras launched in the past few months, said NPD
In-Stat’s Cutting, have for the first time included WiFi chips,
making it possible for users to share their photos much as a
smartphone user might. “It has to be easy, and we haven’t hit
that yet,” she said.
Just as the camera gets smaller and more sociable, so will
the mobile phone evolve to incorporate features presently only
available on a camera. IHS’s Kun said the introduction of 12
megapixel cameras into smartphones, for example, is a “kicker to
change the market.”
Then, said J. Gerry Purdy of cellphone analysts MobileTrax,
there’s Polaroid’s SC1630, announced in January and due to be
launched this year: an Android device with an optical zoom.
These and other innovations, Purdy said, may usher in a future
where a smartphone camera “will perform as well as today’s
digital cameras with large optical zoom and larger lenses.”
California-based Pelican Imaging Corp, for example, promises a
camera that will improve image and video quality while allowing
for thinner smartphones.
How traditional players react to these challenges is
unclear. Canon, for example, has no obvious strategy to combat
the rise of the smartphone, said IHS’s Kun, and so will have to
keep on peddling digital cameras. In the meantime other
technologies may arise either inside or outside the industry.
Says IDC’s Chute: “Everything is up in the air.”
(Editing by Ian Geoghegan)
