Luminous Landscape Forum
The Art of Photography => The Coffee Corner => Topic started by: dreed on February 26, 2015, 10:47:02 pm
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Prediction: The Age of the Standalone Still Camera is Coming to an End for all but PROS (http://blog.vincentlaforet.com/2015/02/24/prediction-the-age-of-the-standalone-still-camera-is-coming-to-and-end-for-all-but-pros/)
This is bold prediction, but it’s clear to me that over the next several years, the standalone still camera will disappear from the hands of everyone – with the exception of a few high end professionals.
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I don't use cell phone cams. But cell phones can't shoot lots of things, or at least shoot them well.
A cell phone would not work well for these night shots.
http://fc00.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2015/007/7/f/bikers__mardi_gras_no__36_daniel_d__teoli_jr__by_ilovemycam-d8cpew9.jpg
nsfw
http://dewallenrld.tumblr.com/
or this
http://dbprng00ikc2j.cloudfront.net/work/image/721151/mf2ji7/20130802131116-_The_Lost_Princess__Copyright_2013_Daniel_Teoli_Jr-V32__MR.jpg
Sure lots of cell and mini cams.
nsfw
http://rangefindercamera.tumblr.com/image/108384062824
nsfw
http://rangefindercamera.tumblr.com/image/108383649339
But lots they can't shoot well.
http://rangefindercamera.tumblr.com/image/90250190154
http://rangefindercamera.tumblr.com/image/108404692249
I don't know what the future will hold, but I got 6 Fuji's and a few Leica's, so am hopefully set for the few years I got left.
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I don't think it is going to happen for the following reasons:
- Lack of lens reach,
- Lack of DoF control,
- UI issues with handheld device form factor,
- Lack of physical space will always impose strong constraints compared to more bulky devices,
- Lack of personality, many photographers like the physical connection with their camera as an object,
- ...
Cheers,
Bernard
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I take some comfort in knowing that I am now one of "a few high end professionals."
Some additional predictions:
* Photography will have killed off fine art painting by about 1850.
* With computers in every home, no one will use paper documents any more after the year 2000.
* By Ground Hog Day of the year 2015 I will have received at least ten serious offers for the bridge I am trying to sell in Brooklyn.
::)
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High end professionals... and enthusiasts.
There's still people shooting wet plate. Film. The DSLR and its followons aren't going anyplace.
R&D is gonna drop off a cliff, sure. Who cares? We're well into the land of diminishing returns anyways. Does it matter than nobody is working on improving T-grain emulsions? Nope. Nobody knows for sure, but there's probably going to remain some sort of market for DSLRs and/or MILC or whatever. It's just not going to be a gigantic gravy train for a bunch of large companies.
The digital revolution was a short-term spike in the graphs. The players are gonna have a shakeout. It's gonna be ugly. The company that can shrink-to-fit best without dropping any of the several necessary balls (staff retention, customer satisfaction, manufacturing and sourcing issues, etc) too hard is going to end up on top of a smallish but likely still profitable business. Look at camera sales in the 1970s. Much much much much smaller than today. Still supported some companies.
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This read like an article written by someone who wants to keep his brand name up. Plenty of plugs for his latest project wagging a barely coherent thesis. Nothing like a "bold concept" to get people talking.
Mobile devices might have killed the low-end compact market. And while the mid-to-high end market isn't booming any more, it isn't going bust either. People who really want to do photography have got themselves set up for the time being. The used market is brimming with cameras that are still good by today's standards, and going for affordable prices.
I never did think a good APS-c/FF camera was for everyone. But I don't think that the people who like these cameras -- and there are a lot of such people -- are by-and-large inclined to sell them off in favor of their iPhones.
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What I find interesting about the graphs (compare film with digital) is the following:
- when everyone shot film, most people bought compact cameras and a few bought SLRs. Rinse and repeat with digital.
- with film cameras, most of the R&D went into lenses as there wasn't a whole lot of R&D to do with film cameras.
- to support a digital camera you need:
+ software developers for in-camera software
+ software developers for out-of-camera software
+ development costs for the sensor
+ finally, camera development that was similar to what was required for SLRs (AF, etc)
Thus a digital camera (especially a DSLR) is a lot more expensive to develop.
How can a camera company reduce costs?
+ out of camera software: package Lightroom
+ in camera software: export DNG rather than "my own raw format"
+ buy someone else's sensor
That still leaves:
+ basic camera development costs (AF)
+ basic camera software development costs (camera firmware)
How many of these cost reduction steps will we see appear? Time will tell!
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The transition the guy's talking about already has taken place. Take a look at the back pages of a magazine like Popular Photography. The number of ads in Pop Photo keeps diminishing and the mag is thinner every issue. And if you look at the lineup in one of the big camera equipment purveyors, say B&H, you see that point-and-shoots have nearly disappeared. Cell phones have taken over the point-and-shoot crowd almost completely.
But pro and semi-pro equipment is still going strong. Check the listing of full-frame bodies from Nikon, for instance. In short, the market is closing in toward where it used to be in, say, the sixties, when if you wanted to point and shoot you could buy a Kodak at the drugstore and then get your film developed and printed at the same drugstore. But if you wanted to do serious photography you went to the camera shop and bought a Leica or a 4 x 5 view camera, lenses, enlarger, developing tanks, trays, dryer, etc., etc.
Photography as an art form was an expensive proposition in the sixties and it still is and still will be for the foreseeable future. The difference is that nowadays most of the expense is in the rapid evolution of digital bodies and lenses instead of in post-processing and printing.
Yesterday I shot a portrait of a lady on her 103rd birthday. I seated her with a window slightly above and behind her to camera right and got a bystander to hold a Tri Grip reflector slightly low and camera left. I shot with a D800 and an 85mm f/1.4 lens. This kind of picture ain't gonna come from a cell phone any time soon, so relax, the still camera isn't going away in the lifetime of anybody on LuLa today.
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LOL............................
Peter
LOL is right.
Predictions: At the World's Fair in Montreal in the 60's I was promised a jet-pack by 1990. ;D
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I don't think it is going to happen for the following reasons:
- Lack of lens reach,
That alone is enough: there are millions of us who are far from being professional photographers, but want to photograph scenes over a range from wide to narrow angular coverage: cropping the moderately wide-angle image from a phone's sensor in never going to do the job nearly as well as having a zoom lens or two. (Another "click-bait" speculation could be whether improvements in zoom lens and in the low light performance of sensors will cause prime lenses to be mostly limited to the realm of professionals and serious amateurs who use professional-level gear.)
As a reality check: digital ILC's are still selling in higher numbers than film ILCs at the end of the tim eras; the settling back after the high camera churn of the film-to-digital transition is being short-sightedly, pessimistically misinterpreted by some people. Yes, some camera companies and their investors need to worry, along perhaps with enthusiasts of some brands and systems that might fail, but it is still a golden age for us ILC-using amateurs, and for enthusiasts whose compact digital cameras give for more flexibility than any comparably portable film gear.
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… there are millions of us …
Perhaps there will be a generational change and enthusiast photographers will become as commonplace as poets.
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Perhaps there will be a generational change and enthusiast photographers will become as commonplace as poets.
I can see this as a possibility. Imagery could become so omnipresent & ubiquitous that people could lose much of their interest in creating yet more of it. Reaching technical plateaus—due to lack of consumer interest rather than innovative/iterative capability—might sluice away much of the specs-obsessed enthusiast crowd too. I doubt any of this will happen in the near term, but who knows? Whatever happens will have little effect on me personally. I can take pics with my 4x5" using glass plates or paper negs with brushed-on emulsion if necessary. :D
-Dave-
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I can see this as a possibility. Imagery could become so omnipresent & ubiquitous that people could lose much of their interest in creating yet more of it. Reaching technical plateaus—due to lack of consumer interest rather than innovative/iterative capability—might sluice away much of the specs-obsessed enthusiast crowd too. I doubt any of this will happen in the near term, but who knows?
That will be self regulating as it always has.
Cheers,
Bernard
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I read Vincent Laforet's article and he's probably right on the button.
There is a video on the collapsing camera market at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfCJDIf-NeA
The graphs are convincing.
From my unreliable memory I recall that the presenter showed that dslr sales have closely followed those of point and shoots, but with a two year lag.
The decline of point and shoot cameras has not followed a conventional sales curve, but has undergone a catastrophic decline.
The cause is NOT smartphones as such. You can demonstrate a causal link between the decline of mp3 players and the rise of smartphones, but the graphs do not show the same link between point and shoots and smartphones.
The cause is most likely the software.
You can use the same software on a variety of smartphones and it's simple and fun. No vast array of knobs and sub-menus. No manufacturer specific raw files, lenses and memory cards. You sort and process your images with your friends over an afternoon cup of coffee and when you get home they are already uploaded to your social media of choice.
In current sales model was probably begun long ago by Kodak. Box Brownie sales supported the development of higher end Kodaks and there was a clear upgrade path. Now with sales of the lower end cameras disappearing, the money to develop new dslr models is gone.
Companies like Fuji and Canon have a larger sales base and are probably okay, as are medium format manufacturers. The rest are trouble if they can't address the software, ease of use, proprietary raw file and lens mount issues.
David
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David,
Thanks for the link to the Mayflower Concepts presentation which initially sounds very convincing. I think his analysis is not correct. The thing he is missing is that from about 2010 the camera sales and smart phones sales follows opposite curves. If he had limited his correlation analysis to this subject I'm sure the correlation coefficient would be much higher. The other thing that happened in 2010 was the launch of the iPhone 4 and later 4S with significant better cameras and also the emergence of photo sharing apps. Look at the growth of Instagram, Facebook etc. which happened in the same time period. So it's not just camera quality of the smart phone, but really the way it can be used and all this happened in this time. Still maybe not enough to explain the sharp decline that happened after 2012. He skips quickly over trying to explain the catastrophic event and what could have caused it. He then goes on to talk about how the camera industry has not at all caught up on the smart phone revolution in ease if use. I think he has a real point there and that it is the reason for the decline, but his business analysis does not support this claim.
I have before written about why I simply cannot understand that new cameras released today does not contain WiFi as standard as well as GPS. Touch screen interface should be a given and more importantly a lot more work put into making pictures looking really good out of camera. Now it's only a niche of people using software like Lightroom to process pictures, but I see no attempt by Adobe to build intelligent software to help the novice process RAW pictures to look good. Why does the software not learn from the user does? I'm editing thousands of pictures using very similar approaches from picture to picture. Why could the software not try to learn what I'm doing and at least suggest and edit similar on another picture? If I don't like I could click a button for an alternative or adjust the rest myself which then would be added to the intelligence of the software. It's all manual and there is a learning curve that scares many off and they don't get the results they could get. Why does Adobe not have software that makes it possible to use a tablet for editing pictures with simple gestures if the automatic software cannot do it all. Why doesn't a camera suggest to the user to bracket and blend exposures when it sees a high DR scene? There is so much that could be done that would make the photographer able to concentrate on shooting and framing the interesting moments rather than checking the camera constantly for histograms, exposure, blown out highlights etc.
The Mayflower Concepts presentation has a use case that should be mandatory for camera manufacturers and software producers to review and take really serious. The trip to Paris. A simple thing like rating pictures in the camera, location data from builtin GPS, camera and laptop automatically sensing each other and automatically transferring images. Is it really that hard to make this? Software that would automatically process the pictures ready for sharing and setup as stories from Paris that could be shared with friends or printed. A side comment: At least my Mac and my iPhone now knows they are close and I can use the iPhone as a hotspot without even touching the phone. I would wish that camera manufacturers would start thinking like Apple. Apple also now when the Photo app comes in the Mac will have the same editing capability across all devices as well as automatic synchronization.
I can almost hear somebody saying I'm nuts and that it would take all the fun out of shooting. In my opinion it would be the complete opposite. I'm by nature lazy enough that I would enjoy having a lot of help from my tools to do what I really like: Photograph!
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I have before written about why I simply cannot understand that new cameras released today does not contain WiFi as standard as well as GPS.
The Best Wi-Fi Cameras (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2425189,00.asp) PCmag
You already know there'll be people (http://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?topic=97374.msg797292#msg797292) who don't yet feel that functionality is a necessity.
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Dave, I am sorry, butI got bored after about ten minutes of mandatory corporate audience fluff, and did not feel like sitting through another 40 minutes wailting for one or two useful graphs, so can you tell me the overall situation for ILC's, and the time period that his data covers? What I can find out is that the digital transition caused a boom in ILC unit sales to a peak of about ten times what film SLR sales were before DSLRs became a significant factor, and though DSLR/ILC are now decreasing, they are still a huge fives times or so higher than film SLR sales ever were in the late film era, and at higher average unit prices, so ILC revenues are far higher than they ever were with film cameras. So all I see is evidence of is an inevitable slow down after the bubble of the transition from film to digital and then a few generations of frequent upgrades while DSLRs were making substantial useful improvemets on a time scale of a few years. I see not the slightest hint that this is a permanent trend all the way down to zero for non-professional ILCs, any more than the previous uptrend in digital cameras sales was permanent. Extrapolation from a few years' trend is very unreliable.
Let me put this as a question: zoom lenes reaching about 300mm or more in "35mm equivalent" angular field of view are very popular with many amateurs (see superzooms as well as telephot zooms lenses), no phone camera can come close by cropping except at very, very low resolution, and the small actual lens aperture sizes of phone cameras will never be able to do a decent job at this "telephoto" photography, due to the basic physics of how little light a phone-sized lens can gather from a narrow angle scene. So do you envision a time when most or all non-professionals give up those narrow angle shots completely, in favor of the wide to normal world of pocketable snap-shot camera-phones?
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Perhaps there will be a generational change and enthusiast photographers will become as commonplace as poets.
I'm not sure what you mean: do you speculate that photographers who are enthusiastic about things like telephoto reach will become rare? I see absolutely no trend in that direction; the opposite in fact.
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Hans, yes I agree the time frame is the important thing as far as deciding the correlation coefficient. Time will tell. I think you are right about the software. Most people I see in camera clubs are seriously struggling with getting their images off the camera and into storage, let alone things like raw conversion. They want to go out and make photographs and enjoy doing it. I can't blame them.
Bill, I was going to download the presentation and watch it at 3x speed to go over the details again, but can't face it. Sorry.
I think the critical graph is the one that shows dslr sales closely following point and shoot sales but with a two year or so lag. No one has any idea if it will hold true, but I have to say if my livelihood depended on camera sales I would be stocking up on clean underwear.
So do you envision a time when most or all non-professionals give up those narrow angle shots completely, in favor of the wide to normal world of pocketable snap-shot camera-phones?
Now that the dslr tidal wave is over, all I can do is look at what was done in the past. Most people who wanted to record their travel and family used the simplest gear that they could that would give them a half usable picture. Has that really changed?
While there will always be a percentage of folks who want to do something a little better or want to be seen with a flashy camera, what was the percentage in the past? What's your memory of of this? I recall that narrow angle shots were not the norm.
I used to often play music at weddings. Five years ago a lot of guests brought dslrs. At the last few events I did a year ago the were none. Not one. Guests were mostly holding up those ipad things. Or using their phones.
I know some very good professionals who regularly reach for their phones because they can't be bothered getting out their hefty camera bag. And their cameras are mirrorless for heavens sake. One the other hand the images are on their blog minutes later.
David
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If there is a touch screen on the back of the camera then the camera has an inbuilt keyboard (just as smart phones do.)
Put a SIM card in the camera and with touch screen keyboard you can now upload to instagram, etc.
Of course that is too sensible for any camera manufacturer to actually do.
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… there are millions of us …
Perhaps there will be a generational change and enthusiast photographers will become as commonplace as poets.
I'm not sure what you mean: do you speculate that photographers who are enthusiastic about things like telephoto reach will become rare? I see absolutely no trend in that direction; the opposite in fact.
I was speculating that there's nothing inevitable about photography as a widespread "hobby" beyond what can be satisfied by ubiquitous snap and share.
Although there is an obvious driver behind desire for telephoto reach, it isn't from enthusiast photographers --
The phrase that describes the most important segment of the DSLR community is: “soccer mom”. ... The three reasons parents buy high end cameras is telephoto reach (http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-graying-of-traditional-photography.html?showComment=1383097984098#c746810578841493996), low light capability, and the ability to quickly focus on their children when they are jumping a hurdle or scoring a goal.
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Now that the dslr tidal wave is over, all I can do is look at what was done in the past. Most people who wanted to record their travel and family used the simplest gear that they could that would give them a half usable picture. Has that really changed?
While there will always be a percentage of folks who want to do something a little better or want to be seen with a flashy camera, what was the percentage in the past? What's your memory of of this? I recall that narrow angle shots were not the norm.
I completely agree about the equipment needs of the most common mode of photography, what I call "casual" photography, mostly to preserve memories of family, friends, travels and such. What I am rejecting is Vincent Laforet's far more extreme claim, the false dichotomy that there will soon be only the two extremes of photographic equipment (a) camera-phones for this "casual photography, and (b) "professional photographic equipment". Because in between these two type of photography, there has for a long time been a substantial number of photographers who want and use things like more telephoto reach or wider angle lens options or macro lenses, but do it with gear of distinctly less that "professional" grade and pricing; gear like 70-300/3.5-5.6 zoom lenses, super-zoom fixed lens digital cameras, and so on. This middle group is far smaller than the "casuals", but still far more numerous than the professionals (plus amateurs who use "professional" equipment) so it puzzles me when I read so many people effectively ignoring their existence in this discussion, or of all the gear that they buy. Just look at all the moderately priced "non-professional grade" telephoto lenses and super-zoom digital cameras, which do things that no phone can come close to.
This is no different than the pattern for a century or so, such as the eras when a preponderance of Brownies or Instamatics or compact 35mm film cameras with 3x or 4x zoom lenses coexisted alongside a smaller but healthy market for a higher levels of non-professional gear.
P. S. Can we also drop the inaccurate and sexist stereotype of entry level DSLR users as being mostly "soccer moms"? I see roughly equal numbers of men and women using DSLRs at tourist locations where a more pocketable camera would probably serve them just as well, and in the college town where I live, I also plenty of young people enjoying photography with inexpensive DSLRs and clearly taking more care in the activity than casual snap-shooters or Instagramographers.
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If you want to sound very credible, here is a handy approach:
Say some stuff that is definitely true. Supply graphs and citations, or whatever, to make sure everyone knows that it's true.
Now state your insane and unsupportable thesis, as if it were a consequence. "Therefore, it's clear that .." is a handy phrase. Go easy, but be definite that your stupid thing follows.
For extra credit, wrap up with a couple more definitely true things.
(does this sound familiar?)
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If you want to sound very credible, here is a handy approach:
Say some stuff that is definitely true. Supply graphs and citations, or whatever, to make sure everyone knows that it's true.
Now state your insane and unsupportable thesis, as if it were a consequence. "Therefore, it's clear that .." is a handy phrase. Go easy, but be definite that your stupid thing follows.
For extra credit, wrap up with a couple more definitely true things.
Remember the most important part! The thesis was just a tail to wag his name and latest project. The more ridiculous the tail, the more the dog will wag (the KR thesis).
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P. S. Can we also drop the inaccurate and sexist stereotype of entry level DSLR users as being mostly "soccer moms"?
It would certainly be interesting to know the basis of the claim (http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-graying-of-traditional-photography.html?showComment=1383097984098#c746810578841493996) that "A majority of [DSLR] buyers are women. Most have kids under 6."
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It would certainly be interesting to know the basis of the claim (http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-graying-of-traditional-photography.html?showComment=1383097984098#c746810578841493996) that "A majority of [DSLR] buyers are women. Most have kids under 6."
It is well known that 93.2% of all statistics mentioned online are invented.
Cheers,
Bernard
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http://www.infotrends.com/public/Content/Press/2012/11.07.12.html
'Weighted toward males'
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It is well known that 93.2% of all statistics mentioned online are invented.
Cheers,
Bernard
No, Bernard!
I'm quite sure it's closer to 93.7%.
Cheers,
Eric
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It is well known that 93.2% of all statistics mentioned online are invented.
Cheers,
Bernard
That's for the internet as a whole: the rate is twice as high for claims made in discussion forums. (Like that one (http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-graying-of-traditional-photography.html?showComment=1383097984098#c746810578841493996) about mothers of young children.)
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http://www.infotrends.com/public/Content/Press/2012/11.07.12.html
'Weighted toward males'
Selective quotation ;-)
Strangely market research firms seem to want money for their purchaser demographic data; which leaves discussion forum squabbles with just the fun-stuff (http://petapixel.com/2012/11/20/survey-majority-of-dslr-shooters-use-their-cameras-as-point-and-shoots/) -- "2/3 of casual DSLR users never (or rarely) take their camera out of full-auto mode. 72% purchased their camera simply for fun and for family snapshots, and 65% of those aged 18-29 considered their glorified point-and-shoots DSLRs a status symbol."
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Selective quotation ;-)
That quotation in no way distorts the message of the full sentence:
The demographics of DSLR and CILC owners look very similar: photo enthusiasts, knowledgeable about photography, weighted to males, affluent, and early adopters.
(Which sounds a lot like the demographics of this forum!)
Unfortunately, the full demographic details are in the reports that InfoTrends sells, so I will settle for my own informal surveys of ILC usage as seen at tourist hotspots, which corroborates the "weighted to males".
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That quotation in no way distorts the message of the full sentence…
And the following sentence says…?
so I will settle for my own informal surveys of ILC usage as seen at tourist hotspots, which corroborates the "weighted to males".
Try informal surveys at pumpkin patches, xmas tree farms, after school sports… :-)
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And the following sentence says…?
Nothing relevant. This is disingenuous. You're relying on the fact that many people won't bother to click the link and read, and will therefore assume that whatever the next sentence is, it supports something or other you have said. This despite the fact that, as usual, you have said nothing.
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"The [2012] demographics of DSLR and CILC owners look very similar … Future CILC owner demographics reflect a more mainstream buyer, who may be stepping up from a point & shoot camera."
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So the next sentence is:
"Future CILC owner demographics reflect a more mainstream buyer, who may be stepping up from a point & shoot camera."
I do not see how this prediction relates to the claim that ILC buyers are or will soon be mostly mothers of young children. Or getting back to the OP, how does this InfoTrends prediction relate to the Laforet prediction that mainstream, non-professional camera users will lose interest in telephoto reach and low-light/fast action handling beyond what phones offer? Be they stereotypical soccer moms or baseball dads, or people who enjoy watching sports or children at play or birds or other wildlife, is there the slightest evidence of decreasing interest in also photographing such sites? (Sales numbers being now only about five times higher than in 2000 is not persuasive evidence!)
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… is there the slightest evidence …
We ought to be able to agree to the obvious: neither of us have access to current camera buyer demographic data.