Sales volume is down. The camera makers have all gone upscale in response. Indeed, from a purely financial point of view, the camera makers all righted their ships by increasing their average selling price. Meanwhile, all the camera makers have also cut back on external-facing staffing, as well as marketing and sales expenses. The result of these things is that virtually every camera company is now making a reasonable profit on lower sales volume.
There's just one fly in the ointment: people who pay more for a product expect more support. Support that has been constantly pared back recently in order to save costs.
A customer who bought a US$500-800 DSLR was buying a consumer camera. Limited features, simpler user interactions, not a lot of things to learn, set, and keep from interfering with one another. Most of the questions these folk had could be answered by the store that sold them the camera. If the store in question was a Big Box that couldn't answer the question, this drove the customer to a dedicated camera dealer, who, when they answered the questions (and more), got a new long-term customer.
Good camera dealers spend as much time on educating customers as they do selling them. Perhaps more.
With the emphasis on moving to enthusiast, prosumer, and professional customers instead of consumers, the gear that's being bought today is more sophisticated, more complex, has more interaction effects, and generally takes me 1000+ pages to do justice in a book that fully describes everything about them (my Complete Guide to the... series).
I'm seeing more and more customer questions on these higher end cameras that require much more than a quick call into customer support to answer. Customer support operators that aren't photographers, don't have that specific gear in front of them, and often have little to no idea what the customer is talking about.
I'm seeing more and more real product issues that are subtle, and which are being dismissed by the camera company repair facilities. "Within specifications" or "no fault found" is the usual response, because all they did is put it on a test machine similar to the one that passed the product out of the factory in the first place. Actually, the repair facility test machines aren't as sophisticated as the ones at the factory, so may even miss something the factory should have caught.
I'm seeing more and more interaction issues, where X negates Y, or A also sets B, or the grandaddy of them all: you can't get there from here (e.g. can't set X and Y together). If the camera company's front-line support even understands these problems when presented to them, the response is almost always "that's the way it was designed to work."
The list goes on. And on.
For the customer that just paid many thousands of dollars for their new gear, getting problems attended to is becoming more and more problematic. Yes, a good local dealer that has a good relationship with the camera company can help escalate an issue, but many of the problems I'm starting to have to deal with from site readers are ones that a dealer can't do anything about themselves. Some of them are incredibly subtle. These days, fly-by-wire lenses mean that lens problems often aren't mechanical, too. Yet it is often unclear whether what is being seen by the customer is a firmware issue (bad coding) or a real failure (digital part not working correctly). Add in an adapter—because someone is moving from DSLR to mirrorless—and we can also get into finger pointing as to what's causing the issue. Camera? Maybe. Adapter? Possibly. Lens? Perhaps.
Those that work with me to assess a problem know that I'm highly analytical. I'll take a step-by-step walk with them where I try to isolate where the issue actually lies before suggesting what can be done about it. That takes time and patience. Patience is not something the camera companies tend to have, and time costs them money. Particularly because that time has to come from someone that has a high level of knowledge and experience with the equipment. That level of folk is now in short supply at all the camera company subsidiaries, and overburdened because of that.
You might think that CPS, NPS, or SPS—the professional services programs at the various camera companies—takes care of such problems at the professional level. They sometimes do, but not without escalation more often than not. By that I mean that the issue is shrugged off at first, and it takes persistence and clear documentation to get the professional service program's clear attention. In the past year, I've had to quietly intercede using my contacts and try to get an escalation for professional service members several times, something that didn't used to happen in the past.
High end cameras are complex. I've been using a Nikon Z9 for almost a year now and I'm still learning some very subtle things about it, and also seeing some very subtle issues and failures (both my own, and among other Z9 users). Ditto the Sony A1.
The problem for the camera companies is this: someone that's bought a higher-end body and a quiver of decent lenses probably has spent as much as US$10,000. At the pro level, a Z9/A1, a full set of f/2.8 zooms, and an exotic might be more like US$30,000 spent. At those prices people expect satisfaction, and when they don't get it in some way, they'll expect answers. Or at least a response. My observation is that fewer and fewer consumers and pros alike are getting any response, let alone proper answers.
That doesn't bode well for the camera companies. Here's what happens:
- The pros muddle through. They might just stop buying new gear and deal with the gear they have, or they might consider moving to another brand/mount if it looks like they'll get better support there, but that's a costly transition, so would generally only be timed to when they expect to update significant gear. As in a DSLR-to-mirrorless transition, wink, wink.
- The enthusiasts get less enthusiastic. Most are pursuing photography as a hobby, so when your hobby gets burdensome, you just look for another hobby. Or you just stop buying new gear and use what you've got.
The net result could very well be even lower sales volume. Which under the current Tokyo-think would mean "raise the average selling price." Yeah, that doesn't end well, does it?
