Okay, my tongue is a bit back in my cheek again today, but there’s plenty of truth in what I’ll write.
The following are real questions that my subconscious was mulling over while I spent the month talking to elephants and petting lions.
“Will Sony abandon the camera business?”
No. At least not in any time period I could contemplate. Being successful at something tends to have that impact.
Not that Sony was always successful at the camera business. Hidden away in their long journey—which dates back into the 1980’s—were a lot of failures. Despite having plenty of first mover benefits, by the time digital camera sales started their rapid ascent near the turn of the century, Sony wasn’t really leading the pack, and thus it missed the DSLR takeoff.
The KonicaMinolta acquisition didn’t solve Sony's DSLR problem, either. Canon and Nikon continued to chew up 75-80% of that market every year, leaving slim pickings for Fujifilm, Olympus, Pentax, and Sony. I wrote soon after the KM acquisition that Sony wouldn’t achieve their stated 20% market share goals, and I was right. For more than a decade.
Around the 2008-2010 time period was the point where Sony would have most likely decided to exit the camera business. I predicted the digital camera peak accurately nine years before it happened, but as we got closer to that event, Sony surely must have seen the impending top themselves.
Instead, they pivoted. Good decisions were made: avoiding joining the m4/3 alliance, and starting on the mirrorless road with their own new mount. With Canon and Nikon milking DSLRs long past their Fresh By date, that was the crack that Sony needed to wedge away sales with. Nikon even helped by crippling their Nikon 1 mirrorless entry back in 2011. Canon followed with an easy lob that barely cleared the net in the EOS M.
Meanwhile, Sony found enough momentum to forge past all their other issues, and became the clear leader of the mirrorless pack. The only question at that point was whether or not mirrorless was going to eclipse DSLR (as I wrote at the time—remember, I started sansmirror.com in 2009—it was inevitable if nothing else due to cost reduction capability).
So today Sony is doing well in cameras, making money, and not likely to abandon one of the clear tech wins they’ve been able to make. Phew! One less thing to worry about.
Did (will) a replacement for dpreview appear?
No. You don’t replace 25 years in one month.
What will replace big forum congregations like those that we lost from dpreview?
AI bots. In the future, you don’t need forums to discuss photo gear. You can discuss it all by yourself with a properly programmed AI chat bot. It can argue with you, make outrageous and unsupported claims, applaud your best fan boy rants, and more.
During my break, specifically on April 1st via a virtual posting, I created dpreview.ai. It looks like the old dpreview, but all the new articles and posts are just ai posing as real people. Amazingly, you won’t notice the difference.
Who will be the leaders in mirrorless in 2025?
#1. Canon. #2. Sony. #3. Either Nikon or Fujifilm, depending upon execution.
Canon, because they have to. They have no choice. It’s probably win or die for them. Sony because they’re on a milk run now, made easier by Nikon’s contractions.
If you give Canon 50% and Sony 25% (the construct at the start of the DSLR era, with Nikon being the 25%) that leaves a 10-15% position available for third (the scraps go to the remainder of the competitors). Nikon holds that position today. Fujifilm is trying to build to it. The advantage is currently Nikon’s, but fumbling is a lot easier when you’re third on the depth chart. Not that I’m predicting that—so far Nikon seems solid—but it’s definitely a possibility that could cause a change in leaders. Both companies see cameras a solid part of their legacy, so neither is going to give up. Should be an interesting battle to watch.
Does pixel shift really matter?
For marketing purposes, sure. For user purposes, I’m not at all convinced.
Even if you minimize the collection time of the pixel shift and deal with any subject motion via AI replacement, who needs all those pixels? Peter Lik, maybe? (Is there a gallery big enough to hold his images if he adds more pixels? ;~).
The camera companies, and now the smartphone companies, are addicted to Big Number Marketing. It solves a simple problem for them. No one can deny that 100 is larger than 45, or that 200 is larger than 100. All the wimps in the marketing departments of camera companies just keep going into the engineering offices and ask “can we get more pixels?” If they get them, they consider the marketing job done, and they can just go to the sake bar to celebrate.
Real marketing is enormously difficult. It isn’t about larger numbers. You want your customer to have an emotional connection to your product, not a mathematical one.
If I only had 12mp to work with (I’m looking at you Sony A7S) I’d market it as “Best damn 4K data you can collect, and someday you’re going to want your 4K data to be as good as possible.” Disclaimer: I’m the “collect optimal data, process the data optimally” guy. Of course, my product would need to back that up, and I’d need to show it in my marketing, neither of which is a given, but still…
You don’t need more pixels. You need better cameras. Not the same thing.
