Cameras and Photography Explained

For the summary, see this page. I've previously announced these two new trips to those that are signed up for my workshop newsletter, so if you're interested at all, you don't want to dally, as early signups are already taking most of the available spaces. 

I will say that, with workshops that cost this much this far out, you'll also want to budget for trip insurance (Lisa, who you'll register with, can give you details of a plan that we know from experience works well; we've had last minute health issues come up a few times over the decades I've been doing these workshops, and it sucks to be both sick and out of pocket with a big sum at the same time). 

I'm excited about these new workshops. One is completely unique and I don't believe has been offered by any other instructor. The other is another refinement of a trip I know works really well, both for first timers as well as returning photographers. It was tough to keep the pricing from going completely bonkers. As I've noted elsewhere, the lodges in Botswana are all trying to make up for the pandemic, and most have raised their prices 200% or more in the past two years (and are still filling their beds). Fortunately, we have long term relationships with the ones we use, and have been able to talk them back to sanity somewhat. 

Still, top level product, excellent access, and great guiding is now approaching US$1500/day on the ground in much of Africa. You can get lower cost excursions, but they won't be nearly as good as what we put together. For example, in Khwai this year, at the check-in gate we watched one "budget" tour limp in with two flat tires on their only vehicle, but that wasn't their biggest problem: their camp truck had broken down and they had no camp, nor did they have a backup plan for such situations. My team and I are proud of our long track record in getting you where you need to be with what you need to have when you need to be there. I'm not going to back off of quality trips with solid contingency plans. This year, for instance, we pre-scouted the Kalahari camps and decided two days prior to the trip to move everything, because if we did so we could catch the zebra migration, a very unique thing that people rarely see in Botswana because it happens mostly away from the traditional safari areas.

Yes, I've heard the folks asking for things more local. Mark Comon and I are talking about what we might be able to do about that together (Mark does a lot US workshops), but it's tough putting two schedules together. 

No sooner did Nikkei publish their mirrorless market share report (chart summarizing that, below), did the amateur statisticians once again whip up their completely wrong analysis, one of whom went to the trouble of asking ChatGTP for help. But garbage in, garbage out.

One problem is that these amateur statisticians have trouble with reading comprehension. The report Nikkei quoted was for mirrorless market share, not complete camera market share. That didn’t stop one site from pulling up full camera share reports for previous years from different sources, and come to the conclusion that Canon is in trouble (if you want a more accurate analysis of what’s happening in the market, see mine).

Taking three sources with no overlap to create a pattern over four years to predict for ten years forward is a big statistical no-no. But no, this particular site then took that multi-sourced and non-conforming data and had AI do the hard work of coming up with projections from it. That led them to the conclusion that Canon will have a 7.7% market share in 2033, and Sony an 82.1% market share. 

To add humor, not only did we get that ridiculous projection, but said poster couldn’t even read his own fake table. He wrote “Nikon...will continue to grow steadily.” But his table says 12.95% in 2024 down to 10.7% in 2033, which as you’re probably aware, is not what anyone would call growth. If it is, Nikon has been growing like gangbusters for several years now ;~).

Anyone can do statistics these days. Even political pollsters. The problem is that those are almost never accurate use of statistics, and thus the reliability of all these amateur projections we see these days is essentially zero. 

Even for someone like me, whose PhD minor was in statistics, it’s difficult, as the reliability of data has gone down, too. About the only two consistently reliabible data points in cameras that are publicly available now are the CIPA monthly numbers, plus Nikon’s quarterly financial statements. But even those are difficult to square together, because Nikon still reports all ILC while CIPA breaks mirrorless and DSLRs out. 

When I made my 2003 projection of peak DSLR being reached sometime in 2011 (I was off by about six months), I did that from four known, reliable data sources. Unfortunately, one of those is now private and another no longer reliable. Moreover, the projection didn’t rely upon the camera market volume directly, but rather home adoption. One of the things I discovered in my PhD work is that future volumes can be predicted by household penetration numbers. I’d point to my long study of this, but I can’t find a copy at the moment. 

You might also have noticed this chart making the rounds (again from Nikkei):

Note the hump. This tells us that every home in Japan decided they needed a digital still camera, so household penetration went up; so did camera sales, obviously. But as smartphones started taking over the photo job, Japan has returned to more where they were in terms of number of dedicated cameras in each home.

This is exactly the area I’ve been studying for quite some time. It’s what made me suggest that we’d fall well below 6m unit sales before we did. Unfortunately, the available data to me at the moment is not global and for only a couple of markets, but the suggestion to me is that somewhere in the 4m to 6m range is the nominal long term level of camera sales. I see a little uptick in average ownership among the young recently, but it’s unclear yet whether that’s just faddish or a real new trend that will push the number upward. 

If I’m right about a relatively flat overall market long term (or even a slow decline), this makes market share strategies really important. As I note in my sansmirror article, I see everything is upside down right now: one of the smaller market shares is making the highest per unit profit, which usually doesn’t hold for long. 

There’s little doubt that Canon is under stress right now. Their long-term strategy of targeting half the market (50% market share) is not likely achievable in the short term without dramatic cost cutting as well as ratcheting up product discounts. By dramatic, I mean more than they’ve already done.

Since everyone else is doing junk statistics, I’ll do a junk prediction here (though partially based upon a broad knowledge of how all this works): within three to five years, Canon’s camera market share will have dropped probably ten points, Nikon will have gained five points, and the Big Three ILC shares will look more like Canon 40%, Sony 30%, Nikon 15%, all ±2. Oh, wait, that’s exactly where we are with the current mirrorless market ;~). Maybe not so junk, after all. 

I’ve begun to think of technology advances much the same way I do about viruses: there’s constant on-going evolutionary mutations, mostly mild, with only an occasional outlier that establishes a new species and has any true new abilities. 

I’m not alone in this thought. Even the BBC once said “the hi-fi world has become something of a graveyard for bright ideas that come to nothing,” but that the CD was a “real” change. 

This idea of failed (tech) “species" with occasional successful new ones is something I’ve both experienced and observed in my long career. Moreover, the way in which some tech species fail varies considerably. I’ve been at companies with products that died because of cash flow issues, licensing arguments, and even the very weird “too successful to continue as a Subchapter S while unable to transition to Subchapter C due to the tax consequence.” It isn’t always lack of sales, poor/wrong product, or economic recession that kills off tech products. 

One thing I admire about the Japanese engineering teams is that they're exceptionally good at producing small mutations (iterations) that inch a tech species forward. The thing that everyone admires about Silicon Valley is different: the Valley seems to be able to spontaneously combust a new hardy tech species from out of nowhere. 

We need both things to happen to get better cameras. Call it in-box and out-of-box thinking if you want to use the cliched terminology.

Most of the criticism over recent camera introductions is that it's all in-box thinking. Some more pixels, some more attention to focus algorithms, faster movement of data, and so on. What I hear becoming louder in the customer complaints is requests for things that currently aren't being done in our cameras. And, of course, I've been a long time complainer about cameras not yet having really moved into the 21st century in terms of moving data over the airwaves.

One of the biggest requests from users these days has to do with computational computing. Caution: many are conflating what they see that looks okay on a smartphone screen with "computational imaging makes better photos." 

Before we go further, let me correct one thought many have: our cameras already have plenty of computational computing. The complaint really has to do with the fact that smartphones seem to be doing more, and are doing it IRT (in real time). Moreover, we've had some computational stuff before that has been removed from later cameras. Remember Nikon's BSS (best shot selection)? That, or a newer mutation of that would be truly handy in a Z9 that pops off 120 frames per second on a pre-shot capture (e.g. "ignore the images of the bird just sitting, and only show me the ones of it taking off and still in frame"). 

We have two competing changes in final pixel approach going on right now that also need to be better resolved. The first is AI completely making up pixels; the second is computational reconstruction of pixels. In the former, new pixels appear out of nowhere. In the latter, pixels are formed by examining before, during, after pixels and putting the best pixel forward (or combining them to remove quantum shot noise). Perhaps we want both mutations, but I'd also like to have more control over both when and how each of them are used. 

This is actually one place where the smartphone and dedicated camera makers can (and should) be different. Smartphones just give you their best guess. No one wants deep menus and lots of buttons to control things on their phones. Smartphones as a camera are a convenience product, not a high quality, high performance tool. Dedicated cameras (mostly) assume an intelligent controller (you) is making intelligent decisions (or overrides of decisions). The difference is important. Not everyone wants the smartphone simplification, but not everyone wants to be stepping in all the time to assert more control. These two groups of users can and should coexist. The question is whether you do both in the same device.