When the iPhone appeared in 2007, the camera market at the time was flooded with compact choices. Slowly but surely the camera makers have been in retreat ever since, almost completely leaving the compact market, and in some cases, even the 1” camera market (e.g. Nikon 1). Most of the remaining dedicated cameras you can buy have now retreated to higher price, larger sensor, mirrorless designs, and there’s no real sign that this trend is over yet.
So when a Tamron executive was quoted by Phototrend as saying “...from a commercial point of view, there are already a large number of players who offer this type of optics [fast primes] and we are rather trying to play the agility card. So we are focusing on our strengths with our zooms,” one has to wonder whether the Chinese prime parade is now turning the Japanese lens makers into retreat, too. (Chinese Z mount autofocus primes now number 59; the number is even higher for the Sony FE mount.)
I’m comfortable calling both these things retreats because it’s not clear what the Japanese camera companies might be running towards. They’re starting to fall behind in software and they are slower to iterate, which doesn’t help, either.
This is one of the things about tech: once a market is proven, you either become the largest and most nimble player, or you will slowly be caught and eventually passed by others. First Mover is always a good position to be in, but only if you know where you’re going next and can get there faster. The longer you linger at any given point—typically to milk the cash from customers without spending it all on new development so your shareholders are happy—the more likely another company just rushes in to fill the innovation void you created. At one Silicon Valley company I worked at, we made the conscious decision not to patent a number of things we had conjured out of nowhere, mostly because we knew that would slow us down and keep us from finding the next innovation before everyone else. If your engineers are always speaking with lawyers, they’re not designing the Next Better Thing.
People ask me all the time to predict what the camera market will be like in 10 years. My quick, snide answer is “Chinese.”
So it isn’t a good thing that good autofocus primes now seem to be flying out of China. It isn’t a good thing that DJI is creating cameras for creators and those that want to view things from above. The US-sponsored embargo on top end semiconductor equipment has slowed the Chinese a bit in SoCs (system on chip, e.g. DIGIC, EXPEED, BIONZ), but it hasn’t stopped them (and will fail to even slow them eventually). It’s absolutely not a good thing that the Chinese seem to have become the lowest cost producer of way more than adequate knockoffs. The canary in a coal mine will be a Chinese acquisition of a Japanese imaging entity. If that happens, the retreat is about to become a rout.
Ironically, the Japanese once stole the imaging baton from Germany (and to a smaller degree, US). Now the Japanese camera industry faces multiple, massive foes—Apple, Google, and China—that are running fast to take the baton away from them. The correct answer isn’t to “retreat.” That’s a stalling action, at best.
