I mentioned the DJI Osmo Pocket in the "Future's so Dim..." post, and this got a number of responses popping into my email InBox. It's worth deep diving into the problem a bit more, because it's essentially the same problem that the camera makers have been fighting for some time: "good enough" wins.
We've seen this "good enough" thing pop up in technology after technology. For example, despite the audio on early Compact Disc (CD) having some distinct technical issues compared to traditional tape and LP recordings, what was heard by the consumer was more than "good enough" while the convenience factor was higher. While the CD frequency range had a pretty harsh brick filter on it, that occurred above most folk's direct hearing and tended to only impact harmonics that most people weren't even noticing. Moreover, there was no more LP "popping" or tape "hissing." CDs were smaller than LPs, more robust than tape, didn't have to blipped mid-album, and weren't fiddly in getting to the first track or doing anything after the last track. It was easy at the time to predict that CDs would dominate music publishing.
You're probably already recognizing that smartphones were kind of the same thing: "good enough" photos with a higher convenience factor. Good-enough-with-convenience is a pretty winning combination, historically, so it was easy for me and a few others to predict back in 2007 that the world was about to change for photography. At the time—a month after the iPhone was launched—I was sitting on the slopes of Kilimanjaro with a newly installed cellular system ringing the mountain pretty much all to myself and...I was able to send "good enough" photos in real time to my family. Oops.
The young these days are posting to SnapChat, Instagram, and Tik-Tok for the most part, and there's another bit that's coming into play: devices that can do that for video that are just as "good enough" and even more convenient than any previous method of dealing with video. The DJI Osmo Pocket is probably the best of those choices at the moment, thus my mention of it.
GoPro managed to be one of the leaders into this realm, but didn't seem to ever realize that the function would be more broadly applicable than just action sports. That Nikon virtually copied GoPro with the KeyMission shows that Nikon didn't actually understand the market that was available, but instead saw the market as "competitor's product." That's a big no-no in tech. If you shoot your R&D wad 100% at an existing product, you are by definition at least a year and probably two or more year's behind.
Ironically, Nikon actually was close to the right answer with the Nikon 1, but missed the convenience bit, which today has to do mostly with the accompanying software. This is actually where DJI excels, software. Software propels their drones, stabilizes their gimbals, and connects their cameras. The DJI Mimo app—their equivalent to Nikon SnapBridge—connects near instantly, is stable, updates firmware, controls the camera with remote view, and, of course, allows for files to get to the mobile device quickly. It downloads what you recorded quickly and with a tap, and allows you both post process and trim your video as desired before sending it onwards. The Share menu in the app is direct to Facebook, Instagram, Messages, SnapChat, as well as anything else you can share to via the smart device's built-in abilities (e.g. AirDrop, Mail, and other installed apps on iOS).
The camera companies keep showing that they don't want to play in the "good enough" arena, yet that's where the volume is. CIPA, of course, doesn't track GoPro or DJI shipments, because they're not members, so this gives the Japanese camera companies the ability to pretend that there isn't a volume of cameras being sold that might be problematic for them. Well here's a statistic for you: GoPro alone sold about 2.9m cameras in 2023. Given that CIPA reports all cameras shipped in 2023 as 7.7m units and that it's leaving out all these "odd-ball" cameras from countries other than Japan, can you see the problem more clearly now?
The Japanese camera companies first ceded a significant part of their former market to the smartphone. More recently they've ceded another significant portion to the action/portable/handheld cameras. Instead of circling their wagons or inventing wagon drones, the Japanese simply think that converting to higher-end wagons will allow them to survive. Meanwhile they seem to continue to think that just giving lip service to getting images off cameras over to the Internet is enough. It simply isn't. I called them out on this over a decade ago, and their response is still more lame than Chinese entrants that didn't exist when I made that call.
So what's happened is that not only have the camera companies retreated to "high end," they've also found that this "high end" is a bit more restrictive than they originally thought. The last bastions of semi-protectable territory have really devolved to wildlife and sports photography, with perhaps a nod at photojournalism (the latter of which is being ignored by the camera companies). That's one reason why you saw Nikon pay so much attention to telephoto lenses in the Z-mount, by the way. It's not that the Japanese companies don't realize what I've written above, it's that they appear to think they're powerless to do anything about it, so they cluster in areas they think there's still some traction. If I'm starting up a new camera company (or running a new Chinese one), I'm already thinking about how I take even that "protected" business away.
Yes, there's room for quality, and large sensor dedicated cameras do have advantages there, but have you looked at the pricing in the quality markets? Consider this article on photo pricing at mefoto, for instance. At the WPPI show (wedding and portrait photographers) earlier this year I made it a point to ask a number of attendees what they were grossing with their attention to high-end capability. While there were a number that reported six figure incomes, I was surprised at how many were mired in something near the average salary in the US (about US$60k). Most people making an average salary don't need to buy high-end gear costing thousands of dollars to do their job, let alone keep upgrading that to stay above the competition.
I'll stick by what I've written previously: 6m interchangeable lens camera units a year is an ambitious goal for the Japanese. Short of a breakthrough in camera technology, it's going to be tough sledding to keep gross sales volume where they are. As I wrote previously, you can't just keep going for higher-and-higher end products to keep your overall sales figures intact. Beyond price elasticity of demand you also have buying fatigue to deal with if that's your long-term strategy. Meanwhile, competitors nibble upwards. We've now got 120mm in a smartphone, so how protected is that telephoto wagon?
Get ready for a Groundhog Day type market, redux, where the Japanese camera companies will keep reliving their nightmare. It'll take creative energy from the Japanese companies to get out of their repeating pattern now.
