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Nikon is a startup? The camera market is dominated by big companies. And not only that, many of those companies were actually also big film camera companies. O
by arrrg 11y ago
Nikon is a startup?
The camera market is dominated by big companies. And not only that, many of those companies were actually also big film camera companies. Obviously there’s Nikon and Canon. Sony (which has been coming out with some wickedly cool and innovative digital cameras and certainly worked its way up to become a huge digital camera company) is not an analoge camera company, but it’s also not a small company.
The biggest disruption to the (low end of the) camera market have probably been smartphones and their cameras. (The market segment of cheap point and shoot cameras is practically dead and camera makers have already moved on to new and certainly more exciting products, targeting a very different audience.) That’s chiefly Apple and Samsung (as the biggest drivers of bringing smartphones with good enough cameras to everyone), certainly not small startups.
Even the hippest of the hip current digital cameras tend to be made by some really, really old companies that have been making cameras (and analog film!) for ages, namely Fujifilm (it’s right in the name!) and Olympus.
Selling cameras is still dangerous terrain and I think it pays off to have great ideas and to know your audience, but some very old and very big companies have been quite excellent at doing that, actually. Of course, all around them there has been lots of death and destruction (including Kodak), but that doesn’t mean no one made it.
- rodgerd 11y ago> Sony (which has been coming out with some wickedly cool and innovative digital cameras and certainly worked its way up to become a huge digital camera company) is not an analoge camera company It's not, but it did buy one of the (fading) high-end camera businesses to get access to an SLR system and lens portfolio that they used grant them the credibility they needed to base their current charge on.
- arrrg 11y agoI know! (I didn’t mention it because my comment was getting long enough already.) It seems if you can’t sell to the low end you absolutely need to show off your analog film chops in some way to be really taken seriously. Or at least you had to. (I mean, Sony’s current cameras are certainly thoroughly modern and you can’t really accuse them of nostalgia.)
- rodgerd 11y agoYeah, although their lens strategy seems a bit of a mess - Minolta, Alpha, and Alpha Full-Frame.
- NovaS1X 11y ago>Selling cameras is still dangerous terrain and I think it pays off to have great ideas and to know your audience, but some very old and very big companies have been quite excellent at doing that, actually. For good reason. People can still use their $10,000 pro film lens collections on new digital cameras. Lenses don't evolve like bodies do, most glass from the 70s and up is still amazing by today's standards and these companies with their proprietary mounts that haven't changed in ages offer a massive legacy lens market that a startup couldn't. Fujifilm and Olympus have been doing great in this area relasing new mounts and lens systems that are catching on. Fuji makes some of the best APS-C lenses available and Olympus has done great with their m4/3 format.