[clackers]

iPhone killed the consumer market

Yep, we who really value the art and possibilities of taking pictures with an ILC, are a minority … but it was that way through nearly all the history of photography.

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Last edited by clackers; 06-27-2018 at 07:19 PM.

[FozzFoster]

Yep, we who really value the art and possibilities of ILC pictures, are a minority … but it was that way through nearly all the history of photography.

My family say they 'hate fumbling with multiple lenses' - so they love Bridge cameras.. all of em. No one else uses ILC! But I find I feel like I can be much more creative with ILC!

[clackers]

My family say they 'hate fumbling with multiple lenses' - so they love Bridge cameras.. all of em. No one else uses ILC! But I find I feel like I can be much more creative with ILC!

Yeah, I've got a Canon SX 50 somewhere in the house.

Wouldn't know where to start looking, that's an indication that I don't love 'em as much as your family does, Fozz!

[mee]

Nikon cameras are very good at autofocus.

But neither that D850 nor the D500 is particularly good at high ISO values .... I've heard that from users, and DxOMark tests show that also. The KP provides much better color fidelity than the D500 does at high ISO values.

The overall market values better performing autofocus over color fidelity improvements at high ISO values.

It is an aspect that can be used in many applications of photography over one that has a rather niche appeal.


The fact is Nikon spent on R&D and specifically in the realm of digital FF SLRs for many many more years than any of the Pentax brand owners have. That has resulted in more leeway for Nikon with respect to new products.. they hit the plateau of 'good enough for many.' Even their 4 year old bodies are fairly competitive today in their product tiers. And they still sell..


The bigger issue though is with hardware there is no means to keep your revenue up once they mature to the point that they get into that 'good enough for many' phase. That is the real reason Adobe moved to a 'Creative Cloud' system (aka rental) for their software. They touted piracy publicly, but in business news the real reason came out -- They realized there were fewer innovations that were going to be released thus less reason for customers to continue to upgrade. As a result they were going to lose money over time as customers kept clinging to their old products. The solution is to iterate smaller improvements more frequently and only offer them on a rental plan. The result is their stock price has soared as has their revenue.


But for camera manufacturers they can only slow their product releases and we'll all have to deal with it. Pentax is in a tight spot because they played conservative with their product offerings and, now that the market is becoming lean, it is showing for them. More meat on Canon and Nikon product lanes so they are aging more gracefully.. at least perceptually to the market. I think this is where a lot of angst and woe is coming from in the Pentax world.. Ricoh needs to still catch up in some aspects of their camera designs and revisions to lens technology yet they are already on the slow track in a robust, mature market. Tough sell when R&D dollars are tight.. uphill battle. I don't ever see it picking back up to any large degree (and not just with Pentax but the market as a whole). So we end up with slowwwww launches indefinitely. At some point the updated lens lineup should be filled and they'll be in a better place, until then expect a frustrating and bumpy road in Pentaxland especially but for all the major brands. That is, if you're not satisfied with your current gear.

[FozzFoster]

Yeah, I've got a Canon SX 50 somewhere in the house.

Wouldn't know where to start looking, that's an indication that I don't love 'em as much as your family does, Fozz!

Yeah I’ve had both SX50 HS a d the SX60 HS. Both are good cameras to fit their bill

[Wheatfield]

I'm sure it wasn't nothing - high margins in the cheap stuff I'm sure

The margins on high end equipment are much higher than it is on the inexpensive stuff. Remember that what sunk Pentax and led to the Hoya takeover was, among other things, a lack of high end products over a fairly long period of time. Pentax was the "budget brand". Margins are pretty low on budget stuff. It's why McDonald's has to serve billions upon billions while your high end steak house with the fancy linens can get by on a hundred guests a day (and that might be a very good day).

By not having a high end killer camera, Pentax customers didn't have a clear upgrade path to the top. The LX was under supported (shame on them, it was every bit as good as it's contemporaries), and then when the competition moved on (hello Nikon F4), Pentax didn't.

Companies make far more on top tier products than they do on cheap and cheerful. The bottom dwellers who buy the cheap stuff are sensitive only to the feature/ benefit equation. Load it up with sizzle at a low price, and the customer in that price point won't care that the body is made of papier-mache and the lens is a fixed focus Coke bottle bottom.

By the time you get to the top end consumer, the choice has pretty much been made. That customer has chosen a brand, and will, in most cases, stay with that brand because it's now cheaper to do that than it is to switch. Combine brand loyalty with high margin top end equipment, and you have a win for the manufacturer.

[SSGGeezer]

It's why McDonald's has to serve billions upon billions while your high end steak house with the fancy linens can get by on a hundred guests a day (and that might be a very good day).

AND McD's doesn't actually make anything on burgers, they make it all on fountain soda and sweet junk with some help from fries. The "value" menus just want to salt your tongue so you buy a soda.

[Wheatfield]

AND McD's doesn't actually make anything on burgers, they make it all on fountain soda and sweet junk with some help from fries. The "value" menus just want to salt your tongue so you buy a soda.

Yup, and with low end cameras, the manufacturer is hoping you will buy a branded accessory to give them a few cents profit.
When I was in the retail game in the 1980s, we were generally selling camera bodies at a loss, branded lenses at something of a profit, unbranded lenses (we had our own house brand) at a very tidy profit, and accessories at killer margins.

I made more money on a UV filter than I did on a camera body.

[SSGGeezer]

Yup, and with low end cameras, the manufacturer is hoping you will buy a branded accessory to give them a few cents profit.
When I was in the retail game in the 1980s, we were generally selling camera bodies at a loss, branded lenses at something of a profit, unbranded lenses (we had our own house brand) at a very tidy profit, and accessories at killer margins.

I made more money on a UV filter than I did on a camera body.

Just like the office supply stores like Staples lose money on laptops to the tune of 50 to 100 each. that is why they hard sell accessories and service contracts with them. They make their money on the fiddly bits like paper and pens as well as all the cleaning supplies. High end has to be there but margin is king!

[Wheatfield]

Just like the office supply stores like Staples lose money on laptops to the tune of 50 to 100 each. that is why they hard sell accessories and service contracts with them. They make their money on the fiddly bits like paper and pens as well as all the cleaning supplies. High end has to be there but margin is king!

Absolutely true. Prebuilt Lenovo's at the local office supply don't fall into the high end market. High end for Staples is like walking into a Yugo dealer and buying the one with two toned paint and air conditioning.
In those places you are approaching high end when you buy something with an Apple logo on it, but I've never seen a really high end Mac in Staples. They can special order the fully tricked out ones, but they don't keep them in stock.
Where the real money is in computers is high end custom builds.
I know this for a fact. I have never bought an OTS desktop machine.

[SSGGeezer]

Absolutely true. Prebuilt Lenovo's at the local office supply don't fall into the high end market. High end for Staples is like walking into a Yugo dealer and buying the one with two toned paint and air conditioning.
In those places you are approaching high end when you buy something with an Apple logo on it, but I've never seen a really high end Mac in Staples. They can special order the fully tricked out ones, but they don't keep them in stock.
Where the real money is in computers is high end custom builds.
I know this for a fact. I have never bought an OTS desktop machine.

Desktop means build it yourself! AMD FX 8350, 24G RAM, lots of SSDs, AMD 480 Video Card. I will pay for quality, but it has to be exactly what I want.

[Wheatfield]

Desktop means build it yourself! AMD FX 8350, 24G RAM, lots of SSDs, AMD 480 Video Card. I will pay for quality, but it has to be exactly what I want.

Exactly. I always find the sweet spot between performance and price and buy there. It means I am not getting the fastest, latest and greatest, I am stopping just before the price jumps from "gee, that's expensive" to "Holy Cow, I didn't want to sell my children to do this".
My present machine is slightly younger than my K1, I don't recall what the MB is, but the processor is an i7-6700 8 core running at 4GH, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 video card with 6GB of RAM on the card, 32 GB of RAM on the MB, an SSD for the OS and another SSD for swap (I do use swap from time to time even with 32GB of RAM) and another couple of spin drives for storage, and a Drobo 5D running two disc failure protection for long term storage/backup.
Even with this machine, running a 30+ image focus stack from the K1 can cause the machine to bog down during parts of the operation.

The owner of the studio I worked with up until a few years ago was addicted to OTS machines from Future Shop. He'd wander in, spend under a grand, and come back gloating about what a wonderful machine he had just purchased. I always found it a bit frustrating..

[reh321]

Yeah I’ve had both SX50 HS a d the SX60 HS. Both are good cameras to fit their bill

I looked at the various "super zoom" cameras - but I went with a Pentax Q-7 instead, and put a Sigma 70-300mm lens on it I don't get autofocus, but I get higher quality and in its other kit, with regular Q-mount lenses. it is much more compact.

[beholder3]

The margins on high end equipment are much higher than it is on the inexpensive stuff.

But that is only a small part of business logic.

You are missing the absolute profit values for which you need to look at unit volume as well. Superteles for example might have big margins but actually are loss leaders. Of an old Nikkor 600/4 they sold about 2600 units over 12 years. 200 lenses per year is not going to float your boat even if you make $3000 per lens if you have annual costs of > 600 billion yen.


Then mix in the fixed cost situation of large companies (not Ricoh Imaging, but Nikon certainly). They do need heaps of sales and absolute profits to maintain their corporate structures.

There is a good reason why it was Nikon who had to fire every 6th employee last year. Considering that Imaging is only half of Nikon and the DSLR lens and P&S factory closing was only impacting Imaging, probably about every 4th or 5th photography guy at Nikon had to leave in one year.

Canon is performing best and they actually extended their low end portfolio.

[Wheatfield]

But that is only a small part of business logic.

You are missing the absolute profit values for which you need to look at unit volume as well. Superteles for example might have big margins but actually are loss leaders. Of an old Nikkor 600/4 they sold about 2600 units over 12 years. 200 lenses per year is not going to float your boat even if you make $3000 per lens if you have annual costs of > 600 billion yen.

I'm not missing that, it just wasn't germane to the point I was making.

Then mix in the fixed cost situation of large companies (not Ricoh Imaging, but Nikon certainly). They do need heaps of sales and absolute profits to maintain their corporate structures.

They also need to be prepared to resize their corporate structure to match their sales volume. Companies like Nikon, which is more or less a standalone within Mitsubishi, became gigantic over the course of a few decades because they were able to ride the bow wave of their industry. Those days are coming to a close as the high volume but lower profit part of the business gets hollowed out.

There is a good reason why it was Nikon who had to fire every 6th employee last year. Considering that Imaging is only half of Nikon and the DSLR lens and P&S factory closing was only impacting Imaging, probably about every 4th or 5th photography guy at Nikon had to leave in one year.

See above.

Canon is performing best and they actually extended their low end portfolio.

In the short term, but I expect in the long term, they will find themselves in the same position as Nikon. Canon's imaging division is not immune from the changes in the marketplace.

This has been a growth industry for so long that people think it is the norm, but the reality is that photography was able to position itself as a desirable leisure time activity and with the postwar boom in the 1950s, were able to coax people into spending discretionary income on cameras and accessories. This gave the manufacturers lots off money for R&D, so they were able to come up with newer and better toys frequently enough that it put and kept people on a consumer roller coaster. The 80s and beyond have been a fantastic ride. At about the same time it was looking like there was going to be a development lull, along came the Minolta 7000 and EOS 650, both of which (the Canon especially) reenergized the industry and took us into the digital photography era where growth became explosive, especially for the winners (Canon and Nikon). The losers got bought by other companies and became Ricoh and Sony, and a couple of companies that really weren't well known as camera makers managed to grab onto the coattails of the boom and made a name for themselves (Olympus, Panasonic and Fuji come to mind). Oly and Fuji were always pretty small players in the camera game, but had other interests to keep things going. Fuji, for example, was huge into film and processing machinery, Oly had medical imaging.

What I forsee is the camera industry as a whole shrinking as the bubble that has been growing since the mid 1950s deflates. The low end market is going to be (is being) gutted by cell phones, which have become good enough to replace compact cameras, and I expect are poised to hit the bottom end SLR market pretty hard.

There will always be the enthusiast who is willing to spend big bucks on a camera and lenses, but they cannot support an industry that is sized as it is. Smaller companies (Hello Pentax) are actually pretty well positioned because they don't have the massive infrastructure in place that require huge volume sales to support.
I predict that in a few years, we are going to see something of a repeat of history. I don't know if you remember the 1960s, and how the camera industry was in those days, but we had a pretty small high end market that was also fairly expensive. The low end market was mostly handled by the Kodak X-15, a 126 cartridge load camera that was available in gift shops for under 20 bucks.

I don't recall what my father paid for his Spotmatic II in the 1960s, but according to a thread on Photonet, it was around $300.00 with a 50/1.4 or just north of $2400.00 in today's money. I do recall that my Nikon F2s and 50/1.4 lens was in the range of $1k when I bought it in 1973. That works out to just south of $6k in today's dollars. I also recall that lenses were not cheap.
This is what we are going back to. There won't be a low end, high volume market in the near future, the smartphone is going to kill it off once and for all.

Get ready for a return to the good old days where camera gear was really, really expensive