Originally posted by beholder3 Based on the historical data shown above I am confident the market for old school combustion engine cars will go away before the same happens for DSLR as subtype of ILC.
I guess the more pressing thing is that ILC as whole dinosaur (with or without mirror is no difference) is still being pushed aside by cameras in smartphones and the latter are innovating much faster than the likes of Fuji, Sony, Nikon, Canon, Pentax ever will.
[Edited for Volvo clarification, grammar and typos] Constant innovation is feasible when
Smartphone annual Unit Sales rise from 1.0 billion to 1.4 billion in five years (2013-2017).I guess that's one Smartphone for every person on earth since January, 2013. If ILC sales only dropped from roughly 12 million to roughly 7 million [/I]over roughly the same years then the real cost is lost opportunity - statistically, zero of the 6 billion phone camera buyers bought an ILC (granting that 120,000,000 compact digital sales did disappear).
I don’t really think smartphones have much to do with sophisticated enthusiast and flagship cameras. Essentially, convenient smartphone cameras have replaced 100% of the
casual shooter ILC’s globally. That’s certainly the case in my family. In 2013 we probably had a dozen digital cameras ranging from Q’s to flagship ILC’s. Now we have 6 phones and K-1 and KP. My wife only gets her Q out for special uses such as her recent Holy Land tour. We sold the others and almost all their former images are now captured on phones.
The issue for ILC makers is whether they are capitalized correctly to do R&D, advance the tech and make a profit on the lower volume. In one way Pentax is fortunate not to need to carry massive, empty facilities any more. They don’t
need to make MILC’s in their dead space. I suspect ILC’s will be exclusively a rich person’s hobby shortly, as they were twenty years ago at half the present unit volume. I just hope Pentax survives the next global recession.
FWIW, over the next two full product development cycles (16 years) EV’s will do to ICE vehicles what Smartphones have done to cameras in the larger sense (including compact cameras). Volvo, for instance, plans to
eliminate ICE-only vehicles from their catalog by 2023. That’s only five years folks.