Originally posted by Aristophanes The "market" is the number of customers who use a camera, like the photos, and when it depreciates as we all accept things do when we engage as consumers in chattel goods, think about buying a replacement. That is when brand loyalty, Pentax Forums, the cult status of the Ricoh GR, and investments in glass pay off.
The easiest customer is always a repeat one.
But I stand by my assertion that the change in wireless and right-now transfer of images has caught the DSLR and optics company camera market with their pants down. This, I believe, has dramatically slowed the replacement cycle. Flu Card ain't gonna do it. They need to make mobile OS's their main platform. This needs to happen in the next 3 quarters or it will be a bloodbath. Traditional Japanese camera engineering (like how Olympus has recently approached the industry) is not going to change things. Pentax is sort of on the ball with the fashion accessory, multi-colour approach, but it only blinds the market at the edges. Connectivity is what is lacking from the DSLR and mirrorless crowd.
You may be right but I think you are being pretty optimistic. Brand loyalty, internet forums and cult cameras apply to only a tiny, tiny number of overall users and for most users "glass" means renewing the glazing in their home. All the folks I know who want a nice camera for a vacation or whatever go to a good local store, often John Lewis (the leading department store chain here), and buy what takes their fancy. They like something which "does it all" in one body, and video is very much a part of it. The key for a brand is
to be on sale in the store. This is strength of the established companies and the Achilles Heel of the lesser players, like Pentax, who simply cannot get into the store to begin with. When times are tough and stores become even more picky about their stock lines, the situation is even worse for the lesser players.
I completely agree about wireless and software. But there must be little chance of a real change in either without some serious changes right across the main camera companies. Why? Because they have repeatedly spurned any such thing and, broadly, take the line that what a user does after buying the camera is nothing to do with them. The whole point is that how people user their cameras is everything to do with the camera companies because unless the camera fits into a modern workflow, it is often just a useless lump. And a big, heavy useless lump too.
"Workflow" embraces a lot of different things. For most folks, it probably means Just Works (TM) with mobiles and tablets. Others require more high-end solutions; still others are looking for Pinterest kinds of things - easy ways to turn their pictures into prints, items like mugs and mats, embroidery patterns, puzzles, digital picture holders and all the rest. Not a single camera company I've seen makes any effort at all to facilitate this. An example would be to do so via appropriate links and upload systems on their websites and eventually in-camera or from mobile apps. And the Just Works (TM) side means proper integration with quality apps, not half-baked "solutions" which barely work at all or which cost a hundred bucks for a dongle with might work, or might not.
In some ways, perhaps the time is right for an entirely new company to walk in with a killer camera OS and appropriate apps and clean up. At the present rate of non-progress, it might take the camera companies years to achieve any of this, not a few quarters. Perhaps a few management changes are needed.
I wonder what Ricoh think. They bought Pentax at the top of the market, a few months before "peak camera" of 2012. The landscape must look very different now and they may even rue the day, but in truth Ricoh are no different from Canon and Nikon in the "not invented here" stakes. Look at the ill-fated FluCard - no wifi here, thank you, we're off-shoring the lot to a third party and good luck with than one, customers. I guess one possibility is that edgy investors at Canon and Nikon might force some changes, particularly at Nikon which is much the more vulnerable. They have a testbed in the 1 system. I guess it could be upscaled to APS-C, or even FF, fitted out with a new mobile-friendly OS and used as the back end for the F mount.