Originally posted by ogl We are discussing at Russian penta-club the situation that smartphones already killed P&S cameras and the photo market of DSLR and EVIL decreases every year.
It seems to me Ricoh looks a bit confused. Q is frozen and I think it won't have any perspectives.
To carry APS-C, FF and MF is rather heavy burden for Ricoh. Everything goes very slow and with risks to lose all.
But to hesitate is more risk than to go very slow and in conservative way.
How to remain afloat ? To launch lenses slowly is wrong way. IMO. The lenses are flesh and blood of system.
New lenses are the bricks of photo brand.
In digital age there will be more photo enthusiasts than during the film age. I would say twice as many at least. Each household will have twice as many proper digital cameras than film cameras — despite mobile phones. The success of mobile phones lie exclusively in one fact: they are obtainable at a plan, paid monthly. But are obsolete much faster than proper cameras. Smartphone market will too stagnate.
Number of sales of digital cameras are currently dropping because for a while they were
abnormally high for this industry, but are still much higher than even at best moments during the film era.
Back then, sales compared to current sales were abysmal! Canon was producing mere 1/6 of current EOS cameras! Tell me, how bad was back then?! Yet no one ever cried end of the world, end of camera business, etc.
People were normal. Doom&gloom is purposefully broadcasted nonsense in the digital era, by the ill-educated bloggers who have full access to world communication highways, and by the investors, who live by such rapid expansions / contractions of the markets. That is called the shock economy, and it is bad! Everyone wants quick money based on lies and false expectations. Digital photo industry need to get out of that mode, and stabilise itself, become normal — same as bred and butter production is stabile and normal for decades.
Another way to stabilise this market is that number of bloggers and forums drops down, and people rely exclusively on professional insights by industry experts. In film era, we read magazines that were edited by professionals and normal people. Not so today. Today 90% of online information about digital photography is garbage, that would never have been published in magazines.
In essence, only those companies that were fooled by a sudden abnormal growth in digital camera market will suffer, because they had big expectations which never had support in reality. Nikon is one of them. Sony too.
Ricoh Imaging is not one of them, though. They were conservative and they must persist being normal, and have modest expectations, and think outside the box, deliver good value products. And people will come and buy, share valuable information.
That is all.