Rob Trek Forum

CIPA figures "mirrorless camera shipments were up 29.9% by volume and 82.1% by value for the same time period YoY." This is for the first quarter of the year. It looks like while sales are up it is mostly upgrading to higher end more expensive cameras. The path for someone who got interested in taking photos with their cellphone and wants to get started with a camera is harder, more expensive, and mostly ignored by manufacturers do not seem to be interested in expanding the market for cameras when they can be profitable selling upgrades to existing customers. And of course it seems we are all for this. I notice on many facebook groups, when someone asks how to do something, the majority of the answers are what to buy, not how to do it with what you have. Alas, not all the world is rich Americans and Europeans who can spend thousands on a hobby. Since most photos are shared online, perhaps the best camera for that is a cellphone and those who have extra money to spend for a 2mp picture or less are the future or the camera lens market. Which of course will push the prices up even more as the economy of scale will keep the market limited. And of course we see all the time most people are not satisfied with the camera they have and want more features to be built into the next camera. The big concern seems to be will this is that company make better cameras in the future so I can stay with them. I wonder if there will be a day when a camera is good enough for most people. Once people are happy with the camera they have, maybe they will think it is good enough they can show their friends and get new people into photography expanding the market.

YoY is year over year or compared to last year. Last year in March Covid had an effect of lowering production. This is units manufactured and shipped to stores that compares pretty close to sales.

I feel that the camera brands think they can no longer compete with the phones.
Therefore they either 'merge' or co-ally with phone makers, which in part makes sense as for the optical part.
They must also assume their remaining market is not longer consumers or even serious consumers, but rather those that have photography as a living, so the higher pricing is onto the end-user of those photo's.
We are therefore on the receiving end of that 'club'.

To be honest, crying out mft is dead because Olympus sold, and perhaps the demise of some other brands, and the somewhat complicated market on top of covid, and other features of this era, such as a switch onto the vloggers and instagrammers, where the end-result is not perfected, or otherwise put, not the technique but rather snapshooting counts will be another factor for this.

Why on the other mirrorless is suddenly gaining beats me. Is it weight, is it being smaller, less in your eye ... It's anybody's call.