Summer’s officially over, Labor Day celebrated, so welcome
back to work. We hope you had the chance to follow Mr. da Vinci’s advice we
offered up last month and take some time off to “go some distance away and put
your work into perspective.”
Most people who went-some-distance on vacation likely
captured their time with photographs. Of course, when we say ”photographs” we
don’t mean film we mean pixels. Digital. So consumers were out using their digital
SLRs and point-and-shoots to immortalize their time and space whatever distance
they went.
But sad to tell for that industry, that would be fewer
consumers than in years past. With smartphone technology constantly improving,
and the quality of smartphone photos and videos virtually indistinguishable
from dedicated digital devices like SLRs, when you combine that with
smartphones’ abilities to review, edit, and immediately transmit, it’s no
surprise the dedicated digital imaging devices are rapidly becoming obsolete.
In fact, Brand Keys estimates that this year 55% of photos and video are now
being shot with smart phones, up nearly 20% from last year.
OK, you can look at the other side of the usage ratio and
say that 45% of photos and videos are still being shot with traditional
cameras, and this year, in our Customer Loyalty Engagement Index, we did track
digital camera brands. But with newer smartphones in sight and consumer
smartphone-adoption levels constantly on the rise, one cannot be precisely sure
for how long the category will remain viable – in retail or in our survey. So
for those of you who are focused on when the sales of traditional digital
cameras will begin, here’s how the current range of digital brands rank:
- Canon
- Nikon/Olympus/Leica
- Sony
- Pentax/Panasonic
- Fuji
Digital Point & Shoot
Cameras
- Canon
- Nikon
- Panasonic
- Sony
- Casio
- Samsung
- Fuji
- Pentax
- Olympus
- Kodak
The photographer Ernst Hass, once noted, “There is only you
and your camera.” But with the increase in picture quality and the ubiquity of
we-do-everything smartphones taking the place of dedicated digital cameras, we
expect we may soon have to amend that to “there’s only you and your phone.”
Which puts the category’s continued presence into real perspective too.
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