There was this extraordinary figure revealed a few weeks ago that said camera and lens sales had dropped 75% since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. And this was from a declining market to start with. Several companies have decided not to release their financial reports, which doesn't sound good. And yet the rumour sites trundle on getting all hot and bothered about new camera and lens releases, both real and imagined. I got to thinking what is going on here? Is this another IBM? ('Nobody will want desktop computers!!!') or is it cross your fingers and hope that the stand alone market will somehow magically improve.
The above image doesn't involve the use of A1 or computational manipulation. It's straight out of the camera and impossible to tell what kind of camera it was taken on. And that's the real point of this.
When someone buys a picture of mine from a picture library, or publishes it in print or on the web, they don't know what camera I used or even care. All they are interested in is whether it works for them. Pixel Peeping is all very well and yes I've done it, but ultimately if you are a working photographer it's not very helpful. My two best selling images are both shot on a Pentax 10MP camera. And I've seen them published in magazines at A4. So the 50MP and 12MP images that the Huawei P40 Pro produces are obviously fine. And let's not forget the days of film. 35mm images were roughly 10MP as well and many millions of those got published.
The Huawei P40 Pro is also far from the end of the story. This is not the ultimate smartphone camera, it will be bettered. Some say it's the largest sensor used in a smartphone, but actually it's not. I still have a Panasonic CM1 with a 20MP 1" sensor. I use it from time to time. It obviously didn't sell as Panasonic didn't follow up on it and it looked much more like a camera than a smartphone. The sensor on the Huawei P40 Pro isn't that much smaller than a 1" sensor, so it's clear that it probably won't be long before we see one of those behind a multi lens array on a smartphone.
So in answer to this what do the manufacturers of 'proper' cameras do? Well from what I see, not very much to attempt to get back the customers lost to smartphones. Now maybe that's never going to happen and mirrorless and DSLR cameras will become a niche (and expensive) option for some professionals and enthusiastic amateurs. Now I'm selling a lot of gear, but I'm not selling my Nikon D850. It's an unbelievably good camera both in terms of images quality and handling. And yes it's big and heavy, but for certain jobs it's just what I need. The time has not yet come when professional photographers can turn up with a smartphone to a professional job. So while I don't do a lot of that these days, I do some, so it's staying.
Now that market is not going to go away anytime soon, but what on earth is the point of cameras like the Sony ZV-1? Supposedly a camera meant for vlogging. Now I wonder exactly how many people actually 'vlog' and how many will think that a camera like this, with no internet access built in, is what they want or need? And that brings me to what I think is the glaring omission from current 'proper' cameras. As far as I'm aware there have only been two cameras that have the facility to upload to the web. One was the Samsung NX-1 Smart Camera and the other is the yet to appear Zeiss ZX1. Why on earth more camera manufacturers can't do this is a mystery to me.
And why haven't camera manufacturers included computational bokeh in their cameras. Currently you have to buy fast expensive lenses to get bokeh effects, but most middle of the road cameras have cheaper, slower zoom lenses. Ideal I would have thought for adding a bokeh effect. It seems astonishing to me that, in many ways, smartphones are more versatile than mirrorless or DSLR cameras. And why are the latter, even mirrorless becoming so big, heavy and expensive? Hardly a formula to attract mass market sales, I would have thought.
Part of the reason for all of this is that there are very few companies that make both Smartphones and Cameras. Samsung have pulled out of camera manufacturing and the only company I can think of that makes both these day is Sony. And to be honest their smartphones don't exactly get the pulse racing. As ever, it's Leica, the innovators, who have decided to get involved with this form of photography. As well as making the most old fashioned cameras, the M series, they are collaborating with Huawei on their smartphone lenses. As indicated before I don't know exactly what their input is. But this article, written a while ago but still relevant, does shed some light on the relationship and shows that for Leica and Huawei it's more than just the branding.
Now I've already seen what these Leica lenses can do on the Huawei P40 Pro. They are, by some distance, the best lenses on a smartphone I've ever seen. They are in fact better than some lenses found on mirrorless cameras. The colour (apparently one of Leica's major contributions) is stunning and the sharpness and low noise is both unexpected and yet very pleasing to the eye. The Huawei sensors are made by Sony apparently, which begs the question as to why Sony smartphone cameras are pretty run of the mill.
Now maybe this is a way to get camera companies into the smartphone world. My wife still uses the Nokia 1020 phone with a 41MP sensor a a Zeiss micro array of lenses. It's still a decent smartphone camera. Why haven't Nikon, Canon, Fuji, Panasonic and Olympus done something similar to Leica with smartphone companies. For example the lenses on Apples iPhones are looking somewhat dated now and would benefit from upgrading.
So what does the future hold and how will it impact on the choices that will be available to us? Personally I think that it is inevitable that not all camera manufacturers will survive. Constant, increasing losses are not sustainable. Cutbacks seen almost impossible to prevent. We may well see amalgamations. Unless something dramatic happens we may see high priced, high specification cameras in the Mirrorless / DSLR field (mainly mirrorless I suspect) and smartphones dominating everything else. Now while the current situation seems to me to need a severe pruning of camera models and lenses, with the unfortunate consequence of job losses, this may result in a fight to the death to hold on to market share.
It would be a shame to lose some of the famous names of photography, but as consumers we cannot be sentimental. It is not our job to prop up historic brands, but to get the best deal we can for what we want. The next year or two will probably entail much upheaval in the camera industry, but there is little we can do about that and a policy of wait and see is both advisable and inevitable.
