Cameras are magic upgrade desire devices: no matter how good my camera is, my average snapshot will always be worse than the carefully selected best of the best of others. This is never a fair competition, it's hardly every the camera's fault, but it's where blame will fall nonetheless. Cameras will never be good enough.
But are right of course, even cameras won't save the two year upgrade cycle. There will be an even more improved camera next year, just hold out a bit longer. Repeat until the old phone is actually broken. Everybody wins (long term even phone mallets will need a livable planet)
As an economist: isn't this 'just' an example of software eating the world?
One the one hand, quality camera's should keep upgrading the periferal hardware to keep match with modern IT-supplies and on the other hand keep a focus on durable products. Why wouldn't producers do this? Cost savings and probably price competition.
The competition (smart phones) have a whole different market. They have a product that people (regretably?) replace every 2-3 years. The market dictates the newest techniques. Pictures are sensors + software. Software has a much shorter improvement cycle. Hence, I would expect a continuously larger part of the camera market to 'fall' for the smartphone camera. Heck, the 'official' advice from my preferred reviewers is not to buy a small camera anymore, but use the savings for a better smartphone.
And then you have large old-camera corporations struggling because their highest margin products (just a guess that that was the little cameras in the former days, not the professionaly product) are falling away. So they don't have the money to keep their high-end products up quality wise nor the institutional awareness to quickly adapt. Cycle a few times... Read OP.
It's always kind of sad when they people who know their field the best are being disrupted because if they could just accept the ways things are changing they could create better products than those they're disrupted with. So many "better" products die because of inability of leadership to accept this quickly enough.
Phone cameras will continue to get better. Phones will continue to have more space (You can get an iPhone with 256GB now right?). They will have more compute power. They have access to the network to do serious post-processing (does someone remember that company which did this on-demand with racks of Mac Minis?). The threats are real to their companies and products.
And yet, I bet if they took the time to understand that problem they could blow away phones because phones just aren't specialized cameras like the ones they're able to make.
And take sweet pictures. That alone is worth upgrades for a lot of people. Though we are pretty fast approaching a ceiling on what is actually visible to the human eye in terms of improvements. I bet we will start to see diminishing returns in camera tech in the next few years.
Right, which is why the low end consumer camera market has basically died. For average use, a phone is already "good enough".
So another plausible path is that the damage has already been done, and what is left of the prosumer and pro level stuff will remain stable.
Note, I'm not saying that I think that is what will happen, I haven't thought about it much. But there is nothing in current tech development that suggests the phones will bridge that gap (to prosumer level image quality) any time soon...
That's true, but then again what could be any better than what we have now? My camera takes really excellent pictures, I can use any lens made in the last century and have it autofocus, I can send images to my phone almost instantly, I can record amazingly high quality video, if I decide I want to I can use HDR+ and do dynamic stacking to reduce noise and increase dynamic range, I can send the files to my computer wirelessly and edit them with amazing flexibility, and so on. So I don't really know what else I could want.
The fact that cameras are so good that no one has managed to improve them is a good thing. I can buy a high quality camera now and still get great performance out of it in ten years, and when I want to switch gear if I've been careful I can sell it at very similar prices to what I paid for it. Since the only reason I was updating my phones was camera quality this also makes it a good long term decision as each two years I pay 500$ less on my phone as I buy an older model that suits me just fine.
When phones started to have built-in cameras, I once talked to a guy in a camera store and predicted that phone cameras will become more popular than regular cameras.
He looked at me as if I was insane. And with some anger, he told me that if I consider those little pieces of junk with tiny sensors and lenses to become serious competition to real cameras, he just can't take me serious.
It's always the same story with software eating the world. At first, it is hard to believe that the software will play a larger and larger role and ultimately become more important than the hardware.
That has reached some limits in the last few cycles, in my view. The cameras are almost all good enough for almost all users and the only place anyone cares now are the people with a grand to blow for very minor improvements, a fraction of the audience for the fraction of phone sales at the top end.
Look down market even slightly and the cameras on today's upper and middle mid-range or the those on a two or three year old hero phone poll exceptionally well with users today. Sensors, lens packs, and OIS are good enough and cheap enough for even very low light situations and everything else is software (or perhaps some new hardware as we get more ruin like "A.I." enhancements like portrait mode -- God damn if I have to see another photo with that exaggerated depth of field I'm gonna kick something, but even those effects don't need this years model as the hardware and software for that have filtered out over the last 7 years.
I think we're really at the end for the "I need (or even want) the new phone for a better camera." (note Samsung and others marketing moves to streaming and astrophotography as "normal" photos that most people care about are simply good enough.)
Perhaps something more computationally challenging like live deep fake video and things like that will drive sales going forward and that's "camera" sure (but also that AI chip) but photography, pictures, IMO, has reached a plateau and nothing exciting has happened enough yet in video to replace "outrageously better pictures" as as a that now fading upgrade cycle driver.
I think battery (and weight considerations) could be drivers in the near future. Fast charging, IMO, has been a bigger driver of revenue for phone makers than cameras for the last few years and I suspect we'll see marketing and user demand shifting to "does your phone run for a week without bending your spine" or "does your phone charge in under a minute" something like that becoming a focus in 3-5 years and cameras falling down to compete with things like cover glass which has also plateaued and mostly fallen off the users radar.
Apple's rumored battery and size bump and the EU's move to consumer replaceable batteries is a perfect storm for super fast charging, even at destructive levels, then OEM or 7-11 sales of replacement batteries. I imagine we'll also see optimizations in the rest of the hardware and software stack become a focus for that magical week of battery that's probably not a decade away.
Photography, like cover glass, is bound by some pretty daunting constraints of physics and I think we've hit "good as it's gonna get" or "good enough" or some combination of those for a while and so phone makers need something new to drive their annual or biannual upgrade cycles.
Apple hopes VR will be big and replace a lot of phone and pc use cases, perhaps the way the iPhone and iPad did so much of that 15 years ago, but I don't see that happening for another decade or three (I've used various head mounted VR kits since 1993; it's not happening any time soon.)
Android is too fragmented to say what that ecosystem is betting on over the next 5 years or so, but I'm gonna wager it's battery and screen followed by performance, camera, and then storage, durability and IP rating and all those other "a few small but big spending segments care enough to keep improving" features.
The big camera companies have as well. How much better is Canon's or Sony's best camera this year than a year or two ago? They don't have the same constraints that a phone company has and it seems like there's not a lot of year-over-year advancement.
The camera companies are so bad at software that the software companies are building better cameras than them... in the few millimeters thickness of a phone! I salivate for the day that Google or Apple buys Nikon or Leica or whatever and shoves all of that computational photography goodness under a 24x36mm camera sensor.
Indeed so: I do replace mine every year because each generation has a successively better camera, and I value being able to take better pictures with the device I have available [1] more than I value the incremental cost to me of selling the old one and buying a new one each year (and iPhones hold their value very well!)
By the requests of the luddites here, I should not be able to do better than a 5 year old camera to appease them.
[1]: I also have a DSLR for special occasions, but I do not carry that round with me generally...
This rather long article describes the past, not necessarily the future.
Basically, what the author identifies and yet misses is that most phones these days are no longer phones. A normal camera has similar capabilities except it has better optics and happens to not have a 4g/5g chip in it (typically) or be used for taking calls.
The status quo of the last 15 years is basically convergence of devices around a form factor that fits in your pocket that is good enough but frankly a bit awkward for many things. They've gotten uncomfortably big and yet are still uncomfortably small for many things (like typing). You only have one phone and the myth companies like Apple are built on is that that one phone comes from them and is the center of your life.
However, making phone hardware is getting so cheap now that you can produce fairly decent ones for around 100$. Manufacturers like Apple have been looking to expand in the camera domain to justify higher prices. If you look at the most expensive phones, their number one feature is always the camera.
The next logical step from a technical point of view is separating those two again. After all, if phones are cheap, there's no good reason why any camera can't be a phone as well. The only reason that's not happening is that traditional camera manufacturers (like most electronics manufacturers) are lousy at software. Eventually one of them will figure it out.
Another thing that I've been expecting to happen is that Apple will figure out that selling just 1 device to people with too much money is bad business. Right now they have a one size fits all phone and that's it. You buy it and then you replace it after a few years. The next logical step here is to own multiple devices and start treating them more as accessories to be used in different contexts. The phone you use while biking to work might be different than what you use while you are sitting on the bus or at home. It might not even be a phone. It's like owning just one pair of shoes for jogging, weddings, office, and gardening. Once companies figure out how to make switching from one device to the next seamless, there's an enormous amount of potential for all sorts of specialized devices to be sold that seamlessly integrate. Including high end cameras.
A week ago we discussed Om Malik's article "Camera sales are falling sharply". I am one of those people who now does not upgrade his camera, nor use it any more, as much as I like it. I use my smartphone, albeit with some aftermarket Moment wide- and fish-eye lenses on it.
This phone makes total sense to me. The money I used to spend on cameras and lenses will be captured by the smartphone companies.
So you're saying it will only be a few more years then? Look at where cellphone cameras were 20 years ago, and where they are today. The present inadequacy of hardware doesn't give me any comfort.
I don't think we've yet gotten to the point where everybody is unloading their old consumer-level DSLR equipment that they no longer use because their cell phone camera is almost as good. Give it another 5-10 years.
> starting around the iPhone 13, phones got really good.
ILC cameras also got really good.
I'm not at all doubting that smartphones are the primary cannibalization vector, but even for people who prefer to use cameras with significantly larger sensors than can be put into a smartphone I think the cameras themselves reached a point years ago where it became difficult even for ILC enthusiasts to justify upgrades on a regular basis because what people already owned was "Good Enough". I reached this point with the Sony A7R Mk3 and other people probably reached this point sooner.
For years it felt like Canon and Nikon were kind of aware this would happen with ILCs and were dragging their feet on camera body tech making incremental upgrades behind where the technology should have been if they were competing full speed, and then other vendors like Sony just came smashing in without being part of this implicit agreement and pushed camera body tech along extremely quickly for a few years (with Canon/Nikon having to follow along to some degree to keep up) and it didn't take many iterations of this pushing the technology to where it could be for ILC camera bodies to be something you feel no itch to upgrade from year to year because the shiny new thing is an extremely marginal upgrade.
So the cannibalization of the market probably had two fronts, the larger one from smartphones, and a smaller but still significant one from "Good Enough" (which is an issue smartphones are starting to run into as well).
But are right of course, even cameras won't save the two year upgrade cycle. There will be an even more improved camera next year, just hold out a bit longer. Repeat until the old phone is actually broken. Everybody wins (long term even phone mallets will need a livable planet)
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