Will the lockdown of the photo industry ever end?
Camera makers without vision
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The figures on the camera market in 2020, published by the Japanese industry association CIPA on the occasion of the digital CP+ tradeshow/conference, show a terrible picture of our industry: Only 8.9 million cameras were shipped last year, 59 percent less than the year before.
In view of the Corona pandemic and the related canceled events, vacations and trips, this is no surprise, but it is still bad.
Even worse: Those who had hoped that, as the last remaining photo fair with global awareness, the digital edition of the Japanese CP+ imaging show and conference would provide new ideas to the industry, were bitterly disappointed.
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After Fujifilm had already launched its X-E4 and GFX100S and Sony its Alpha 1 – certainly a highlight – in January, the only camera introduction at CP+ was the Canon EOS M50 Mark II. In fact, it is another nice system camera for vloggers, but definitely not an innovation that could escort the photo retailers out of the Corona crisis. The other noteworthy new products were a dozen or so lenses plus a semi-professional video camera (from Sony). What a disaster!
With this “tradeshow”, CIPA, as the organizer of CP+, has made a clear statement that it has no desire to close the gap that photokina has left behind in the international imaging trade fair landscape. This was not only made clear by the miserable number of novelties. Even worse was the demonstrative uninspiredness with which the camera manufacturers attended the online fair (the phrase “presented themselves” would be a lie). The 20 "exhibitors" at CP+, which included all the big names such as Canon, Epson, Fujifilm, Nikon, Olympus (OM Digital Solutions), Panasonic, Ricoh, Sony and Tamron, did not set up digital exhibition stands, but instead launched dedicated websites for CP+. Believe it or not, all of them – with the exception of Fujifilm – were in Japanese. This also applied to the supporting program with workshops and lectures. A panel discussion featuring top engineers from the development departments – Japanese; a CIPA seminar on the digital camera market – Japanese.
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And then there was the opening keynote. It was delivered by CIPA President Masaya Maeda, who resigned from the Office of President and COO of Canon Corporation due to health reasons last year. He spoke – in Japanese, of course – on the exciting subject of “The past, present and future of sports photography”. What was announced as English subtitles comprised two to three lines each for two to three minutes of speaking.
The exciting insights you could understand from them was that sports photography began in the 19th century and it still exists today. That is, according to Maeda, because the camera manufacturers remain committed to support sports photographers in capturing fascinating moments. This statement, which would have been every year, if not every second since the 19th century, as true as it is today, was the only vision of the future imaging industry that the Japanese camera industry had to offer at CP+. Embarrassing!
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CIPA President Masaya Maeda delivered the
opening keynote at the digital CP+ 2021.
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Despite the collapsing camera market, picture taking and filming are as popular with consumers as never before. As a result, more and more events and festivals are organized around the world to get people excited about taking and enjoying pictures. The Japanese camera industry should understand that there is a simple recipe for success: If you want to get people excited about your products, you need to be enthusiastic yourself first.
That is why my wish for the manufacturers in Japan is: get well (and enthusiastic) soon!
* Thomas Bloemer is the owner of C.A.T.-Publishing Thomas Bloemer GmbH, a German publishing company specialized in trade media for the photo, imaging and consumer technology industry. In addition to worldofphoto.com, the online news service of the global imaging publication, INTERNATIONAL CONTACT, the company organizes conferences on innovation in imaging and publishes imaging+foto-contact for the German photo and imaging industry as well as PoS-MAIL, a leading trade publication for consumer tech retailers in Germany
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Insta360. Keep on innovatin’. Camera makers no vision? Maybe they need to be 7-year-old startups. Our 2018 Visual 1st Best of Show Awards Winner, Insta360 launches the Go 2, a stabilized action camera that weighs less than 1(!) ounce: waterproof, replaceable lens, magnets to make it wearable or attachable, a Bluetooth-enabled charging case that doubles as a remote control, superb stabilization, and the lists goes on. Most impressively, this $299 beast uses the same 1/2.3" image sensor and F2.2 aperture as other Insta360 products. Watch it in action and being compared with the GoPro HERO 9 Black.
Photomyne. IPO. What’s it with all these past Best of Show Awards Winners? Congratulations to Photomyne, our 2017 winner, which has completed its IPO on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange with a market cap of around $69M. With a push of a button, Photomyne’s apps let you scan your old photographs, photo slides or film negatives with your smartphone. Since its foundation in 2015, over 20M people worldwide have downloaded an app by Photomyne, and have converted over 230M photographs, photo slides, and film negatives into digital photos.
GoPro. Saving you from the abyss of your camera roll. It’s not always easy for camera vendors to do smartphone apps right – or to fully understand their strategic value, as we’ve also found in our upcoming DIY Video Tools report. GoPro definitely saw the strategic value and ponied out $105M to acquire 2 app developers back in 2006. Its newly rebranded Quick app is not only an app that offers GoPro camera control, but it also can function as storage repository of any photo or image residing on one’s smartphone ( in CEO Nick Woodman’s words, “Saving you from the abyss of your camera roll”), while offering comprehensive photo and video editing features.
Kapwing. DIY: create your own NFT. Maybe you won’t get $69M for selling your first digital image, but now you can create and sell your first NFT (Non-Fungible-Token) with these step-by-step guidelines published by video app developer Kapwing. And why not sell what you’ve been teaching? Kapwing is now auctioning its original logo, also used as watermark on their free online video editor, as a 1 of 1 collectible token. You can bid here.
Facebook. Self-supervised learning. We’re not talking homeschooling during the pandemic, but self-supervised learning refers to Facebook’s newly announced breakthrough in building computer vision models with little or no need for humans to manually label datasets. The flipside: the new technology might require billions or trillions of neural connections or parameters – many more than a conventional image-recognition algorithm with comparable performance. So beef up on your computing powerband give all these Mechanical Turkers something else to do!
Feeling sorry for Google an Apple? Nah… According to Sensor Tower, if the 15% fee schedule on revenue up to $1M had been in place on Google Play in 2020, Google would have missed out on $587M, or about 5% of Sensor Tower’s estimate of $11.6B in Google Play fees for the year. If Apple’s program had been in place for 2020, Sensor Tower estimates that it would have missed out on $595M, or about 2.7% of its estimated $21.7B in App Store fees in 2020.
Adobe. Upsampling RAW images. Upsampling (increasing resolution after image capture) is nothing new (as developers like Let’s Enhance and Viesus have shown at Visual 1st), but Adobe’s new Super Resolution upsampling results in Adobe Camera Raw appear to be more than impressive. So print that old image at that poster size you always wanted!
Best,
Hans Hartman
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