w**7
发帖数: 5258 | 1 Has the bubble burst? Is that why camera sales in N. America are down by 43%?
http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com.au/2013/08/has-bubble-burs
DSLR sales are down this year, worldwide, by 18.5% according to CIPA. The
total decline in the entire dedicated camera market is closer to 43.5% and
mirrorless cameras are seeing about the same year to year decline as
traditional DSLRs. Why?
I think there are two reasons driving this incredible decline. Two bubble
bursting phenomena occurring on top of each other. The obvious first cause
is the rampant replacement of point and shoot cameras of all flavors and
varieties with smart phones and their built in cameras. The advantages to
smart phones are size, constant (annoyingly constant) access, multi-task
tool set, and the ability to send your images, electronically, to an
audience just about anywhere in the world. What's not to like about that?
You must pay for a plan so you have a vested interest in maximizing the
potential of the tool anyway.
Interesting that we are just now seeing cameras with full operating systems
like Android while smart phones have been vested with operating systems
since the first rev of iOS. In some demographics that gave the phone a big
head start over conventional cameras because owners could populate the phone
/camera with a huge range of "apps" which expanded the usability of the
phones as photography tools. This capability arrived (in a very, very
primitive form) in the Sony Nex cameras last year and is set to arrive in a
more mature fashion with the intro of the Samsung Galaxy NX camera running
Android, this Fall.
I can only imagine some future photo excursion with the Galaxy NX camera or
some other camera that comes complete with a luscious big screen and a full
bore OS.. I'll have spent a day shooting images and I'll be riding home on a
bus from some God forsaken hell hole and I'll relax as we barrel down the
highway by watching Blade Runner on Netflix on my smart camera. Then I'll
take a break to run MS Office in Windows emulation so I can do my taxes....
on my camera.
As you can imagine point and shoot cameras represent(ed) a huge part of the
total camera market and for many years were the bread and butter financial
foundation that made it possible for DSLRs to exist at the price points they
occupied. Now the market is being effectively gutted. Gone. Non-existent.
And as that market dries up you can logically expect the last of the one
hour labs and photo labs in major stores to vanish because people very, very
rarely print anything that they've shot with a cellphone. Don't know why
but they don't. People seem to think that having images resident on their
hard drives is the end game for the latent image. When 43% of the market
vanishes in ONE YEAR something profound WILL happen to the all of the
players in the market.
It looks like Olympus and Fujifilm's response will be to kill off that
segment of their product lines entirely. But that hardly means that any of
the second tier (behind Canon and Nikon) companies are out of the woods.
Another interesting number to emerge from CIPA is the total sales of
mirrorless system cameras in N. America. In the last year the makers of
these little gems have sold slightly fewer than 39,000 units. Total. And I
suspect most of those were sold only in the financially prosperous, tech
forward cities of the U.S. The value proposition being lost in more
traditional markets.
But cellphones have been gently eroding the market for the past four years.
Why the swift and sudden plunge of conventional cameras over the cliff? My
take? The vast majority of buyers of all cameras, DSLR's, mirror less, high
end compacts, etc. were hobbyists and amateur photographers who, after
years of pursuing some sort of competence in the craft have come to the
conclusion that the whole art genre of photography is somewhat of a dead end
. There's no real cheese at the end of the imaging tunnel. Pros take
pictures to sell to people, and companies, and they try to make products
that are really, really good so they can sell them for good amounts of money
. Their motivation comes in trying to please clients. And get paid. Oh, and
they might also do it for the sheer exuberance the craft, well practiced,
can bring. But the hobbyists mostly had one feedback loop and that was to
share their images with like minded practitioners on the web and to bask in
the glory of positive feedback.
In the early days, when images were being uploaded only in the low millions
per day there was a chance to stand out from the average, struggling amateur
and really show off one's chops. But as the faucet was removed from the
plumbing and the pipes started delivering at full and accelerating capacity
every day the sheer quantity of images became absolutely overwhelming and
impossible to sort and parse.
What's more, the feedback loop of learning about photography from your
fellow followers on the web became, more or less, nearly 100% efficient so
that any unique and singular vision is copied, disseminated, learned and re-
shared in veritable milliseconds. The very hunger for approval fueling the
next wave of homogeneous vision in a cruel and immediate way.
Like any trend this one grew slowly at first and then accelerated to its
tipping point and started the precipitous slide into ambivalence around the
end of last year (2012). That was the time frame when I started hearing from
my non-professional friends (but very competent photographers) about their
hobby ennui. They were fully equipped but uninspired to move forward. Not
just one or two lost souls but a legion of guys who seemed to have lost
their photographic drive just around the time that they caught up with, and
mastered, the sum of all the technical stuff one needed to know to produce a
really well done image. We'd have coffee and they would say to me, "I have
all the gear I ever wanted and I just don't know what I want to shoot." I'd
talk about taking portraits but beyond flashing their portrait work onto the
world wide web for forum approval most friends understood that without the
client along for the ride making standard portraits is a shallow exercise
for the most part.
If you think about it the hobby of photography from the dawn of digital to
now really had very little to do with the desire of most people to make
wonderful images. They did want to make the images but not for the sake of
the images but only as proof of mastery. Proof that another rung of Moore's
rusty ladder of laws had been assimilated and mastered. In the early days
the technical workers of our hobby were locked in a war against the stair
stepping and lack of sharpness caused by lack of pixels. Not enough dots to
make up a convincing image---especially when writ large and examined
minutely. That battle continued right up to the introduction of the 24
megapixel sensors hit the market and, if you notice, there was a backwash, a
rehashing, and new understanding that maybe, just maybe, 16 megapixels
currently represents a sweet spot. Good enough for big photos and small
enough to be manageable.
Part of the technical race came to a (maybe temporary) end. The proofs of
quality that showed the equation of mastery were handed in and graded and
that part of the course was over. See how big I can print this? See how
sharp it is?
The contingent that is driven to do photography to prove their technical
mastery (and it's a much bigger segment than most will acknowledge) and
their understanding moved on to embrace the noble battle against noise and
there's been a circular series of spasms empowered with endless energy,
driving the expansion of ISO's that one can use to capture a scene. Every
time the ISO scale gets ratcheted up the noise comes howling back in like a
pack of wolves attacking a frail cabin door and the noble knights of noise
saddle up and do battle with noise reduction software, exposure schemes to
the left or right, and many other fixes. The battle isn't about producing a
wonderful photograph as much as it is about creating a "proof" (using the
word in a mathematical sense) which shows off the victory over noise at each
setting.
And the marketers for the camera makers have proven really good at creating
the "problem" of the quarter for techie photo enthusiasts and providing the
(inventory) roadmap for its subsequent solution.
What finally happened? How did the skirmish resolve? I think the camera
makers shot themselves in the foot. When the only way to get super high
resolution at first was to drop $5,000 to $8,000 on a professional camera
body the technographers had the understanding that high resolution was rare
and costly and something to be pursued. And mastered. When you could buy a
Nex 7 at 24 megapixels that could go toe to toe with a Canon 1DS mk3 in
terms of sharpness and resolution for nearly one sixth the price the pursuit
of the precious was shaken. When the 24 megapixel sensors got rolled out
into a $600 Nikon body the curtain was pulled open and we could see that
performance was now on sale at Target prices and everyone was free to share
the same basic benefits no matter what their tenure in the technical
trenches. And when everyone is special....no one is.
I think amateur and pro alike realize that most of the race is over; at
least how the race was understood as an analogy to analog. By which I mean,
"How can I match and exceed the quality of conventional metrics that we used
to get from medium format film." There's nothing else pressing to solve,
technically. And as the STEM education mania pushes everything else out of
the way in the U.S. at least, when the non-subjective metrics are satisfied
the game is complete then there is no way to advance to the next level. We,
collectively, did our "job" and mastered all the new impediments to making
imaging work in the digital age. That, and that alone was the quest of the
Holy Grail for millions and millions of hobbyists. It was all about mastery
and all about the process of perfecting measurable results. Corralling data
points. Keeping score by analysis.
And you could see that in the ten years of cataclysmic discussion on forums
and web discussion groups around the world as old knowledge met new
semiconductor life forms and accompanying constructs of new understanding.
Characteristic curves paled next to the arguing power of Nyquist frequencies
and interference patterns. Diffraction limitation and artifacts of sensor
blooming overtook age old discussions of resolution and sharpness.
Now all the cameras that are coming out in the hobbyist, enthusiast, semi-
pro and pro markets are equally good at exceeding all the measuring metrics
that the coalesced hive have set down for "good enough." The engineering
idea is that we've hit the sweet spot and to go for a Six Sigma improvement
would be costly and unnecessary. So, as I've said, the game is over and the
photo wizards made it to level 89 and no one wrote anymore code after that.
To the vast majority of people who "took up" photography after it became
digital the lack of new technical challenges equals having to play an old
video game over and over and over again knowing exactly where the new lives
are stashed and which key will get you the grenades as you enter the Alien/
Predator threshold.
What's left? That's the real question and it's one that people who care
about the photographs themselves have been grappling with for decades. Why
photograph? What's my motivation? What story do I want to tell? How do I
want to tell it? How can I make things in my own style? How do you really
learn to see? What's my target for all this work? How does one keep score
when everything (everything going forward) is subjective and not bound by
the measurement of interferometers or subject to Moore's Law? Is the future
of photography all about watching Breaking Bad on the rear screen of your
camera and then taking a break from time to time to look into a window on
the screen and snap a photo of some meaningless (but colorful and graphic)
street scene to share later with other people on the backs of their wi-fi
enabled cameras? Dear God, I hope not.
I think the future is something more and less desirable for photography and
photographers. As people adjust to the new economy they'll be going back to
more secure and conventional jobs and will abandon trying to make a career
out of photography. As hobbyists driven by technical contests and quests
realize that the quest is over and the game is at level XX and there's no
more technical pats on the back to accrue, no more extra lives to collect,
they'll move to the next technical challenge and abandon old fashion, non-
moving photography. As the market for cameras declines the rate of new
product introductions will also decline and everyone who is left will be
figuring out what they want use the power to make images for and how to
proceed.
Instead of workshops on how to do stuff (step by step, recipes) the new
workshops will be on finding that magic spark that motivates you and makes
you want to create for the sake of creation. And instead of sharing
endlessly with strangers perhaps we'll return to a time when small groups of
photographers and galleries and even virtual magazines helped to curate and
self-curate and sort and add value to the practice of enjoying the actual
image instead of sanctifying only the process. And the tools of the process.
And that, in a nutshell, is why I think the camera market has fallen off a
cliff and entered a period of radical and breathtaking decline. To the mass
market all images have transformed from being a method of memory and
sentiment storage to being consumables. Like cheeseburgers and fries and
large lattes. To the technically motivated the major psuedo engineering
challenges have been met and solved and won. Why continue?
And now we can get back to work and make images that reflect our tastes and
our styles and our engagement with life. Because art should be a
conversation that strives to tell us just what it is to be human.
I could be totally wrong. Discuss? | a********l
发帖数: 39524 | 2 的确，数码相机在过去15年左右的迅速发展和降价，以及数码的无成本拍摄，让摄影师
这个定位大众化了，机器普及了，用户也多了，想要靠这个赚钱和搞艺术的也多了，职
业摄影师的市场受到了很大冲击。
作者认为随着市场趋于冷淡，器材的技术水平接近饱和，厂家减少对研发的投入，可以
降低一半业余爱好者的热情，减少那些没天资或者水平也想成为职业的人数。这是个有
趣的事情，但是否能发生，还未可知。 |
|
