Bloomberg: Japanese mirrorless growth a threat to Canon and Nikon

Oh these smart analysts. LOL

We the old ones who are posting in here, will someday have to completely learn to accept, that something has changed, no matter how you're bragging about "the old ones are the best ever", or "it is like a toy compared to mine, the true professionals'".

The consumer market will be much larger than the specialized one any day.
1.There is cost to consider. Compacts are less expensive. You can junk one and not cry over a years worth of stock investments :). You can give it to the wife or kids(or husband in some cases) and not worry about them wrecking the lens or dropping it or swinging it around.

2. Compacts(or good camera phones) are carried around more in everyday life. A lot of people want to have a camera handy at all time. More so due to social networking.

3.Compacts are less complicated. For the average user DSLR is great, but, not not everyone's interested.

I have seen a lot of people struggle to take pictures on any camera without face detect & VR. These features on the compacts make it easy for everyone to take decent snapshots. Most people would rather point and shoot whatever catches their fancy rather than worrying about exposures and bokeh.

They would probably say my Facebook pics are too small to notice detail anyway.

What's extremely hilarious with this article is their constant references to "mirrorless SLRs" or "mirrorless being this percentage of SLR sales"...

Hello? SLR = Single Lens Reflex. ie. A MIRROR! There is no such thing as a mirrorless SLR. They are completely different.

If the author really knew what they were trying to report, they would remove all references to "SLRs", and replace them with "interchangeable lens cameras". Also, IMO, Fuji was not represented well in the article either. The market for mirrorless cameras should include the X100, even though it has a fixed lens.

What happens in the Japanese market is meaningless to other markets in the world. Just because curious Japanese amateurs are buying into M43 and E-mount systems does not mean serious pros are doing so.

Look at sales of game consoles in Japan compared to the rest of the world for proof.
Why would a pro change to a system that does not have an upgrade path to full frame? Why would a pro change to a system that forces them to use their camera at arms length? Why would a pro change to a lens mount that offers very little variety in lenses? Sure you can buy adapters to make other lenses fit, but why would a pro want to gimp their full frame lenses to only show a quarter (M43) of information that the lens is capable of bringing in?

I work in a camera store in Sydney and I sell cameras day in day out. Canon and Nikon DSLRS outsell M43, E-mount, Alpha-mount and Pentax mount systems by a factor of 1:10.
There is no contest so far.

there is a saying in business about companies who want to make sure they'll be around for the long haul

"if someone is to render your product irrelevant, that someone had better be you"

so despite the big talk about SLR superiority, viewfinders, L series lenses etc. technology never ceases to amaze us. 10 years ago there were people were prepared to eat their hat the day that film was to be replaced by the then silly 0.3mP toy cameras.... of course the rest is history....

Canon and Nikon will follow.... or they will follow Kodak at the hall of fame of photography in the section of "companies that were". which might be just as well, the duopoly has milked punters for decades now, it is about time they faced some competition

I don't think EVF will take off .Personally having used both systems EVF is a pain in the proverbial,inacurrate and slow.
Sure, mirrorless is the way they will head but I firmly believe that an alternative to the EVF will produce a much better mirrorless camera as the EVF is not the answer.
I predicted that Canon and Nikon would venture into mirrorless designs months ago ,but only when they started to see a drop in sales.
I also predict that they will come up with a much better option than an EVF.

The writing is on the wall. I'm sure that in less time than expected EVIL (mirrorless) cameras will replace DSLRs camera first at introductory models and in short time even for some professionals and advanced amateurs (those that don't need to impress with a big camera)
The EVF still needed and the last one from SONY sound good enough to replace every other viewfinder.( for me the VF-2 from Olympus is good enough)
The way to a professional EVIL camera will go trough water proof camera and good lenses.
An electronic shutter may be in the future also.

It's funny how many people are defensive about Canon not having a quality mirrorless product out yet, and therefore need to rip the Sony NEX or other mirrorless product. I am sure Canon will put out a quality mirrorless camera someday, but I am also sure they would rather not. Honestly, Canon is afraid of cannibalizing their own DSLR sales, but if the market is there, they will make a product. But Canon had better hurry. Just look at Kodak to see a company afraid to fully develop a product (digital) in order to protect established sales (film). Or Polariod. Or any tablet maker besides Apple -- they are all playing catch up to this day. Sony, Panasonic and Minolta obviously do not dominate the DSLR market and was therefore more amenable to putting out something new and exciting.

Canon has already stated that they plan on responding next year, although they won't say if the response will be mirrorless or some kind of mini-DSLR.

(Reuters) "We are considering the technical aspects," Maeda said, when asked about the mirrorless segment. "We will launch an interesting product next year," he said, adding that it would be small, but not specifying whether it would be a mirrorless model."

In the mean time, Canon sales are great. BTW, (Source: Bloomberg), 81 percent of Canon's revenue comes from outside Japan. As the posted (different) Bloomberg article points out "Mirrorless cameras have yet to catch on outside of Japan..."

Web address to my post below. Tried editing original but can't find out how to edit.

http://www.naturalexposures.com/corkboard/?s=gf1&x=26&y=17

Canikon has been quietly beta-testing a mirrorless DSLR. It's called "Live View Mode" and comes thrown in as a freebie in all their recent DSLRs.

It would not a huge engineering feat or marketing feat or even very surprising at all if one of them launches a lower-end DSLR which is basically a crippled DSLR - in the same body, except is stuck in LV mode with a covered-up OVF and missing mirror -- using the same lens mount!

It would be lighter and cheaper than a traditional DSLR, yet have the same sensor and lens selection. This would be just good enough to eat NEX-7's for lunch and yet not compete directly against the legacy DSLR architecture.

Well I think Mirrorless cameras and especially those without any viewfinder are a bit of a fad and really not what many entheusiasts will end up with. I think they will eventually migrate to SLR or even the new SONY system.
Having said that,iIt would be in both of Nikons and Canons best interests to at least get a mirrorles camera out there that uses their lens system rather than say Panasonic, Olympus, NEX or even Samsung so that everything they sell can move towards the ultimate purchases down the timeline when they start to become serious about serious photography where only an SLR will do the job most times.

Its time both Canon and Nikon sing in chorus" Those were the days, my friend....We thought will never end"!

Nikon and Canon are paying the price for their short-sighted commercial plan of milking and churning their locked-in SLR users ( with substantial investments in their propietary lenses ) with continual upgrades giving very marginal improvements in photographic quality. Just look at their model ranges. A 35% loss in market share is shocking but the good times had to come to an end one day.

Their only hope ; sign up to the M43 standard and trust that they can compete with Oly/Pana on the quality of their cameras, sensors and optics. SLR's have been in evolving over 127 years versus the 3 years of the MILC.

"Japanese" mirrorless?
As opposed to USA's mirrorless? Or Greenland's?

And where are Canon & Nikon headquartered?

The title makes you think there's some sorty of international rivalry when it's really just about camera designs.

How about a more accurate title: "Mirrorless cameras eat away established DLSR sales."

Mirrorless is the future, period. This is not surprising. Thank you Panasonic for your forward thinking creation...

To be honest everybody was late.
Why nobody saw the potential of the mirrorless market back in 2004?
All were busy doing me too SLRs.

To me lens matters more than camera body be it mirror or mirrorless.

None of this would be happening had Nikon re-introduced their "S" series rangefinders in digital versions (like Leica with their M8) like most of us asked them to.

Don't underestimate the mirrorless cameras...I've been a Nikon SLR/DSLR user since 1968 (I still have my original Nikon F from 1972), but I have almost exclusively been using my GF1 since I got it in 4/2010.

Canon and Nikon can wait and let the other manufacturers establish the global demand and then jump in because they still "own" the brands that everyone knows and wants to buy. If I look at me experience, I can see a scenario that every serious DSLR photographer will also be carrying a mirrorless camera, one for every Canon and Nikon DSLR sold.

Canon and Nikon is probably studying the market for now and designing their next 'system'. Diversification is the best way of making a profit.

I think Canon's LiveView feature is a step into the mirrorless world. Canon could modify the LiveView where no mirror would be involved. Canon had a Pellicle mirror camera (RT) and hopefully can bring it back and with today's technology make it more translucent and cheaper. My friend has a NEX5 and it's too light for me. It's like a P/S camera with an interchangeable lens.

Mainstream media is years late again. I think there was a New York Times article in 2006 touting about the coming age of shopping online.

Market share data can be misleading because they say nothing about profits. While the article noted that both DSLRs were very profitable for both Canon and Nikon last year, it failed to provide information about mirrorless revenue/ profits for any of the companies selling mirrorless cameras. Olympus had a 25% decrease in imagaing division revenue for the 2011 fiscal year (which ended March31, 2011). Its compacts probably account for much of that decline, but the fact remains that mirrorless has yet to make make its camera division profitable.

aside from the "turntable-vinyl market reduction due to digital disc" analogy.... let us be reminded that even discs went thru a miniaturization process. remember movies on laser discs (and you even have to flip them to read the backside!) just to finish a movie? then came the DVD, and it has many times the capacity of that huge laser-disc thing (a laser-dic is as big as a vinyl record, for those who forgot what it is). who would have thought that huge laser-disc size storage capability can be stowed in a smaller size. and then the BluRay came in, and now treatens the DVD's existence. life goes on...

point is- those small-size sensors you now dismiss as "small" may soon have the capability of capturing images better than a medium-format (i'm talking about the size) in the very near future. let's wait a while.

CaNikon is probably busy developing/testing fast phase difference autofocus built into the sensor [somehow]. This could eliminate the irksome situation of the pellicle miror as Sony has it now. If this can be eliminated the sky's the limit and Sony will have a real battle on their hands unless they can produce their own sensor with phase AF built in.

There are only 2 factors that give better image quality in technical terms: lens and film (sensor) size. Leica, Zeiss, Nikon and Canon are making great lenses. Large format cameras will always produce better IQ than medium, medium than 35mm, 35mm than aps-c, aps-c than m4/3, m4/3 then cell phones, etc...
Mirror will eventualy disapear, thats for sure, but real pros will always look for the best IQ / portability ratio, and at the moment 5d mk 2 and D700 are the best digital cameras.

ok, maybe not really extinct or obsolete (the DSLR) ....but like one post here said earlier- the market for DSLR may get smaller. and yes- technology moves on. turntables and vinyls seem to have lived forever (even with all those technological advancements for them), but has to be a niche market soon as digital discs came in. why, even DVDs seem to be the end of the disc technology- until BluRay came in. and 5-10 years earlier you'd sound ridiculous saying you need hard-discs in the terrabyte capacity.

point is- we just have to accept reality- there is an ever increasing pace of development in technology. i can understand it may be a painful reality for those who already have invested big budgets on those DinoSLR equipment they now have, and suddenly here are people saying their whole gear is obsolete.

and yes.... CanoNikon is simply playing wait-and-see. once they realize what's going on- it's "follow the leaders" once more for them.

non slr comeras are still not good enough if image quality is considered. Of course for a lot of people this is not the sole criterion and I'm fine with that. We need way more choices of lenses.

For Viewfinder, if I can't properly view, I can't shoot at all. Body size is one factor of this as well

I want less weight, but not at the cost of compromising everything.

Those mirrorless cameras are not cheap at this stage. They are not really significantly smaller or lighter. Image quality compromises, especially lense quality is significant. It is still sort of not compelling yet. Manual focusing is harder to achieve. I kept watching but never convinced enough to bite.

The utility of the "mirror" was exclusively based on the existence of the film as a recording support.
Today, as the media is a "senso"r, which allows viewing of real shot (through the viewfinder or the LCD screen), SLR architecture does not make sense anymore: it's just a survival of the past that, sooner or later, will disappear. The philosophy of the Sony NEX-/ or Samsung NV200, marks the way of the professional cameras of the future.

I waited 9 years for a worthy follow-up for my Canon Powershot G3 (f 2.0, mind you). And the winner is: Panasonic Lumix G3. If only Canon rebuild their own G3 with todays technology. As big as the old one, with meaningfull buttons, a nice screen and all the features. (look it up).

This news reminds me of Nokia.

Looking at the typical tourists around London, I'd say camera usage matches that noted by Jonathan F/2. Lots of DSLR and P&S/Phone cams with the occasional m4/3.
Personally, I prefer to have my cameras made by a company known for its photographic and optical products, rather than its TV's and Microwaves.

This is good news: maybe Canon and Nikon finally wake up!

I think people here analyze too much. I just got back from Disneyland and the majority of photographers either had DSLRs, fixed lens P&S cameras or their cell phones. I literally counted only 4 mirrorless bodies out of dozens of the other cameras. While I love my m43 setup, DSLRs are still going strong in America.