Why Camera Makers Will Be Dead (Soonish)

For the past few days, I’ve been walking around with my Ricoh GR3 camera. It’s small and unobtrusive, producing great photos thanks to its fantastic APS-C sensor. It boasts features that my larger Leica lacks. Given the rising crime rate in San Francisco, I truly appreciate its compactness.

However, this morning, my Mac Studio failed to recognize its SD Card. I considered using the iPhone app to download my photos, but unfortunately, that proved to be an exercise in futility.

The Ricoh GR’s Image Sync app is a nightmare. It has a paltry 1.8-star rating on the app store, accompanied by even worse reviews. The app feels outdated, and the process for Bluetooth pairing is manual and tedious. The WiFi connection consistently fails. After spending over an hour troubleshooting and going through the documentation, I gave up. The odds of successfully connecting the phone to the camera seem slimmer than those in a perilous game of Russian roulette.

This experience highlights a significant issue: many camera companies are lagging in the software department at a time when software is pivotal to photography.

Canon, Fuji, Hasselblad, Nikon, Leica, Phase One, Sigma, and Ricoh have struggled to develop user-friendly mobile software. While I haven’t tested Olympus and Panasonic’s offerings, I suspect they face similar challenges. Even though the Leica Fotos app boasts a sleek design, its underlying software proves unreliable.

The disconnect between mobile phone apps and cameras underscores a significant challenge for the camera industry: a fundamental misunderstanding of the escalating role of software in photography.

Camera companies remind me of the server businesses of yesteryears. Those servers, once the pinnacle of computing, were eventually eclipsed by the advent of cloud services. Companies that couldn’t adapt, like Sun Microsystems, fell by the wayside.

A surging demand for cost-effective and efficient servers laid the groundwork for the rise of cloud services. These servers employed open-source software and components that became commoditized by the rapidly expanding PC ecosystem. Their affordability raised questions about the rationale behind purchasing pricier servers equipped with proprietary high-end operating systems and specialized chips.

Was the additional cost justified by the enhanced performance? Firms like Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems reacted by producing even pricier high-end systems. For Sun Microsystems, this approach yielded profits for a time. However, the burden of sustaining their chip innovation, operating system, and software ecosystem became overwhelming.

Inexpensive blade servers and commodity cloud services might not have been infallible, but their cost-effectiveness appealed to those lacking multi-million-dollar budgets. As the cloud expanded, more resources were channeled into cloud providers, enabling them to refine their hardware, software, and the semiconductors powering their cloud. This scalability allowed them to procure and produce the essential components of their cloud at reduced costs. Consequently, Sun’s relevance waned, and it was ultimately acquired by what some consider the graveyard of innovation, Oracle.

The history of the server industry serves as a reminder that when scale, affordability, and connectivity converge, they can disrupt the established order. We’ve seen this with mobile phones, media, and taxi services. And it is gradually unfolding in the camera business. Smartphone cameras offer scale, affordability, and connectivity, leading to a continuous cycle of innovation and change.

The incumbents often dismiss new methodologies as “not good enough.” Early critiques of the iPhone overlooked the device’s potential as a multifunctional pocket computer. This shortsightedness has been evident in other sectors as well, like the automotive industry’s transition to electric and connected vehicles.

The camera industry is no different. Although sales are declining, revenues for camera companies are climbing. (1) They are shifting their focus to selling premium models, a strategy reminiscent of old tech giants before they waned. Sun Microsystems springs to mind.

Just as affordable servers toppled the once-dominant Sun and paved the way for what we now recognize as cloud computing, smartphone cameras are ushering in a distinct visual era. We might witness the rise of a new “living photo” standard in the near future.

Thanks to computational photography, smartphone cameras are poised to elevate these living photos, especially for mixed-reality displays. I realized this potential when experimenting with Apple’s Vision Pro. It became evident that my understanding of photography was just a fraction of the broader visual landscape ahead. Similarly, as “FaceTime”-like video calls are gradually supplanting traditional phone dialing, the concept of photos is bound to evolve.

Mobile phone processors are becoming more powerful, and computer vision algorithms continue to advance. These innovations will minimize image noise, auto-correct imperfections, and optimize images for screen displays. The software’s capacity to merge data from multiple lenses signifies another leap. AI platforms such as MidJourney and Stable Diffusion will enable the transformation of captured images into unique stories. The hefty investments in software, chips, and algorithms present a significant challenge to traditional camera entities.

As this transformation continues, many camera companies grapple with even the most rudimentary software features. While these companies excel in hardware, they stumble in software development. Brands like Sony, Nikon, Canon, Fuji, and Leica pride themselves on their lens craftsmanship. Yet, when the topic shifts to software, their offerings seem lacking in polish and sophistication, almost as if they’re an afterthought.

The path forward for these camera giants is riddled with obstacles. They might continue emphasizing their hardware excellence and lens quality for some time. But in an era where software molds our interactions and experiences, their standing seems increasingly tenuous. In a world where software is pivotal to the user experience, these brands risk becoming relics, much like Motorola, Nokia, and Ericsson did in their heyday.

As for my photos on the Ricoh GR3 — well, I suppose they’ll remain unseen if I have to reformat the SD card. This experience has already soured my opinion of the camera. My next step is to list it for sale.

August 28, 2023. San Francisco

(1): According to data from CIPA, a trade body representing camera makers, 8.36 million digital cameras were sold worldwide in 2021, down 5.9 percent from 2020, and brought in $4.3 billion in revenues. In 2022, CIPA said that 8.01 million digital cameras brought in $4.65 billion in revenues. In 2023, CIPA expects sales to be down by about 7.6 percent — but if recent reports from the major camera companies indicate, the revenues are on the up. 

My Essays, Photo Features, Technology
18 comments

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Om Malik is a San Francisco based writer, photographer and investor. Read More

18 thoughts on this post

  1. The high-end camera brands are going to need major business model changes to survive. It’s a game of scale. The amount that Apple and Samsung can spend on features that improve the photo experience of their customers dwarfs whatever amount any one of the major DSLR manufacturers can allocate. As a prosumer photographer, I have come to use my iPhone much more for photography than my Nikon Z9. The results of the iPhone/Photos workflow are often excellent and take far less time to achieve than the DSLR/Lightroom workflow. And the device is much easier to carry around.

    Sure there are lots of things I can’t do yet in the iPhone/Photos workflow, but they are catching up and in some areas surpassing what can be achieved with DSLR/Lightroom without an enormous investment in time.

    Two potential business model shifts come to mind for the legacy SLR companies:
    1. License software from Apple or Samsung/Google to exploit their optical and mechanical expertise. This could bring the professional segment of photographers into the Apple photography ecosystem.

    The legacy manufacturers could form some form of software development consortium that aims to compete with the mobile phone manufacturers. Pool their software R&D budgets. Focus on competing based on optics and physical form factors, not software.

    Unfortunately, I expect that we will look back 20 years from now and DSLRs will be like the box cameras are today. Quaint artifacts of an earlier technological age.

  2. Sorry to hear about your pains with the GR3.

    As a GR3x owner, I join you in saying the Image Sync app is bad. I changed the WiFi settings on my phone, and it would not pair up again via Bluetooth for some reason. I had to reboot both app and device, to make it sync up again after a few days (the Bluetooth connection can automatically trigger the WiFi hotspot, but manually making it work is a pain, as with most camera-syncing apps indeed).

    As for a potential solution for the Mac/SD card part, I found that plugging the phone via USB and use the Image Capture pre-installed Mac app can be more reliable – if slower – than the SD card.

    1. Thanks for the comment and that helpful tip for image transfer. I will definitely give it a shot. It might just work.

      1. So good. So, so good. Worth all the troubles, to an extent. I dream of an AirDrop-compatible Ricoh GR. This is all the software they need as far as I’m concerned, especially when looking at the latest generation of iPhone/Pixel cameras, which can capture amazing images, but dull and boring photos.

        Edit on my comment, where I meant: I found that plugging the camera via USB and use the Image Capture pre-installed Mac app can be more reliable – if slower – than the SD card.

        1. Thank you for the additional data. I also figure out that the problem is that when you use Adobe RGB color space, it adds a dash in front of the file name and as a result Mac doesn’t download the files and the whole card looks as if it is corrupted. It says can’t read files. Amazing to find these errors.

          1. Oh indeed a very weird issue, good that you identified it, I hope it solves your problem, while we all wait a for an AirDrop enabled camera; it would make a lot of sense for Apple to partner with a few “pro” camera companies, as they more-than-ever target creatives. This would clearly justify getting rid of the SD port. Wishful thinking.

    1. That is perhaps because they are being pushed by “influencers” who never really use the cameras long enough before moving to another device. Much as I like GR3, I hate the app and everything about it.

  4. You are spot on.

    The Camera OEMs have to find a way to put in their gadgets a decent modern OS like Android or iOS with a few select social media apps for it to start having appeal again. Every few years once I buy a new DSLR or a highend point-n-shoot hoping to move away from my iPhone/Pixel for pictures but almost always the Camera/DSLR sleeps in the cupboard.

    The downward trend for the camera OEMs actually started a few years before the iPhone and they accelerated afterwards. At the same time, the proliferation of smartphone cameras has resulted in unbelievable number of pics taken every second worldwide for realworld/business/health/learning usecases that are beyond camera inventors’ imaginations.

    1. It was about 10 years ago, I received a pitch from a company that wanted to help build the new OS/middleware layer for camera companies. It ended up raising a ton of money. And it was essentially aqua-hired. Nothing came of it. The camera industry is so limited in their thinking and understanding of the future. IT is quite astonishing that they are still here. 🙂

    1. Unfortunately they won’t do much about it — as they all want to really keep a tight control on their customer base. Short sighted if you ask me. Of course, they could work with a third party developer who can be independent and make all cameras work with the super software management app.

  6. Sorry to hear about the SD card. I use a lighting to SD dongle to bring raws onto my iPad for Lr editing. If the raw file names are the problem, maybe develop in camera as jpegs and try to transfer those? Not ideal but better than losing them.

    I wonder how far you think tech can go in a phone-sized package? Phone cameras are amazing, but I can always tell the difference from an apsc or ff camera. Maybe something about the sensor size and depth of field possible? Can computational photography eventually bridge that difference?

    1. Sadly this didn’t pan out 🙁 thanks for the tip!

      On your second question: why do you think we need full frame? Or bigger sensors? That is an assumption that we will print these photos or see them in massive scale. Instead we see them on tiny screens I printed photos off my iPhone 14 Pro Max and got 24 inches on the long end without any quality degradation. I have one print that was made using platinum palladium process.

      In a brief few years every photo is going to be consumed digitally and for a few seconds at best. We are almost there. The phone cameras are going to get better. Sharp is making phones with 1-inch sensor: which is amazing if you think about it. Same sensor that is in Sony RX-100. Give that sensor to iPhone, add the chips they have and upgraded the lenses and you have s bonkers camera 😜

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