Canon Sales Continue to Plummet

ahalpert said:
Good compositions and camera moves never get old and can happen with any camera... We'll see some interesting things be made on these iphones by young folks without money
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You can remove the 'young folks without money' and it's still as relevant.

For content creators, especially in social media, shooting with an iPhone (or other brand) can be a smart play. We've seen luxury brands with enough resources opt for iPhone shoots just to get attention. And that is all they want: attention.

And look at YouTube. Who gets more views/makes more money: an in-depth tutorial about ACES or someone explaining "a secret hack" where you can manually change your "ah-per-ture" to control DOF. <-- that's short for "depth of field" which is the secret language of cinema masters who make Hollywood movies. This video is followed by affiliate links to B&H, Adorama, and Amazon... conveniently with links to the local Amazon in the US, UK, France, Italy and Germany.

Many, many don't want 'good', they want 'broad'. Using devices other people are using resonates with them. "I can do that too".
 
AndreeOnline said:
And isn't that the right approach? Look at what a certain format is good at and then go with that?
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I would say yes, but inevitably a person will be inspired to shoot something that a limited camera can't handle or create.

I'm working on a screenplay that has 3 characters in a cabin. I have 2 other stories that would be moderately to extremely more expensive to shoot. So the cheap story will go first. But could I work forever crafting stories to fit micro-budgets? Maybe... sort of how I feel about the iPhone.

Again, it depends on what you want to do with the tool. Most of the hired shooting I do with FS7 or DSLRs wouldn't be suited for an iPhone because I need selective focus, clean low-light shooting, better ergonomics and audio inputs, and a constant aperture zoom lens. But maybe some or all of those issues can be solved on a smartphone eventually if not now.

I work with an artist who shoots high-res photos of dancers. If a smartphone could achieve the same resolution on both the sensor and the lens, then the only issues for her would be firing the strobes from the camera, how high the fps is, ergonomic handling, and tethering to Capture One. I suppose those issues are surmountable. She needs her photos to look good blown up large, though. There's a large folder of shots she shoots that end up good enough for Instagram only

But maybe a smartphone-only future is closer than I think...
 
ahalpert said:
... but maybe a smartphone-only future is closer than I think...
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In my opinion, it's quite a way yet. In order for the pro quality video smartphone, the overall sales numbers would have to sink really low, so the various niches could emerge. Right now, the market is so huge, the minute percentage of units that may be suitable for the pros, are not even contemplated en masse (there were some odd phones by Motorola and Panasonic). Right now, everything is one big wave and all the manufacturers are riding it. So, sales would have to drop from ~ 1.3 billion sold to about 150 million or so, for the manufacturers to start thinking about specializing.

Of course, the image quality, workflow, high ISO performance and so on has already gotten to the point where one doesn't need much to make a smartphone video "DSLR level". And the "DSLR level" is getting to the "Alexa 2014" level. And Alexa 2020 level is almost a surplus to the requirements.
 
What about the current "pro" iphone models? Isn't that specialized enough?

As for DSLR-level quality in smartphones - do you really think they're pumping out equivalently beefy codecs and high ISOs that are as clean? I sincerely doubt it, based on what I've seen.

It seems like Night Sight etc are all based on combining multiple exposures for a still.

Then there's the fast lens problem. Or choosing your own lens aesthetic generally

And just generally whatever you can do with a small sensor you can do but better with a larger sensor
 
ahalpert said:
A) What about the current "pro" iphone models? Isn't that specialized enough?

B) As for DSLR-level quality in smartphones - do you really think they're pumping out equivalently beefy codecs and high ISOs that are as clean? I sincerely doubt it, based on what I've seen.

C) It seems like Night Sight etc are all based on combining multiple exposures for a still.

D) Then there's the fast lens problem. Or choosing your own lens aesthetic generally

E) And just generally whatever you can do with a small sensor you can do but better with a larger sensor
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I alphabetized each paragraph above, to make my replies worthy of bullet points.

A) The phones themselves are not there yet but the various apps, extensions, etc. get it it closer with each step. As in that Moment clip (Moment is one of the more known external lens manufacturers and sponsor various short video contests), most of the frames are good enough. Mind you, I am not comparing each frame to Freddie Young or Robert Surtees (or Abe Halbert, for that matter). I just look at them and decide whether the displayed images please me. In that regard, one can look at a lot of prime TV dramas and think that neither the lighting, the blocking nor the acting is worthy of a $5M episodic investment. Nonetheless ...

B) The modern compressed codecs, as in FX-9, are good enough. But, while it's required pixel peeping for professional projects, YouTube does more harm that a highly compressed codec anyway.

As to ISO, I have a friend, who's an avid runner. As in, up at 5 AM and off to a 10-mile jog. Sometimes, he'll send me his early morning photos to post on FB (I won't post selfies). During winters, when he runs in darkness, his iPhone photos had a lot of blue noise. I ask him, "Can't you see the noise?" - "No, what noise?"

C) They drop the exposure and turn on noise reduction. Whatever works.

There's a YouTuber with a "Camera Conspiracy" channel, who did the "how dark can I go?" clip. So, using GH-5, he dropped the shutter speed and went max ISO. The low shutter speed resulted in some funky ghosting but, at some point, he says into the camera, "Wait, I can't see anything ... where am I?" (eyes can adopt, obviously, but not instantly). Eventually, there was an image, though he couldn't see anything himself. It wasn't a pretty image but it was an image. Not worthy of Freddie Young, Robert Surtees or Abe Halpert. Nonetheless ...

D) One can pick various external lenses like the aforementioned Moment. Are they Signature Prime quality? They're even better, if not optically, then in terms of finances.

BTW, I posted here that a "pro" smartphone would be an ILC. With its own selection of the AF lenses. The market is negligible for that. But there are various independent lens product, who aim to do it manually. Technically, the DOF adapters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoM4c15Mxrs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE7_-EwGAyY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOQU6GQrwkc

E) Yes, but there's a law of diminishing returns. Personally, I believe that, within a few years, the medium format will be taking over the high end photography and video to a far greater extent than currently (Hasselblad, Phase One, Alexa 65) but an MFT camera might be given away with a lens (flare).

That's it. I am out of bullets.
 
As to the plummeting sales - the Japanese sales are down 75% across the board in April.

Let's see how the market rebounds.
 
Video.

For big 8K+ screens. Video art. It would be like the medium format of video. Could really show time and details like bever before.
 
James0b57 said:
Video.

For big 8K+ screens. Video art. It would be like the medium format of video. Could really show time and details like bever before.
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Large video walls are capable of displaying higher than 8k resolutions, but the front end processors are not accepting 8k inputs yet AFAIK.
 
Razz16mm said:
Be interesting to see a breakdown of Canon’s lens sales vs camera sales.
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It's been on their previous reports. These days, it's all gone to the dogs.

But for sh!ts and giggles, here's a hardware cost breakdown of Samsung Galaxy S20 five Ultra camera modules.

http://image-sensors-world.blogspot.com/

If yous want to save time, it's $107.50 or about 20% of the total manufacturing costs.

The 108 MPX main camera itself is bit of a did due to its auto focus problems.
 
Oops, the above redirects to the main page now. Here's a direct link to the article.

http://image-sensors-world.blogspot.com/2020/06/samsung-tof-camera-cost-estimated-at-105.html

On a revisit, what stands out is that the cost of the entire 48 MPX (10x) periscope zoom is $27.50. If one adds about $75 for the hardware, case and labor, then the manufacturing cost of a camera with the 10x periscope zoom is somewhere around $100, which would translate to $200 wholesale and $275-$300 retail.

I am taking the rough cost breakdown from iPhone11.

http://www.iphonehacks.com/2019/10/iphone-11-pro-max-production-cost.html
 
DLD said:
Olympus is exiting the South Korean market (except the repairs).

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/tech/2020/05/133_289823.html

A bit of a strange move, as Olympus is doing well in Japan with its smaller mirrorless lineup.
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Err from my insiders at Olympus...

This is more to do with Korea / Japan politics. There's an anti-japan movement in Korea at the moment, borne out of stuff going back to WW2 and beyond, and there's a general notion to boycott "Japanese" companies.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...s-as-diplomatic-row-intensifies-idUSKCN1UE095


JB
 
John Brawley said:
Err from my insiders at Olympus...

This is more to do with Korea / Japan politics. There's an anti-japan movement in Korea at the moment, borne out of stuff going back to WW2 and beyond, and there's a general notion to boycott "Japanese" companies. JB
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I don't know if you were living in the US in the 80's but this was kind of like that here too. Not over WWII but over the Japanese imports of the consumer electronics, automobiles, steel, motorcycles, etc. Ron Howard even made a comedy about it called "Gung Ho" (released as the "Working Class Man" in Australia). That went away as he Japanese stock market crashed in 1989.

As far as WWII goes, there's a famous British football chant, "Two World Wars and One Wold Cup", which refers to England winning the 1966 WC final over West Germany. Of course, the Germans (three as West Germany, one as the united Germany) won four.

In 1988, the Netherlands defeated West Germany in the semifinal of the Euros, prompting a headline in Dutch papers, "We finally got our bicycles back", referring to the WWII occupation where the German troops did take away bikes belonging to the civilians. With the power grid destroyed, rail cars/trams didn't operate and there was not enough gasoline for the military to power tanks and cars to begin with. Bikes were then like horses in the old West.
 
And, speaking of Canon, EOS RP is $900 body-only or $1,000 with a 24-105 F 4-7.1.

And some rumors have Sony responding with a similar full frame at a similar price. (it might be an A5 series, since A6's are APS-C and A7's are a notch above)
 
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