Reply to post: The smartphone is not the problem...

After 84 years, Japan's Olympus shutters its camera biz, flogs it to private equity – smartphones are just too good

demon driver

The smartphone is not the problem...

The smartphone is not the main problem. Ok, it destroyed most of the compact camera market. But all in all, the smartphone just accelerated everything a bit. The main problem is that sales drop when a product has finally matured (the digital camera) and everyone finally has such a mature specimen. The better the cameras have become over time, the less people feel the need to replace and upgrade theirs. Virtually all digital cameras of lately are excellent, no matter which brand. They have already become more expensive, though, because the manufacturers already had to compensate for the shrinking quantities, making that upgrade even less attractive...

Olympus made mistakes, but no big mistakes (except perhaps, literally, the E-M1X). Its problem – like everyone else's in the industry, hardly any manufacturer is still healthy – is that the cameras they sold were too good. And that there is no new key technology in sight that could initiate a new era of cameras, like AF in the eighties or digital around the turn of the century.

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