LONDON: Canon and Pentax just put on a burst of speed in the race to attract well-funded camera buyers.
The smartphone camera has proved to be a mixed blessing for the photography industry. With a smartphone, people always have a camera on hand and can share the shots immediately, and people are documenting their lives visually like never before. But it’s a lot harder to persuade somebody to buy an ordinary point-and-shoot camera — even though it produces better photos than a smartphone, it’s an extra expense and often something left at home.
For that reason, the camera industry has been pushing toward high-end compact cameras — those with image quality, zoom ranges or ruggedness that smartphones just can’t match — or toward models with interchangeable lenses for even more flexibility. The trend will be evident this week at the CP+ camera trade show in Japan, with Canon and Ricoh subsidiary Pentax already laying out their premium strategies with new cameras. The new cameras underscore a change in tactics amid a shrinking market, with the two companies taking different approaches.
For Canon, the choice was to surge ahead in the megapixel race, announcing its 50.6-megapixel EOS 5DS and 5DS R cameras set to arrive in June. These two new SLRs have more than twice the pixels than Canon’s previous leader, the 22-megapixel 5D Mark II, and vault over Nikon’s 36-megapixel D810.
For Pentax, the surprise was the news that it will release later this year its first “full-frame” digital SLR. That means the image sensor is the size of a full frame of 35mm film, 36x24mm, for better light-gathering abilities than is possible with the 23.5×15.6mm “crop-frame” sensors in Pentax’s earlier digital SLRs. The move signals new high-end ambitions for the company, following full-frame makers Canon, Nikon and Sony.
Camera shipments have been steadily declining for years, but the higher-end segment of models with interchangeable lenses, shown here in orange, have fared better than those with lenses built in.
Camera shipments have been steadily declining for years, but the higher-end segment of models with interchangeable lenses, shown here in orange, have fared better than those with lenses built in.
Also ahead of the show, Olympus and Samsung announced higher-end models: the $1,100 Olympus EM-5 Mark II and $800 Samsung NX500. Nikon’s CP+ news hasn’t emerged yet, but you can bet it’ll also try to coax well-funded photography customers into its domain. That’s because increasingly, they’re the only ones left.
