Maybe not, but the camera industry appears to be one where new technology tends to keep manufacturers on their toes.
Witness the demise of complicated aim-and-adjust cameras when inexpensive point-and-shoot autofocus came along, and then the demise of film cameras when digital cameras came along.
Now the competition is more indirect (my “strategic competitor” concept): the smartphone.
If you are an iPhone user, when was the last time you picked up your camera?
You can’t remember?
Neither can I. In fact, I probably haven’t used my camera (a 12-megapixel, widescreen Panasonic) since I started using an Android phone.
Advanced camera plus phone combos are not new. I used to have a Sony Ericsson K750i which had a better camera than most digital cameras of the era.
But today’s smartphone have a better ecosystem than the old Sony Ericssons: real Internet connectivity and compelling Internet/cloud tools like Facebook, Dropbox etc for sharing pictures.
So today, you can snap a picture with your trusty iPhone/Android and with a few taps, share the picture with your friends/family and the world. You also no longer need to mess with cables or SD Card adaptors: just use Dropbox (and to a more complicated extent, ZumoDrive) to transfer the picture to your PC.
It looks like the camera manufacturers are starting to take notice. So Samsung just announced the SH100 at CES. It comes with Wi-Fi and can share pictures with your PC, Android device, Facebook, Picassa, Photobucket etc. Read the press release here. Adding WiFi to digital cameras is not new, but this is the first time I see WiFi being integrated into the camera experience along with Facebook and PC sharing capability.
Should other camera manufacturers follow suit?
There’s no easy answer. If they don’t, they risk being overtaken by the smartphone tide; at least, in the casual point-and-shoot segment. On the other hand, that segment may still go to the smartphones anyway: for casual point-and-shoot, you are not going to carry another gadget if your smartphone suffices…