Camera-Killing Smartphones And Their Killer Cameras
So much energy is spent these days on Apple’s AirPods and whether Phil Schiller used the word courage appropriately. Everyone is so fascinated with these topics, Apple could’ve changed their name to Orange by now and no one would’ve noticed. In my opinion, all of this is utterly unimportant.
What is important is that at the same time, mobile phones’ cameras are making giant technological leaps. These ultra-thin multi-sensor borderline-pinhole cameras deliver stunning imagery today. I get goosebumps every time I read about the progress in mobile imaging.
Before I continue, a bit about myself
I worked in the digital camera industry for 16 years:
- Back in 1997 I joined Zoran, where we made chips for digital cameras. With the exception of Canon, our chips were used in cameras of every other brand: Konica, Minolta, Agfa, Casio, Nikon, Ricoh, Vivitar, Pentax, GE, Olympus, Kodak, Samsung, Lytro, GoPro, Flip and dozens of no-names. My team worked on every third camera ever shipped in the world.
- In 2005 I joined NuCORE, which also sold its chips to the major Japanese camera brands. Mediatek acquired NuCORE in 2007, where I spent another year working on more camera stuff.
- In 2008 I joined a three-people imaging technology startup, called Refocus Imaging. The four of us continued evolving the technology in stealth mode for a few years and in 2011 we rebranded as Lytro. I eventually left Lytro in 2013 to work on my own startup.
Camera Phones
Ever since the first camera phones became somewhat popular in the early 2000’s, me and my colleagues from the digital camera industry had repeatedly heard that cameraphones would kill us. Every other month or so someone would proclaim that digital camera will be cannibalized by the smartphone industry.
Yet, it didn’t happen for many years. Despite immediate traction smartphones enjoyed early on, digital camera market continued to grow for another decade, until 2012. You can see this in the image below.
The graph is not entirely accurate. First, 2016 data is only for 6 months. Second, it doesn’t include sales by non-Japanese brands and specifically Samsung numbers. Samsung gained significant traction in 2009–2011 and was taking market share from traditional Japanese vendors. Total camera shipments in both 2010 and 2011 were around 140M units.
However, the point still stands — the industry was fine up until 2012, where it collapsed in one year and never recovered. As predicted.
For a full decade these predictions were ignored. And for a good reason. First, when you hear the same non-materializing prediction over and over again, you develop a strong immune system. You start completely ignoring the risk. And thus when it eventually does happen — it catches you by a huge surprise. Same happened to Nokia and will soon happen to gasoline cars.
Second reason, is the feature-matrix. Oh, we were obsessed with it. Up until only a few years ago, on every possible axis of comparison, cameras were always better than the smartphones: resolution, speed, flash, battery life, boot up time, lens, zoom, focus speed, display, print and image quality, noise characteristics, you name it.
So how could any respectful photographer forego their camera gear?
Picture Value
Turns out that the features we looked at did not matter. What killed the digital camera industry was something entirely different. It was Instagram. Or more accurately, the insta part.
Pictures have a unique formula of value. Picture’s value is inversely proportional to the period from the time it was taken. Value is almost infinite at the time you took the shot. Then it starts its ultimate decay to complete irrelevance.
The graph is not entirely accurate either. Picture value is in fact 1/x superposed with spikes around anniversaries. Basically, pictures’ value is almost identical to news stories.
And that’s where cameras could not compete. Cameras could not deliver you likes and comments within minutes of you taking the shot. Customers traded image quality for instant feedback. They never looked back.
And guess when Facebook acquired Instagram? Yep, April 2012.
RIP Digital Camera. I will miss you.
Many of my closest friends and I were lucky to be a part of it.
In the recent years, smartphones are closing the gaps on all other fronts of digital imaging. And those are incredible engineering achievements. And that’s what’s important in the new phones. Not their jack-lack-ness.
Sidenotes
- Coincidentally, both Zoran and NuCORE are now part of the mobile powerhouses, Qualcomm and Mediatek, respectively.
- A guy named Andy visited Zoran in 2003 and pitched my team some phone camera related ideas. We even worked on porting his software onto our camera chips. He also gave us a bulky looking phone made by a company named Danger. I had the phone on my desk for weeks. It was a cool toy. Andy Rubin and his software Android joined Google in 2005…
- Smartphones also killed the entire camcorder industry and specifically the beloved Flip, after Cisco paid $600M for it in 2009. Yet, some companies figured out that there are certain places where you simply won’t take your phone to. These are the brilliant DropCam and GoPro.
- Yours truly spending the night in the Pentax Tokiwadai office in Tokyo, circa 2003:
Alex Fishman is a Founder/CEO of Bugsee — a debugging tool for developers. Bugsee lets developers watch videos leading up to crashes and bugs. Check out Bugsee explainer videos for iOS and Android and Web, or our Demo.
