Smartphones won the camera wars a long time ago, so why are we still expecting otherwise?

Smartphone cameras eating away at the market share of dedicated digital cameras is old news. On and off over the past few years, digital camera makers such as Canon, Nikon and Sony, to name a few, comment on this sad state of affairs. Their solution to the problem? Offer smartphone users something more, quality, and maybe a zoom lens. Unfortunately, it does seem like they’re barking up the wrong tree. To quote many a famed photographer, “the camera’s only job is to get out of the way of making photographs” and, “The best camera you can use is the one that you have on you.” At the same time, the need for quality is not paramount. A brief history lesson When it comes to photography, our needs have evolved. In the days of film, simply having the ability to capture images was great and since the advent of the Internet, the ability to share has been paramount. Most smartphone cameras these days are capable of churning out some very reasonable images and since the quality is acceptable, it’s more than enough for Facebook, Instagram and the like. In the early days of the digital camera, image quality was terrible when compared to film. Even a 2MP digital camera was considered ground-breaking, a far cry from the 25MP that could be achieved by scanning even “amateur-grade” 35mm film. But digital still persisted and survived, if only for the fact that it started getting easier and easier to view and share digital images. Using film started to become a niche, expensive and unwieldy operation. Wouldn’t you say the same for a DSLR today? By the early 2000s we saw a repeat of the exact same story. Smartphones were bad at capturing images, but it was much easier to view and share them so users compromised with quality. Fast-forward to 2016 and now smartphone image quality is excellent and viewing and sharing images is easier than it’s ever been. It’s what the users want and it’s what they’re getting. Image quality can only improve over time and we’re already seeing a slow trickle of smartphones with better zoom levels. Digital cameras aren’t dead, they’re niche

Traditional digital cameras will not die, even film isn’t dead yet (in fact, we’re seeing a resurgence). The quality and speed that DSLRs offer are still unmatched in the imaging space and there are people who will want that, but they’re in the minority. Not everyone wants the hassle of carrying a DSLR body, an assortment of lenses, a card reader, a bunch of cables and memory cards, spare batteries and maybe a laptop. Your smartphone’s right there, your images are on Facebook and you’ve already moved on to the next photo and in life. Canon and Nikon and the like are naïve if they think that quality and zoom are enough to pull users away from smartphones. What’s surprising is that they must have known this, they were, after all, at the centre of the transition from film to digital. Bigger, faster, better digital cameras with more zoom aren’t going to get them anywhere anytime soon. Companies like Konica Minolta have already bitten the dust, Fujifilm managed to scrape together a living only when they abandoned traditional digital cameras and Olympus makes more money from medical cameras than consumer digital ones. Oh, and did we mention the 63 percent decline in sales since 2014? Stand-alone digital cameras lost the camera wars a long time ago, why are we still talking about it?