The Consumer Camera Market is Dead: Here’s How You Keep the Enthusiasts

The consumer camera market is dead. Buried. Worm food. And if camera manufacturers don’t switch their focus to enthusiasts fast, they’ll lose them too. That seems to be the core thesis behind this interesting industry breakdown by photographer and educator Tony Northrup.

Northrup is no stranger to offering advice to the big camera manufacturers, but in his latest opus he takes a step back and offers not just advice… but perspective.

In 25 minutes, he breaks down the birth, growth, and death of the consumer camera market, predicts the death of the enthusiast camera market, and offers manufacturers a few pieces of concrete advice for how they might avoid the latter. But the whole video is based on one very simple (if brutal) assertion. Thanks to the little gadget below, the consumer camera market is dead.

The sooner camera manufacturers can adjust to this reality and refocus their attempts on earning/winning back the business of photo enthusiasts, the better.

How do they do that? Northrup believes it boils down to building smartphone technology and features into enthusiast level cameras. An intuitive Touch UI, opening up their ecosystems to third party app developers, and doing away with memory cards are just a few of the basic changes he believes the big guys must make if they expect to compete for the business of a younger generation who grew up taking these luxuries for granted.

And they need to do this fast. Because once Apple or Samsung or another phone manufacturer puts out a smartphone that truly meets the needs to the enthusiasts, that market, too, will be gone for good.