The Rise and Crash of the Camera Industry in One Chart
The digital camera industry has endured a lot of changes over the years and is currently at the tail of a huge collapse that is tied directly to the proliferation of smartphones. A new chart that uses data from camera shipments shows just how stark the difference has been between the highs and lows over the last 70 years.
Published by Statista, the chart looks at worldwide shipments of photo cameras as logged by the Camera and Imaging Products Association (CIPA). The data shows all cameras shipped by CIPA members since 1951, which includes cameras made by OM Digital Solutions (formerly Olympus), Canon, Fujifilm, Sony, Nikon, Panasonic, and many others.
After a slow rise during the film age from the 1950s through the 1970s (film camera sales are shown as orange), sales really started to take off in the 1980s before a huge spike during the digital age between 2000 and 2010. After peaking at more than 120 million units sold in a single year, the market saw a dramatic collapse between 2010 and 2023. Smartphones are considered the culprit as they became the de facto point-and-shoot, replacing a market once dominated by CIPA members.
Camera manufacturers grab headlines with their flagship interchangeable lens offerings but during the heyday of digital cameras, it was fixed-lens compact cameras that moved the needle. According to Statista, camera shipments dropped 94% between 2010 and 2023, “wiping out decades of growth.” Last year, CIPA members shipped just 1.7 million fixed-lens cameras, a dismal collapse of a segment that propped up the digital camera market for years before.
“So much so in fact, that most people no longer see the need to carry or buy a dedicated camera. While professionals and photo enthusiasts will (probably) always get better results using high-end cameras and lenses, modern smartphones take pictures that are easily sufficient for the demands of the average consumer,” data journalist Felix Richter writes. “As smartphone makers are rolling out AI features to their devices, phone cameras will only get more powerful, enabling lay users to edit their photos in ways that were unthinkable a couple of years ago.”
The chart above is a pretty harrowing look at the industry distilled into one graphic, but there is more information for those who want a bit more granularity.
In May, a survey conducted by Japan’s Cabinet Office found that only 48.6% of households reported owning a digital camera. Statista’s Consumer Insights data is even more dismal, showing Japan barely eclipses 30% ownership (above). In fact, in none of the eight countries where Statista performed its survey was an ownership rate of 50% reached. The United States had a lower percentage of ownership than any country, coming in dead last compared to South Korea, Japan, China, India, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany.
All of these ownership percentages are down versus the same survey conducted five years ago.
“To the camera and photo equipment industry, the rise of smartphone photography has had devastating effects,” Richter says.
Image credits: Statista
