sales

Instant photography is alive and well, and if you need proof, look no further than Amazon's top selling items in Camera & Photo. For the second year in a row, Fujifilm's Instax products dominated the category over the Holiday shopping season.

Fuji's Instax instant film was the bestselling item in Amazon's Camera category in the 2015 holiday season. It wasn't a fluke: the company's instant film business has been exploding in popularity in recent years.

GoPro has seen better days. The company just announced that it will be cutting its workforce by 7%, roughly 100 people, after seeing big declines in sales of its action camera.

Amazon had another record-breaking holiday season this year, with huge gains in product sales, Prime membership subscriptions, and digital streaming. You may, however, be surprised to hear what came out on top on the list of best-selling photography products over the holidays.

It was film.

The camera market has been struggling in recent years, with Canon, Nikon, and Sony all recently reporting drops in camera demand from a year ago. But there may be a sliver of positive news for camera makers: sales appear to be stabilizing a bit after a few years of huge drops.

Photographers can finally stop arguing over what to officially call the latest generation of interchangeable cameras that forgo the prisms of past DSLR brethren. A number of various names have existed including Compact System Cameras (CSC), Mirrorless System Cameras (MSC), Digital Single Lens Mirrorless (DSLM), Digital Interchangeable Lens System Cameras (DILSC), and Electronic Viewfinder with Interchangeable Lens (EVIL). The Consumer Electronic Agency has picked a name, and they are keeping it simple.

A few months ago, we shared a chart showing how sales the camera market have changed between 1947 and 2014. The data shows that after a large spike in the late 2000s, the sales of dedicated cameras have been shrinking by double digit figures each of the following years. Mix in data for smartphone sales, and the chart can shed some more light on the state of the industry.

Want to see how the mirrorless camera war is going over in Japan? Here's a simple graph that will illuminate the situation. It was published recently by tech industry research company BCN, and shows how market share changed in Japan over the course of 2014.

How have camera sales changed over the past 60 or 70 years? The chart above offers an interesting look at this question. It shows camera production between 1947 and 2014.

Swift Galleries is an upcoming platform whose goal is to get your photography work on your clients' walls and, in turn, bring in some extra profit for you.

By leveraging a simple drag-and-drop web app, Swift Galleries makes it easy for you to customize and show off how your photographs would look in your clients' homes, with little to no effort on your behalf.

Snapwire's mission is to make photo selling 'human again,' which is why creative collaboration between image makers and the brands/companies that need those images is at the center of the photo sales platform's model.

Today, the company enters into a creative collaboration of its own with Adobe in order to make sure their users have the most photo editing algorithms on the market at their fingertips.

When it comes to wanting to sell physical prints of your photographs online, there are but a few platforms. And of the platforms that do exist, many of them seem to fall short when it comes to offering everything you need in one, simple workflow.

Seeing this as a ripe opportunity, an incredibly talented team consisting of the co-founders of DNA 11, CanvasPop and dozens others have created an online marketplace that offers an end-to-end platform for artists to leverage. It’s called Crated, and it has the potential to be a game-changer for photographers who want to sell their work online.

We're unfortunately accustomed to bad news in the photo industry. That's not to say there's not great news and exciting new products and a bright future ahead, all of those things are there too, but slumping sales and discontinued products are becoming all-too-common reports.

Case in point: it seems flash trigger king PocketWizard is struggling of late, with reports claiming that the company has had to lay off as many as 20 of its 50 employees due to low sales figures and increasing competition out of China.

The camera industry is turning into a two-tier market, with Canon, Nikon and Sony DSLRs at the top, smartphones at the bottom and nothing in the middle, according to a recent Reuters report that finds little traction for mid-tier camera makers counting on mirrorless to save the day.

With every passing year, the digital camera sales dataset offered by the Camera and Imaging Products Association (CIPA) grows more comprehensive. These records are made available to the public by this coalition of camera manufacturers which includes Nikon, Canon, Fujifilm, Sony, Sigma, Ricoh, Olympus, and dozens of other recognizable brands. Since 2002, they've been improving and increasing the scale of their database, which now separates digital cameras into fixed-lens, mirrorless and DSLR categories, and reports sales figures for different regions.

It sometimes seems that commentators are primarily interested in the CIPA data to prove just how far up a creek camera manufacturers are so far this decade. But these depressing pronouncements are just scratching the surface. Here's some other things the data shows:

News coming down the Nikon financial pipeline isn't good. Whether you're talking about official financial forecasts that mirror what we saw recently from Canon or unofficial sales numbers that don't look promising, the camera company may be coming up on some hard times.

Leading international camera maker Canon cut its annual profit forecast Thursday, revealing that sales of interchangeable-lens cameras are slowing for the first time ever.