For those concerned about cameras

(Originally post on a Blues music list-serve I subscribe to)

Nikon Says It's Leaving Film-Camera Business

By Mike Musgrove
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 12, 2006; D01



Nikon Corp., one of the flagship brands for amateur and professional
photographers alike, said yesterday that it will stop making most of
its film-camera products to concentrate on marketing digital cameras.

"Nikon Corporation has made the decision to focus management
resources on digital cameras in place of film cameras. This decision
will allow Nikon to continue to develop products that match the
demands of an increasingly competitive market place," the Japan-based
company said in a statement posted on a Web site for its British
division. The statement said more than 95 percent of its British
business is now in the digital market.

Nikon spokesmen in the United States at first declined to comment on
the company's British statement, which was linked to by several
technology-oriented Web sites. They later issued a similar version
that said the film-camera line is being "reshaped" to allow "more of
Nikon's planning, engineering and manufacturing resources to be
focused on the digital products that now drive our thriving industry."

Nikon said it will immediately discontinue making all but two of its
film cameras, all large-format Nikkor lenses and enlarging lenses,
and several manual-focus Nikkor lenses. It expects to sell the last
of those products this summer. Nikon will continue to manufacture and
sell two film cameras, the professional-level F6 and the FM10 for the
amateur market, and a few manual-focus lenses for those cameras.

The company's U.S. Web site currently shows a lineup of nine single-
lens-reflex film cameras, including the F6 and FM10.

"To use a car industry analogy, it would be the same as Ford saying
it is no longer producing an internal-combustion engine. It's really
that revolutionary," said Mark Greenberg, a professional photographer
who has shot for National Geographic, Life and this week's People
magazine. "Film is done. Digital rules the world now."

Analyst Christopher Chute of technology research firm IDC said that
the Nikon announcement was the first he has heard of a major camera
company moving so completely out of the film camera business but that
he would not be surprised if other camera makers also do so.

"It's a big shift," Chute said. "When push comes to shove, it's not
going to make any sense for some of these guys to focus on film
cameras anymore."

A decade ago, digital cameras cost thousands of dollars, required
technical proficiency to use and offered unclear images that took up
large amounts of space on expensive memory cards. As prices for
digital cameras and memory cards dropped year after year -- and
started to beat the prices and picture quality offered by film
cameras -- digital cameras rapidly took over the market.

Digital cameras began to outsell film cameras in the past two years,
according to analysts. So ubiquitous are digital cameras now that IDC
has predicted that 90 percent of the cell phones sold this year will
have such cameras built in.

Chute said photography has lost its identity in the digital era and
become a subset of the consumer electronics industry. Camera makers
such as Eastman Kodak Co. have experimented with gadgets such as
digital cameras that double as MP3 players. Electronic gadgets such
as the iPod digital music player and the new Xbox 360 game console
now come with features for viewing digital photo libraries.

For years, analysts predicted that the advent of digital imaging
could mean the demise of Kodak, a U.S. company that helped invent
photography, since consumers would no longer need film.

Kodak has worked hard to reinvent itself. After years of retooling --
and laying off thousands of workers in its film division -- Kodak is
No. 1 in the U.S. digital-camera market, closely followed by Canon
Inc. and Sony Corp. Kodak still sells reloadable film cameras outside
the United States in emerging-market countries such as China, India
and Brazil.

The first Nikon film camera appeared in 1948, though the company's
history goes back nearly to the turn of the 19th century, when it
made optical glass and microscopes. An early Nikon digital still
camera, developed with Fuji Photo Film Co., appeared in 1995. Recent
Nikon models helped pioneer the use of wireless technology in digital
cameras to allow users to upload and print their photos.

Chute said Nikon's customers have tended to be affluent photography
enthusiasts -- a class of user that has been almost entirely
persuaded to switch to digital cameras in recent years.

Paul Worthington, an analyst at photography industry research firm
Future Image Inc., said the Nikon announcement was "noteworthy but
not surprising."

"I don't think film will stick around in any marketable way in the
next few years," he said.

Worthington said that when digital photography emerged as a hot
consumer category, most camera makers said film would survive in the
long run, with different types of cameras meeting different needs.
But that has changed recently, he said, as cameras improved and
enthusiasts turned to digital cameras for all of their photography
needs.

"I don't know of any company that makes film cameras saying, 'We're
in this for the long run,' " Worthington said.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company


--
Sandor Gulyas
Graduate Student - Louisiana St. University
Dept. of Geography & Anthropology

"Welcome to a Louisiana Cockfight..."
-- (Originally penned by) John Nitzinger


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