DSLRs sales go up thanks to smartphone cameras revolution

Sep 28, 2015 11:58 GMT  ·  By

Times have changed a lot since photographers, both professional and amateur, had to rely on dedicated cameras, both compact and professional, whenever they had to take a photo. Since smartphones managed to incorporate better and better cameras, the use of compact cameras has diminished with only professional DSLRs remaining the gold standard of quality photography.

It's pretty obvious that since this change occurred, DSLRs ended up alone in the digital cameras market and with them camera lenses too. However, a small study from DigiTimes says that interchangeable lenses make almost 70% of the entire digital camera market sales.

How so? Well, the answer is quite obvious: photographers don't really change a DSLR that often. They are high-quality products that take above-average quality photographs and usually cost a small fortune, and while a consumer usually owns one single DSLR, he may as well handle multiple lenses of different sizes and meant for specific subjects or events.

Apparently, the overall worldwide digital camera market reached 49.3 million units in 2014. The Interchangeable Lenses (IL) market share, however, managed to get one-third of the market share and is bound to reach 70% in the following years.

DSRLs and the lens-making industry must thank smartphones for their recent success

According to Futuresource Consulting quoted by Digi Times, "The huge convenience and portability associated with mobile photography along with improvements to image capture features, wider availability of 4G mobile connectivity and photography-based apps is contributing to the digital camera population reducing in size and concentrating around hobbyists."

It seems that even the new WiFi connectivity that would allow cameras to at least copy some features from smartphones that would allow them to upload photos to the cloud has only been present in approximately 40% of all digital cameras.

What's interesting is that, while compact cameras sales are continuously declining, DSLRs are not, and since the vast majority of would-be photographers still go for DSLRs to do proper photographs, their demand has actually increased resulting in an average camera price increase of 10% in 2014.

In the world of photography, the impact smartphones had over the last few years has been industry-changing. Ousting compact devices from wide-spread use, smartphones actually proved helpful to the DSLR industry making them the only sort of photo cameras to represent an entire segment of device market and effectively dragging the lens making industry along as they enjoy this exclusivist consumable status.