Nikon, Sony and Panasonic new April product announcements to be delayed?

Nikon Sony and Panasonic are the three companies that should announce new mirrorless products in April. But the earthquake disaster may will force them to delay the new product announcement.

Nikon officially suspended the operations at the Nikon plant at Natori in Sendai “We are unable to announce how soon the operation will resume due to the regional interruption of life-lines although endeavor for restoration are under the way by some of our maintenance personnel.“. And “Injury is reported to some of our group employees. We are currently continuing to gather safety information of our personnel and its family members.“

Panasonic said that “A few employees working at the Fukushima factory, the Sendai factory of AVC Networks Company and at the Koriyama factory of Panasonic Electronic Works received minor injury. Some part of the ceiling and wall were damaged, but there has been no fire or collapse. As regards the impact on our business operations we are in the process of investigation“

Sony halted and evacuated six factories in northeastern Japan: “The company is assessing the impact of power outages and damage to its facilities in the region, which make Blu-ray discs, magnetic heads and batteries.“

Olympus data shows the worldwide mirrorless share (via Megapixel)


Image courtesy: Megapixel

At a presentation in Israel Olympus disclosed some nice graphs. First of all they did show the graph above with the worldwide Mirrorless shares (Olympus calls them “Pen-type”). And as you can see on Megapixel (Click here) Mirrorless cameras are very popular in Asia.

Olympus clear message is that Mirrorless is THE future and classic DSLR will be a niche within 5-10 years. One more thing, a PRO pen camera will hit  the market in 2-3 years only!

More about the mirrorless success (Amateur Photographer and Photoscala)

Amateur Photographer published new data about the mirrorless market in UK:
– Almost a quarter of all interchangeable lens cameras sold in the UK during January are mirrorless
– That’s a 160% rise on the same month the previous year
– In 2010, mirrorless accounted for 11% of all interchangeable lens camera sales (one million units sold).

Photoscala analyzed the worldwide camera sales:
– sales of digital cameras is the world’s first nine months of 2010 greatly increased
– Digital cameras are booming in emerging markets
– The Japanese camera maker could surpass the predicted total delivery volume for 2010
– The share of system cameras (Mirrorless+DSLR) is constantly increasing at the cost of fixed lens compact cameras (from 6% in 2005 to almost 11% in 2010).
– 80.000 of all 960.000 system cameras sold in Germany are mirrorless.

Those are the market shares in Japan:
Compact camera is lead by Canon 19.0%, followed by Casio 15.2% and Panasonic 13.9%
DSLR cameras is lead by Canon 32.0% followed by Nikon 29.4% and on third place we have Sony 13.1%.
Mirrorless is lead by Panasonic 38.7% followed by Sony 32.2% and Olympus 29.1%

In summary: Compact cameras will loose market share in favour of cellulars and interchangeable lens systems. The growth of system cameras sales is lead by the mirrorless success.

Mirrorless market growing worldwide (Japan leads the change)

The GFK Group just relased a few interetsing data about the worldwide mirrorless market:

Japan: “CSC sales in Japan accounted for one third of all changeable lens cameras sold during December and one quarter for 2010 as a whole. The global share of CSCs almost quadrupled in 2010 compared to the previous year to stand at 11%, or almost one million of all changeable lens cameras sold.“

World: “Whilst Japan leads the way, other regions have seen consumers rush to adopt this new camera type. Western Europe (8%), LATAM (19%) and Asia Pacific (18%) have all witnessed a significant increase in share for CSC products.”

With the entries of Pentax and Nikon we can expect an even greater share in 2011. Samsung already said that they expect mirrorless to surpass the DSLR market share within 2015.