Panasonic GH5 has IBIS and will cost you just like the E-M1II


The GH5 as seens at Salon De La photo (Image by Pier-Yves Menkhoff)

The E-M1II caused quite a lot of buzz on the web mainly because of the $1,999 price tag. If you were hoping the Panasonic GH5 could cost less…well your hope was misplaced! According to 43rumors the camera will cost “about the same” as the E-M1II.

So if you want to get the best MFT camera on market that’s what you have to pay nowadays.

The shrinking camera sales will kill Canon-Nikon plans for a FF mirrorless?

Infographic: Are Smartphones Killing Digital Cameras? | Statista

This is just a pure speculation based on a simple fact: The interchangeable system camera market sales are dropping since 2012. And we can assume this trend will continue for the coming years.

I was wondering how that fact would influence the roadmap of companies like Canon and Nikon. I am no marketing expert but my guess would be that Canon and Nikon would do that:

  1. Reduce investments and costs in the current traditional camera market
  2. Focus investments on new areas with potential growth (small cameras for the car industry, optics for the medical business and so on)

The question is: Would a heavy investment in a new FF mirrorles system pay off? The answer seems to be no. Because the mirrorless system market isn’t doing well neither, nor is there any forecast predicting any kind of growth. So to me it sounds logical that whatever Canon and Nikon’s plan was to enter the FF mirrorless system market…they might as well kill it now.

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UPDATE: I aligned the graph to show how much system camera sales (in red) declined between 2012 and 2015:

systemsale

Nikon makes a big communication mess. Confirms it has to cut 10% of it’s Japan worforce.

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The Japanese site Nikkei reports about a plan from Nikon to cut 1,000 jobs in Japan (10% of the entire workforce in Japan). At first Nikon officially debunked the information and wrote:

Although Nikon is constantly studying various management options including headcount rationalization for strengthening company’s profitability mainly of Semiconductor Lithography and Imaging Products Businesses, nothing has been decided at this time.

But hours later Nikon released a new note (PDF file here):

Based on the above initiatives to rationalize headcount, Nikon will be announcing a voluntary retirement program of approximately 1,000 employees. Eligible applicants and detailed conditions will be announced once officially finalized.

That really sounds like a huge mess!

For fact we know that Nikon had a 41% operating profit drop in Q2 and had to cut the DSLR years sales forecast from 6.55 million to 6.20 million. Also the other Nikon businesses  like lithography machines and precision instruments are doing worse than expected.

While all companies are reporting sales drop Nikon company Nikon as a whole is way more “photo-industry” dependent than other companies.