If they are caught it is in a trap of their own making. It seems to me
that megapixel count has been conflated with quality by their own
marketing systems as a tool to differentiate one model from the other
all the way down to the retail level. Since the cost to manufacture a
14 megapixel chip and a 6 megapixel chip with the same physical format
is virtually identical the higher pice of the higher MP camera is
almost all profit and there is little incentive to give it up. Now
that a large proportion of cameras are made not by traditionally
photographic equipment companies, but by electronics and calculator
companies looking for more "product" in a changing market place, image
quality is secondary to selling stuff which is what megapixel count
does. Unfortunately, any company left that might care about image
quality has to compete with them.
It seems to me that the Toyota/Lexus experiment was tried, except for
the name change of course. Remember all those 2/3 sensor cameras that
sold for a thousand dollars. Real photographers were thrilled. Failed
in the marketplace.
One could argue that since virtually all companies separate their
digicam division from their dslr division there is no hope for them
and that there is not one company that cares about their quality, just
divisions that care about sales. They will stumble on in a mediocre
way like Instamatics, mostly Casios with different name plates, until
the next big thing. The one ray of hope may be that as the DSLR market
saturates, that those divisions will decide to build a decent small
camera when they start looking for customers among their existing base.
The digicam business has essentially already reached the no profit
stage, or at least profit so low that besides reducing the size of the
sensor to save costs and lower quality, we have seen the same
companies move into entry level DSLRs, snapping up old line camera
companies. By all estimates, that market will be saturated by the end
of this year. What you will see then is a staged increase in
megapixels which will again drive down quality as pixel density of
DSLRs approach that of digicams. 75 MP anyone?
I am not optimistic about their getting out of this trap, as you can
probably tell.
Winsor
Long Beach, California, USA
On May 17, 2008, at 11:00 PM, Moose wrote:
>
> - The manufacturers are caught in this deadly race of ever
> increasing MPs.
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