Konica Minolta Quits Photography Market

halenger writes "Japanese photographic equipment maker Konica Minolta has announced plans to withdraw from the camera business. Konica Minolta said the market had become too competitive, and added it would sell its digital camera business to Japanese electronics giant Sony." From the article: "Its decision to ditch the camera business altogether includes the cessation of its colour film and photo paper business, in which it has trailed Eastman Kodak of the US and Japan's Fuji Photo Film. Instead, it plans to focus on products such as colour office photocopiers and medical imaging equipment." We just recently reported on the decision by Nikon to go completely digital.

Comments

management speak decoded...

[advocate_one]

Konica Minolta said the market had become too competitive,

means the competition's cameras are too cheap and we have no margin left...

Re:management speak decoded...

[Ubergrendle]

Conservative estimates indicate Canon has about 50% of the DSLR market, whereas Nikon has 30-35% at this time. So that leaves a remaining 15% to be divided amongst: Olympus, Pentax, Fuji, KM, Sigma, and a few other minor players.

I suspect the 'innovations' in the DSLR market are going to slow down a bit now, the 18mo lifecycle for $1k - $10k bodies will probably stretch to 24mos, maybe 36mos. Unfortunately w/ several hundred thousand 350D Rebels and D70s cameras having been sold, the early adopters have already bought into mount systems, making prospects of explosive growth for one of the niche players unlikely... if you're not profitable now, you won't ever be.

Sony might do something interesting with the KM patents their acquiring, but the odds are against it.

And yes, DSLR bodies might become cheaper...the D50 is a good entry level, perhaps a D500 for Nikon at the $500 point might be possible in the future... but if you're selling $500 cameras, you're not tapping a segment that will buy $1000 lenses regularly.

Sad to see Minolta go...

[milgr]

I have an old Minolta SLR camera. It is roughly as old as me (well, it could conceivably be older, I don't really know). All the important controls are manual -- focus, aperature, speed. It takes great pictures. Much better than my wife's auto-everything camera. Not that I have a flash.... but who needs a flash when you can brace the camera against a wall or a knee and take really long exposures?

Upon first hearing the news that Minolta was getting out of the camera business, I thought, time to upgrade.

On the other hand, the only thing I buy for this camera is film.

My one complaint is its size. I guess you can't get everything.

Quality isn't the issue. Fun is.

[Control Group]

*sigh*

And another one bites the dust.

I've got two Minolta 35mm film SLR cameras, (an old 7-series, and a much newer Maxxum 4). They're not professional-grade cameras by any means, but I like them far more than any digital camera I can afford to buy. Minolta dropping out of the camera business entirely probably means that finding accessories for them is going to suddenly become difficult.

And I still need a good flash for the Maxxum, as well as various lenses for each.

Looks like I'm being left behind by the march of technology, and it's really too bad. I won't argue that digital isn't better than film in almost all respects, but I really enjoy making B&W prints in my little darkroom (and, honestly, I have yet to see a digital camera that can give you authentic-looking B&W. I don't know the technical reason, but I can always tell the difference between a picture that's just been desaturated, and an actual B&W). The more niche it becomes, the less I'm going to be able to afford it.

*shrug*

Call me a luddite, but losing the environment wherein you can buy a decent camera and expect your kids to use it after they grow up in favor of the fast-paced furor of modern electronics sort of depresses me. It used to be all about the photographer: a talented amateur with a fairly cheap 35mm camera could take pictures all but indistinguishable from those taken by an average pro if they just used quality film/paper. That is, the stuff that made all the technical difference on the print was the cheap stuff. Now, the stuff that makes all the technical difference on the print is the expensive stuff.

I'm not a serious artist, and I can't afford to spend serious artist money on just a fun thing I like to do. Looks like the market is squeezing my hobby out.

Re:Quality isn't the issue. Fun is.

[Shimmer]

It used to be all about the photographer: a talented amateur with a fairly cheap 35mm camera could take pictures all but indistinguishable from those taken by an average pro

I think this is still true in the digital age. Why wouldn't it be?

Re:Quality isn't the issue. Fun is.

[Control Group]

Because Fuji ISO-100 35mm film yields negatives of the same informational quality regardless of camera. The camera is just a tool the photographer uses to help frame and compose the image, then to help properly expose the film. The difference between a professional film camera and a amateur film camera is only the amount of work the photographer needs to do to get a given photograph. The amateur can buy (relatively inexpensive) quality film, and take up the camera's slack with elbow grease.

With digital cameras, however, no matter how much work the amateur is willing to do, he cannot make a 3 megapixel camera take 10 megapixel pictures. Other things being equal, a 10 megapixel picture is simply superior to a 3 megapixel picture.

To analogize: switching from a $200 film camera to a $2000 film camera is sort of like switching from DOS+Assembly to, say, Win2k+IIS+VBScript to generate active server pages. You can accomplish exactly the same goals either way, but one tool makes it easier on the developer. The switch from a $200 digital camera to a $2000 digital camera, however, is like switching from a 486 with 64MB of RAM on a 28.8kbps connection to a Dell Poweredge 6800 on a dedicated OC3 to serve your active server pages. No amount of work is going to make the 486 do as well at, say, streaming video as the 6800.

The baseline quality is now inherent to the expensive part (the device), rather than to the inexpensive part (the medium).

Re:see definition of "paradigm shift"

[Thag]

if you can find ANY new film cameras, ANY, offered in one year, it will be a major surprise. I suspect canon and nikon will offer one more digital back for their F lines, and that will be it. the major players in one-use supermarket cameras will be offering digital one-shots by next christmas, probably on the order of grill gas bottles... pay $50 up front, swap the camera for $10 when this one is full.

I doubt the film market will disappear, but it will probably wind up being a boutique industry. You'll be able to find camera places in major cities, and there will be companies that specialize in manufacturing replacement parts for discontinued major brands. That's getting cheaper to do all the time with computer aided manufacturing.

But yeah, they'll probably stop selling film cameras in the discount stores fairly soon.

Jon Acheson

Re:Evolution of the Species

[drooling-dog]

...but I just don't have the time/space for my darkroom anymore.

We've become accustomed now to imagery being cheap, fast, and easy. It makes us look at the effort required to achieve a chemical photograph - and maybe even the value of the result - a lot differently.

Re:no loss really

[Anonymous Coward]

"of course the sad day for digital has already come,... all these people with top of the line digital SLRs that have no clue how to use them "

How typical of the elite mindset. I own a digital slr (proud owner of a Canon Rebel XT) and have no clue on how to use it besides auto mode. But guess what! Digital SLR'S made photography actually fun fun for me and actually pushed me to learn more. So, sad day? I don't know it's your call I guess

The second leaving

[Jerry Coffin]

Quite a few comments, but none has noted one interesting point. At least AFAIK, this makes Konica the first company to truly leave the camera business for a second time.

There have been a number of others that have, for example, started out as German companies, then the name was bought and a Japanese company sold cameras under that name for a while, and finally the whole venture died, but Konica (the company itself, not just the name) has now exited the camera business for a second time. I'm not sure, but offhand, I can't think of anybody else who's really done that.

My other minor observation is that this seems a prime example of a theory I've been building for quite a while: to do well in the market, doing brilliant things matters a lot less than avoiding doing much that's really stpuid.

Konica and Minolta combined absolute brilliance with astounding stupidity. Canon (for one) has never introduced a feature like autofocus that has completely transformed the market, but they've mostly avoided massive stupidity, so the dominate the market.

Those who care to look might easily see something similar in comparing Apple with Microsoft.