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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.
means the competition's cameras are too cheap and we have no margin left...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
the same thing happened to 16mm film in the news business around 1978 - 1979. ENG minicams and tape started infiltrating newsrooms, and everybody was saying they'd keep both. we moved our color processor into the basement, and I built a splash pan for the open-bottom drain. frezzolini was saying their next cameras would be computer-controlled and monitored to the extent that you would know which cell of the battery pack was dying.
but this coincided with kodak's deciding to drop E4 for E6 color processing, and E6 was desperately sensitive to water pH. in other words, all of a sudden, your film came out either deep blue or wildly yellow.
this plus the one-time nature of film costs put film out of business in our 8-station tv operation in four months.
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.
glorious silver halide photography, R I P. don't dip a finger to taste the developer any more, it's done.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
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.
Where law ends, tyranny begins -- William Pitt
*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.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
KM will be making DSLRs and glass for Sony (they've been working together since last summer, apparently the first ones will simply be rebranded KM), their consumer point&shoot cameras do indeed appear dead. However, I think the real news here is that Sony may suddenly be a DSLR player. With KM expertise (the 7D and 5D are quite good) in making cameras (and their in-camera anti-shake patents) coupled with Sony's sensor experience (Sony makes the ccds for everybody save Canon), Sony will suddenly have a vertically integrated DSLR business, with proven and well known lens availability (a big barrier to acceptance of new DSLR by pros and prosumers). Canon is the only other company that matches this. That said, keep the -expletive deleted- memory stick out of 'em!
Film is dead. Digital at 11.
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.
"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