Digital Camera Market Overview
Digital Camera Market Overview
Digital Camera Market Overview
Digital Camera Market Overview
Digital Camera Market Overview
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Recently, digital camera vendors and industry watchers have noticed that consumer adoption of digital cameras, as a replace-
ment for film cameras is progressing at a much faster pace than many suspected just one year ago. In past years, the Japan
market has led consumer adoption trends and the U.S. has been approximately one year behind. In many cases, this has
allowed the Japan market to become a model of adoption to other regional markets. The primary difference between the U.S.
and Japan markets is the extent of Internet adoption and we know that the Internet has been a primary driver of digital camera
adoption in the U.S. For the first time since consumer digital cameras were introduced, the U.S. market in 1999 outsold all
other regional markets.
This past summer, an online survey conducted in Japan among digital camera users, indicated that in most cases, the use of
digital cameras leads to a corresponding reduced use of conventional cameras and film. According to this independent survey,
sixty percent of respondents stated that they were using film cameras less since acquiring a digital camera.
Adoption of digital cameras over the past four years has been astounding and dwarfs the adoption growth rate of other
ubiquitous devices such as inkjet printers and scanners. By 2002, consumer digital cameras will surpass flatbed scanners in
yearly worldwide adoption and this will have taken just seven years in comparison to twelve years for flatbed scanners to reach
this equivalent adoption rate. The Imerge Consulting Group worldwide forecast now puts consumer digital camera shipments
at over 50 million units by 2005. It took PC’s over fourteen years to reach this level of penetration. By comparison, digital
cameras will reach this same penetration in nine years.
In 1999 alone, worldwide consumer digital camera shipments, excluding toy cameras exceeded 5.8 million units and repre-
sented over $2.9 billion in street valued revenue. In the U.S., unit shipments exceeded 2.5 million representing over $1.3 billion
in street valued revenue with a projected five-year compound average growth rate, (CAGR) out to 2005 of 39.8%. (All sources:
Imerge Consulting Group - 2000)
Plateaus of Adoption
Unit shipments and revenue only tell part of the dynamic story
of digital cameras. The adoption of digital cameras has oc-
curred in stages or plateaus, driven entirely upon technical
advances. The first plateau occurred with the introduction of a
viewable color LCD, providing instant gratification to consum-
ers in 1995.
With the second plateau of adoption in 1996, Olympus set out
to move digital cameras away from being just novelty products
for viewing images, to products people could actually benefit
from, by providing the industry’s most regarded “optical path”.
The optical path is a combination of lens quality, internal opto-
electronics, image processing (algorithms), and color science,
