The Online Photographer

I'm not an economist. I don't even have an academic college degree. (I hold a studio a.k.a. professional degree in art.) However, I've long suspected that the received wisdom about the camera market we keep hearing might be fundamentally flawed because of the sources it tends to come from.

In 2023 and 2024, there were approximately 6.1 to 8.3 million non-smartphone cameras sold annually (estimates vary, and might be counting differently), after camera sales rebounded after the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 1975, 50 years ago, there were approximately the same number of cameras sold—Google can't find solid figures, though, so I'm just going from lines on charts 'n' graphs; see for instance the lower chart below. It might be closer to 5 million. But something like that. (Also in 1975, the first digital camera was invented by Steve Sasson at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York. It's in the Smithsonian now.)

Of course the idea that 6 million cameras were sold in 2023 is misleading. There are cameras in smartphones. (Now there's a sentence that didn't need to be written if ever there was one.) And 1.22 billion smartphones were sold in 2024.

But sticking with dedicated cameras for the moment: in between 1975 and 2023, the camera market hit what looks like an astounding peak—approximately 121 million units shipped in 2010.

Conventional wisdom so far, although the exact numbers are probably off a bit.

How many?
That peak might be deeply misleading, though, because an estimated 92% of that was digicams, or digital point-and-shoots, a category that has withered to almost nothing since the cameras in smartphones got good. If that figure is right, the rest of the market, the other 8% of that 121 million, amounted to 9.68 million.

But taking all those smartphones into consideration, in a sense the market has perhaps just kept on growing from that 2010 "peak" of 121 million—it's just that all those people aren't buying cameras-as-cameras any more. Cameras have become included-in-the-price smartphone accessories. The cameras consumers are buying aren't being made by old-line dedicated camera manufacturers, but by Apple and the rest of the phone makers. Presumably, if cameras and phones had continued being separate devices, a certain percentage of that 1.22 billion would have been dedicated camera sales. If cameras and phones had continued being separate devices and cameras had continued being counted separately, maybe 2010 wouldn't have been the peak at all. Maybe even more cameras would have been sold in 2014 and in 2018 and so on. No one knows.

And if ILCs and dedicated cameras went from 6 million in 1975 to 9.68 million in 2010 to 6 million in 2023, then the market for the kind of cameras we tend to care about hasn't really changed quite as much as we tend to think. In that case, then much of the dire news about the cameras companies sliding downhill since 2010 is a result of some combination of a.) the loss of digicam and point-and-shoot sales, and b.) the effects of the pandemic.

We're not the market, we're a subset of the market
Where that hurts us—enthusiasts—is that mass sales to the mass market used to subsidize the creation of "good" cameras for us "good" photographers. No longer. Now, Apple and the other smartphone makers are reaping most of the mass market sales, and they're not subsidizing the Z8 or the X-T5 or the rest.

But if all this is anywhere close to right, then the graph—very crudely, with only three data points—looks something like this:

The red and blue dots on the far right represent two different estimates (or accurate counts of different things, who knows): the lower one is Nikon's estimate for the whole market in 2023; the higher one is the number I get from AI Overview when I Google "How many cameras were sold in 2024?" Either way, what the graph describes isn't the greatest news, admittedly. It does show a peak in 2010 and a decline to today, although it doesn't show where the actual ups and downs along the way occurred. But it looks a heck of a lot better than a lot of the number-crunchings out there, for instance this chart from CIPA which made the rounds in 2023:

That chart's headline assumes that consumers make a hard distinction between the digicams they used to buy vs. the smartphone cameras they use now. Do they really? Naturally, to CIPA, the "industry" in the headline means its members—that "Members include..." line at the bottom of the chart. But that's looking at it from the perspective of "the industry." Looking at it from the perspective of the consumer, actually consumers just sidestepped seamlessly to a different kind of digicam.

No one knows how many of those 1.22 billion smartphone buyers would have bought digicams last year if that had been the only way to get a camera. But it would be some subset of 1.22 billion. And it might even have been more than that 92% of 121 million in 2010.

More steady than it looks
There are two problems with any analysis of "the camera market," seems to me. It's 1.) that "cameras" got inextricably entangled with another product, smartphones, which everyone also wanted; and 2.) that smartphones are the replacement for digicams from the perspective of the consumer but not from the perspective of the established camera industry.

Speaking as users of "serious" large-sensor ILCs and dedicated cameras, should we really distinguish between small-sensor digicams and small-sensor smartphones? There were some things digicams could do that phones don't. Have an optical viewfinder, for one thing, and a shape and shutter-button position that makes more sense with a human hand. But there are also a lot of things that smartphones can do that digicams couldn't. Send a snapshot to a faraway friend as easily as sending a text for example.

There are, of course, more complications. For instance, Fuji Instax must really mess up the numbers, no offense. Are the various statistical sources of information counting those, or not counting those? I seem to recall that Fuji was said to have sold 10 million Instax cameras in 2019. Those are non-smartphone cameras, but they're not digital ILCs, or cameras of the kind we lot would consider "serious" or useful.

The chart we should be looking at probably looks a lot more like the uppermost chart above, but with more data points and more accurate information. What we want to know is how serious ILCs at the higher end of the market are doing, removing digicams/point-'n'-shoots, Instax, and smartphones from the calculations. In which case the "camera market" actually might look...kinda steady, with normal, explicable fluctuations.

Duh?
If you're even mildly fluent in economics, this post probably sounds doltish and thick, and obvious. If you aren't, I hope I explained my take on it clearly enough that it gets the points across. Well enough so that first group can point out where my errors are!

This line of thought requires trained economists, not to mention a lot more time and better numbers than Google gave me. For starters, we'd need a robust survey of smartphone buyers asking them if they would have also bought a digital point-and-shoot if there hadn't been a camera or cameras in their phone—to give us some sense of how much of a digicam market is blended invisibly into the smartphone sales numbers.

But the takeaway is that things in the camera market might not actually be nearly bad as they seem, or as bad as we're often told they are.

I'm sure others have opinions on this rather, um, loose economic argument...cue Thom & others in 3...2...1....

/Mike's amateur economics

Mike

ADDENDUM: I missed this when it came out at the very end of 2022: "Animated Chart: The Smartphone Effect on the Camera Market" from visualcapitalist.com.

My point, of course, is that smartphone sales ≠ camera sales. But some portion of them do. We just don't know what portion.

ADDENDUM No. 2: By Kees Molders, from Culemborg, The Netherlands:

The following graph, which I made based on the 'Total Shipments of Digital Still Cameras' CIPA report, might shed some additional light on trends since 1999:

To make recent trends a bit more visible in the lower right-hand corner, this graph is stretched along the vertical axis.

Detail

Sales seem to stabilise around 8.5 million cameras, the majority of which are mirrorless cameras. This figure is indeed, as you suggested, on the level of sales of fifty years ago.

The source of various figures from CIPA can be found here. —Kees

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Dave Millier: "In other words, the number of people today who consider themselves serious enough about photography to spend money on expensive dedicated camera gear is about the same as it was in the film era. The 2010 peak represented people who were never really serious photographers, but people who were early adopters of the latest gadgets. Those people moved on to newer and shinier gadgets leaving approximately the same hardcore enthusiasts as in the film era.

"A couple of points about this: firstly, today's hardcore photographers get a lot more camera for their money than you did in the 1970s and no extra film/processing running costs. I would have expected this to have encouraged more people to be 'serious' photographers, but maybe the maximum audience was always limited. More worryingly, the world population of consumers is much larger than it was in the 1970s, so the percentage of serious-photographer types must have dropped accordingly. In a world where first digicams, then smartphones, has democratised photography to the point there are more photos taken every second than the cumulative total of film photographs, the snapshot and photo-sharing industry is extremely healthy, but photography as a serious artistic pursuit/hobby appears to be in retreat. Maybe what pulled a lot of people into the hobby in the past wasn't photography per se, but the lure of fine watchmaker jewellery gear? Maybe the numbers interested in using photography for artistic work was always very limited and continues to be? Certainly, passers by that I interact with on my photo shoots often have no grasp of what I'm trying to achieve: 'why are you photographing that?'

"As someone who never attended any kind of art school (and photography is barely accepted as art in the UK, anyway), I found hobby photography a lonely pursuit as a teenager and I find it an equally lonely pursuit as a pensioner (I literally don't know one other keen photographer I could meet up with locally). Camera clubs and societies are largely made up of social members and non-active photographers in my experience, so not much companionship for the dedicated photographer to be found there. Since the rise of the Internet, it's online where I've made connections with other photographers. Sadly, though, as welcome as this is, it's not really the same as having real life photo pals you can frequently mix with. Some promising news, though. I've been making this point on my favourite forum and found one or two kindred spirits who have given up on camera clubs. With a bit of effort and organisation, we have tentative agreement to arrange a meet up, even though we live far apart (by UK standards)."

Jim Arthur: "This sounds right to me. I’ve been looking at new phones recently and it seems that about half of U.S. buyers emphasize camera performance when shopping for a new smartphone. In 2023, Qualcomm conducted a worldwide survey of 60,000 users to determine the top ten uses for the average smartphone and they found that sharing and sending photos/video came in at number five. The top four uses were Internet search/web browse, phone calls, listening to music (R.I.P. MP3 players) and using social media.

"At this point, many people don’t think about photography much. Its just a handy feature that's always been in their pocket but if it were to suddenly disappear I’m sure they would buy something inexpensive and just good enough."

John: "That period before and up to 2010 was a craze. So many friends asked me at the time what digital camera they should buy. I would ask how many rolls of film they usually shot with the film camera they had. Often the answer was one or two rolls a year. So, I would tell them that a digicam was a waste of money for them. And then they would go and buy one anyway. Never made sense."

Tom Burke (partial comment): "I've been looking at the prices of ILCs, and how they've changed over the years. In 1988 I bought a Canon EOS 650, Canon's first AF SLR (I think the 620 was released at the same time.) I paid around £350 for it. Since then prices in the UK have increased about 2.5 times, so a camera in the equivalent position would cost £350 x 2.5 = £875. Obviously not any kind of accurate figure, but that's a ball park. Let's inflate that a bit to allow for the general depreciation of sterling over the years—let's say somewhere between £1,000 and £1,200. Looking at Canon's lineup today, all I can say is the only cameras they are selling at those prices are lower-end APS-C models. The R8, Canon's entry-level full-frame mirrorless model, has a list price of around £1,600. The R6II, a solid mid-range camera (which is what the EOS 650 ands its successors were) retails at £2,100. Other cameras in their range are way more expensive—the R5 II is nearly £4,500, the R3 is £5,000, and the R1 is nearly £7,000. Crazy money!—and for most people, not 'hobby' money, either. I'm not familiar enough with other manufacturers' ranges to comment on them, but given that it's a competitive market I assume that Canon's prices are in line with the overall market.

"So where does this leave me? Well, with the conclusion that the market for new ILCs is aimed at either professionals who can write these costs off to business expenses (and, in Europe, can reclaim the VAT) or hobbyists with extremely deep pockets. Surely that's a big structural change to the market, even if the numbers are about where they were in the pre-digital era?"