Amateur Photographer published new data about the mirrorless market in UK:
– Almost a quarter of all interchangeable lens cameras sold in the UK during January are mirrorless
– That’s a 160% rise on the same month the previous year
– In 2010, mirrorless accounted for 11% of all interchangeable lens camera sales (one million units sold).

Photoscala analyzed the worldwide camera sales:
– sales of digital cameras is the world’s first nine months of 2010 greatly increased
– Digital cameras are booming in emerging markets
– The Japanese camera maker could surpass the predicted total delivery volume for 2010
– The share of system cameras (Mirrorless+DSLR) is constantly increasing at the cost of fixed lens compact cameras (from 6% in 2005 to almost 11% in 2010).
– 80.000 of all 960.000 system cameras sold in Germany are mirrorless.

Those are the market shares in Japan:
Compact camera is lead by Canon 19.0%, followed by Casio 15.2% and Panasonic 13.9%
DSLR cameras is lead by Canon 32.0% followed by Nikon 29.4% and on third place we have Sony 13.1%.
Mirrorless is lead by Panasonic 38.7% followed by Sony 32.2% and Olympus 29.1%

In summary: Compact cameras will loose market share in favour of cellulars and interchangeable lens systems. The growth of system cameras sales is lead by the mirrorless success.

The GFK Group just relased a few interetsing data about the worldwide mirrorless market:

Japan: “CSC sales in Japan accounted for one third of all changeable lens cameras sold during December and one quarter for 2010 as a whole. The global share of CSCs almost quadrupled in 2010 compared to the previous year to stand at 11%, or almost one million of all changeable lens cameras sold.“

World: “Whilst Japan leads the way, other regions have seen consumers rush to adopt this new camera type. Western Europe (8%), LATAM (19%) and Asia Pacific (18%) have all witnessed a significant increase in share for CSC products.”

With the entries of Pentax and Nikon we can expect an even greater share in 2011. Samsung already said that they expect mirrorless to surpass the DSLR market share within 2015.

Drop Test SAMSUNG NX100 vs SONY NEX-3

Ricoh GXR vs Nikon D7000 at Blog.Paran.

There is a new full E-PL2 review at Cameralabs (Click here).

NEX5 Six Weeks Later (Seriouscompacts).

Panasonic announced a new firmware upgrade for the AG-AF100.

Dpreview (Click here) posted the new Panasonic GF2 review.

Bloomberg reports that “Sony may control about 15 percent of the global market for single-lens-reflex cameras by the end of March, Masashi Imamura, president of the Personal Imaging & Sound Business Group, said in an interview in Tokyo yesterday. ” UPDATE: (Does Sony sum mirrorless and DSLR to reach the 15%?)

And Sony is certain to grow further with the help of new products that will be introduced soon. The next camera should be the NEX-C3 (Source: SonyAlphaRumors). The rumor is backed up by the fact that Sony Japan officially discontinued the [shoplink 100079]NEX-3[/shoplink]!

It is very difficult to get an accurate idea about how well mirrorless cameras are selling in european and american markets. Only the japanese market shares exact percentages and we know that almost 40% of all sold system cameras in Japan are mirrorless. But finally the Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung (GfK) studied the german digital camera market. According to their research 8% of all sold system cameras are mirrorless (year 2010)!

In 2010 nearly 10% of all Germans bought a camera. The sales growth was about of 1.05 percent (total of 8.65 million cameras sold). The demand for SLR cameras and system cameras with interchangeable lenses increased up to 960.000 cameras (up 6.7 percent). Analysis shows that the buyer system for cameras with interchangeable lenses preferred are those that previously photographed with compact cameras. Consumers do professionalize their photo equipment constantly and buy all three to five years a new camera.

via Photoscala.

That wasn’t really a secret anymore. The press release with images have been already posted here two days ago but now it it officially official :)
Samsung will release five new lenses during 2011:
18-200mm F3.5-6.3 ED OIS (May)
16mm F2.4 (July)
60mm F2.8 Macro ED OIS SSA (August)
85mm F1.4 ED SSA (October)
16-80mm F3.5-4.5 OIS (December)

Source: Samsungimaging

Read the whole press release after the break:

We already know that Kodak financial results are getting worse and worse. In an meeting with Wall Street analysts on Feb. 3, Kodak CEO Antonio Perez told that Kodak will likely sell its CMOS image sensor business, which is based in Rochester. Is that another good reason why Leica is shopping for a non-Kodak sensor for their fullframe mirrorless system? Anyway, that news makes the Sony-Leica sensor partnership rumor even more credible…