Sony has 15% of the DSLR Market Share (NEX-3 discontinued)


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]!

In Germany: 8% of all system cameras are mirrorless!

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.

The five new Samsung NX lenses are now official (no surprise)

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:

Read more

Kodak to Sell CMOS Sensor Business? Another good reason for Leica to use Sony sensors?

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…

Someone else goes mirrorless….Gizmon!

There is a new and unexpected player in the mirrorless market, Gizmon! The name of their camera is Half-D and you can find more about it at gizmon-image.com. The camera has three different apsect ratio, landscape, square and vertical. Ten different color modes (like sepia) and it can take videos. It comes along a macro lens, three fisheye converters and a “tunnel-effect” lens. If google translate didn’t fool us than the camera shoulg have 2 Megapixels, a 1,5 inch LCD, ISO 100-400, VGA video. And look at the image below…it’s so small! And yes, it really looks like a mini copy of the ! Image samples are available here: cameratalk.jp.

What do you think about it?

The Kenko booth at CP+. New Ricoh GXR firmware update!

Also Kenko had his nice place at the CP+ show in Yokohama!

With all those CP+ news we missed to post an important new Ricoh GXR firmware update that has been posted two days ago! This update includes the firmware for :
•GXR body (ver. 1.31)
•GR LENS A12 28mm F2.5 (ver. 1.31)
•GR LENS A12 50mm F2.5 MACRO (ver. 1.31)
•RICOH LENS S10 24-72 mm F2.5-4.4 VC (ver. 1.31)
•RICOH LENS P10 28-300 mm F3.5-5.6 VC (ver. 1.31)

The update corrects a few bugs. You can read more about that and download the firmware here: http://ricoh.com/r_dc/download/firmware/gxr/