Nikon, Sony and Panasonic new April product announcements to be delayed?

Nikon Sony and Panasonic are the three companies that should announce new mirrorless products in April. But the earthquake disaster may will force them to delay the new product announcement.

Nikon officially suspended the operations at the Nikon plant at Natori in Sendai “We are unable to announce how soon the operation will resume due to the regional interruption of life-lines although endeavor for restoration are under the way by some of our maintenance personnel.“. And “Injury is reported to some of our group employees. We are currently continuing to gather safety information of our personnel and its family members.“

Panasonic said that “A few employees working at the Fukushima factory, the Sendai factory of AVC Networks Company and at the Koriyama factory of Panasonic Electronic Works received minor injury. Some part of the ceiling and wall were damaged, but there has been no fire or collapse. As regards the impact on our business operations we are in the process of investigation“

Sony halted and evacuated six factories in northeastern Japan: “The company is assessing the impact of power outages and damage to its facilities in the region, which make Blu-ray discs, magnetic heads and batteries.“

More rumors about the “Nikon Coolpix PRO” mirrorless coming in April

Image from a Nikon patent (Source: Nikonrumors.com)

A month ago we told you that Nikon would announce their new mirrorless system in April. Now Nikonrumors got new confirmation from their sources: “Today I received some information from a reliable source that Nikon indeed will be targeting professional users with their mirrorless solution rather than the consumer market. I was told that the announcement will be in the next few weeks.“

We from Mirrorlessrumors do believe that Nikon’s “PRO” system will not be a full frame nor an APS-C sensor based system. They will more likely use a smaller 2.5 crop sensor (Micro Four Thirds has a larger 2.0 crop sensor). It sounds like PRO is more a marketing suffix :)

Latest rumors: Panaosnic 25mm lens, Samyang fisheye lens and Pentax will join mirrorless

There have been three new rumros about upcoming Mirrorless products:

1) Panasonic will announced the 25mm f/1.4 lens this summer (Source: Amateur Photographer)
2) Samyang announced the development of the 7.5mm f/3.5 Micro Four Thirds lens (Source: 43rumors)
3) Pentax is considering developing a mirrorless interchangeable lens camera. (Source: PhotoRadar)

Reminder: The next products to be announced are the Panasonic G3 in late March and the Sony NEX-C3 early April.

Olympus data shows the worldwide mirrorless share (via Megapixel)


Image courtesy: Megapixel

At a presentation in Israel Olympus disclosed some nice graphs. First of all they did show the graph above with the worldwide Mirrorless shares (Olympus calls them “Pen-type”). And as you can see on Megapixel (Click here) Mirrorless cameras are very popular in Asia.

Olympus clear message is that Mirrorless is THE future and classic DSLR will be a niche within 5-10 years. One more thing, a PRO pen camera will hit  the market in 2-3 years only!

Samsung almost ready to launch the NX20 and NX200 with new sensor!

According to the Korean magazine “ddaily” the NX20 and the NX200 development almost finished. Both cameras will feature a new Samsung sensor. There are no detailed specs about the sensor although we from MirrorlessRumors “heard” that it will be be close to the 20 Megapixels. The Design of the cameras will be close to the current NX10/11 and NX100 cameras.

Reminder: Samsung already announced that they will release the 18-200mm, 16mm, 60mm Macro, 85mm/f1.4 and 16-80mm lenses within 2011.

More about the mirrorless success (Amateur Photographer and Photoscala)

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.