Would you drag two heavy DSLR bodies with heavy lenses if you can have a DSLR-quality device that crams 16 lenses in one slim smartphone-sized body? It’s a rhetoric question.
A recent market report Software Defined Digital Camera Market envisions disruption in DSLR/Mirrorless camera market coming from two directions:
- OS-powered dedicated photography device with Software Development Kit (SDK) that available to third party developers and allows building wide range of applications
- A dedicated computational photography device acquiring image through a multitude of micro lenses and processing multiple inputs into a high quality high resolution image. Currently the best example to illustrate the concept is Light L16 camera (bottom frame).
The report measures impact of software-defined photography devices on the interchangeable lens camera market and report’s conclusions may spoil a day of Canon/Nikon/Sony/Olympus/Fujifilm executives. The report projects revenue loss of $11 Billion in the period 2019-2024 for those DSLR/Mirrorless camera manufacturers that will fail to adjust to new reality. It may seem like exaggeration but none of the famous photography brands were ready when digital technology hit hard and fast analog cameras.