Many of us have watched as the price of cameras have gone astronomical. I see people with $3,000 camera bodies attached to $8,000 lenses hanging around their necks. This is insane.  You can buy used cars – even two of them – for what some people carry around their necks!

Micro four thirds, the lower tier of the interchangeable lens market (and what I shoot) has pushed cameras up to the $1,000 to $2,000 price range with hints that even higher priced offerings may emerge in 2019.

Online camera reviews breathlessly tout the latest camera offerings with more megapixels, better focusing or what have you, but which rarely make much difference to anyone except professionals and some high end amateurs. All those online review sites have become “latest tech you gotta have” pushers. And why not? They make their money with affiliate links, earning a commission each time someone clicks through to Amazon or B&H and makes a purchase. They are the camera gear equivalent of drug pushers!

The pressure to upgrade is everywhere – and few people recognize how they are played to spend more money.

If you are a pro, who earns money with your photography, you are in a different league than most people out taking photos. You can likely cost justify your purchase of the latest high priced gear.

Today, Flickr announced they will delete photos from free accounts with over 1,000 photos as of February 5, 2019. If you want to keep your photos, you’ll have to upgrade to “pro” – and oh, they doubled the price on that too! Again, for a pro that’s making money on their photography, that’s not a big obstacle. For all others, Flickr has decided the customer hostile approach to their business is the right one for Flickr, but may be not so much for users.

The message from Flickr is clear – they are no longer interested in the casual hobbyist market. They are after the “pro” market and some high end amateurs who can cost justify the new prices.

Meanwhile, as we already know, camera phones have obliterated the point-n-shoot market so all camera makers have been moving up scale. The reality is that beyond certain megapixel limits, most of us will not see personal benefits from buying new cameras and lens priced in multiples of $10,000 🙂 The camera makers are steering their business towards high end photographers willing to shell out the big bucks.

The photo industry seems to be bifurcating into smart phone shooters who share on Instagram, and high end “pros” (or pro wannabes) on Flickr and other platforms.

What will happen to the middle ground segment? There are still APS-C cameras and micro four thirds but even they seem to be moving upscale.

The casual/hobby market is moving up scale very rapidly – and may leave many photographers behind as photography becomes an activity limited to the high heeled elite of the future. Or just using smartphones …

A related issue is that the old idea of buying a product has gone away – today we merely rent them. Adobe did this with their photo editing tools. Flickr is doing this with photo sharing. Microsoft has done this with Office. Before long, we will be paying considerable amounts of money – forever – as we get locked in to tools used to create and access our own content. How long before we are charged an annual fee to use certain features of our cameras, such as say, SLOG or VLOG video color grading? This seems to be the holy grail of the industry now – lots and lots of user fees!

Nikon discontinues entire Nikon 1 line, including cameras and lenses. Consumers who bought into Nikon’s 1″ sensor system stuck with a dead end lens system.

As seen in this chart, the camera line de facto existed for about 4 years, from its introduction in September 2011 to its last new camera introduction in late 2015:

Source: Has Nikon Shuttered Its 1 Series Line of Mirrorless Cameras?

After 2015, they milked money from their customers before abandoning them.

Nikon executives repeatedly said during the past 3 years that the Nikon 1 line was not dead. And then in July 2018, they killed it, abandoning users who had invested in the Nikon 1 lens systems.

Many of the Nikon 1 lenses had a design defect – they used a very tiny nylon gear to control the lens aperture. Over a fairly short time frame, these gears began to dry out, crack and break, resulting in the aperture being set to the maximum closed position – and rendering the lens unusable.

Some private parties set up shop to fix the lenses (notably MYDC in Taiwan) by replacing the damaged gears with a tiny brass gear that will not break. Nikon screwed up with the cheap nylon gears, ultimately leading to all of their lenses eventually failing. Rather than address it, they killed the entire product line and said to the customers “Hah hah – sucks to be you! And oh, we no longer support or repair any Nikon 1 products!”

I owned several Nikon 1 cameras and lenses. I’ve had 2 of the lenses repaired by MYDC and am using some other DX lenses with an adapter. Otherwise, my Nikon 1 system would now be useless.

This impacted me and I will not again buy a Nikon product. At NAB, I spoke with every camera manufacturer except Olympus. I mentioned that someone needed to produce a camera body with a software development kit. All – except Nikon – were interested in the idea.

The Nikon rep told me with a straight face that Nikon would never allow third party products to potentially damage the Nikon brand name.

I could hardly contain my laughter – you mean like how the iPhone was ruined by third party app developers? Hah hah!

That exchange told me Nikon management are dimwits. Since then their revenue plummeted and it was not because of third parties harming the Nikon brand – it was because Nikon shot its brand in the foot.