Nikkei shared its Industry Map 2027 with a ranking of global camera shipments.

1. Canon – 4.5 million units (45.7%, +2.5%)

2. Sony – 2.42 million units (24.6%, -3.9%)

3. Fujifilm– 1.16 million units (11.8%, +2.8%)

4. Nikon – 880,000 units (8.9%, -2.8%)

5. Panasonic – 430,000 units (4.4%, +1%)

6. Ricoh Imaging – 210,000 units (2.1%, +1.3%)

7. OM Digital – 150,000 units (1.5%, -0.4%)

Image credit: mirrorlessrumors.com

It is worth noting how incredibly Nikon is no longer the third player in the market, surpassed by Fujifilm. This is probably due to the incredible success of the luxury compact camera Fujifilm X100VI.

This retro-designed camera that mimics the style of rangefinder cameras has broken every historical sales record for the brand and is often hard to find in stores. It is compact only on the outside: it packs a 40.2-megapixel sensor and in-body image stabilization and offers Fujifilms famous historical color profiles without the need for post-production.

More and more manufacturers are launching vintage-style compact models. On September 9 OM formerly Olympus will launch the successor to the legendary PEN.

for the rest, Canon is firmly in the lead, Sony has a slight dip and the others... are fighting in the mud 🥲

still remember a couple of years ago, when compact cameras were pronounced dead and buried for good in one such report - and of course, in our cozy forum pages. 😁😁😁

Isn’t 2026 the year we were all supposed to be shooting underwater on our phones, BTW? 😁

Edited 1 hour ago1 hr by bghazzal

25 minutes ago, bghazzal said:

still remember a couple of years ago, when compact cameras were pronounced dead and buried for good in one such report — and, of course, in our cozy forum pages. 😁😁😁

Isn’t 2026 the year we were all supposed to be shooting underwater on our phones, BTW? 😁

We are not very good at predicting market trends 🙃

And anyway I will never tire of emphasizing that the number of smartphones sold is 1.25 billion units, while the entire photography sector, including compacts and mirrorless cameras, did not even reach 10 million. Two orders of magnitude.

Technology advance comes from smartphones.

51 minutes ago, Davide DB said:

We are not very good at predicting market trends 🙃

And anyway I will never tire of emphasizing that the number of smartphones sold is 1.25 billion units, while the entire photography sector, including compacts and mirrorless cameras, did not even reach 10 million. Two orders of magnitude.

Technology advance comes from smartphones.

Yes, absolutely.
Smartphones are vastly bigger in volume and a huge amount of imaging technology research is now clearly driven by the smartphone market.

Where it's a little weak in the knees is to use this fact to predict that the dedicated cameras will effectively disappear fast.
It seems to me the market is evolving into something rather different: smartphones dominate general-purpose photography, while dedicated cameras survive - and in some segments are actually growing again ( built-in-lens camera shipments is forecast to grow by 13.6% this year for instance by Japan's Camera & Imaging Products Association) - because they offer things a phone can't, despite being a cumbersome dedicated tools.

And then we also have action cams on the video front, which in a way seem to be mutating into some high end neo-camcorder function.

I guess it's more about different tools for different purposes, and this makes predictions a little more complicated as society, users and uses evolve as well. Video, as a medium rather than a format, has little to do now with what it was 20, even 10 years ago.
And we see weird things in the music sector as well.

I suppose the lesson is that predicting market dominance is easier than predicting actual market extinction.

When a smartphone arrives that can trigger an external TTL strobe...

1 hour ago, bghazzal said:

Yes, absolutely.
Smartphones are vastly bigger in volume and a huge amount of imaging technology research is now clearly driven by the smartphone market.

Where it's a little weak in the knees is to use this fact to predict that the dedicated cameras will effectively disappear fast.
It seems to me the market is evolving into something rather different: smartphones dominate general-purpose photography, while dedicated cameras survive - and in some segments are actually growing again ( built-in-lens camera shipments is forecast to grow by 13.6% this year for instance by Japan's Camera & Imaging Products Association) - because they offer things a phone can't, despite being a cumbersome dedicated tools.

And then we also have action cams on the video front, which in a way seem to be mutating into some high end neo-camcorder function.

I guess it's more about different tools for different purposes, and this makes predictions a little more complicated as society, users and uses evolve as well. Video, as a medium rather than a format, has little to do now with what it was 20, even 10 years ago.
And we see weird things in the music sector as well.

I suppose the lesson is that predicting market dominance is easier than predicting actual market extinction.

I couldn't agree more. Often technological replacement is confused with the extinction of an entire sector.

The idea that smartphones would completely wipe out cameras was based on the assumption that taking a picture is just recording pixels. Following this linear reasoning, if the phone takes good photos for 99 percent of daily situations, the dedicated camera no longer has a reason to exist.

Instead, something very similar to what happened in the music market with vinyl is happening. The more mobile photography becomes automated, compressed, and dominated by aggressive computational algorithms, the more people rediscover the value of the physical object, manual control, and an image with a natural optical rendering. "organic" 😁

Just look at kodak and film stocks. it was declared dead but now a lot of movie are shot again on film stock.

The phenomenon of the Fujifilm X100 series and Ricoh GR is explained precisely like this: Fuji has intercepted a huge audience that wants the "organic" shooting experience and ready-to-use color rendering, without necessarily having to spend the evening developing RAW files on a monitor. The overtake of Nikon in terms of volumes tells exactly this change of priority in the consumer market.

I guess that most of the X100 and GR customers comes form smartphones and not from hard core photography.

The roles have simply sorted themselves out in the end. The smartphone acts as an omnipresent visual notepad and finances technological research on sensors, the dedicated camera remains the tool of those who look for deliberate action and control of parameters, and action cams and products like the Osmo Pocket have taken the place of old camcorders for mobile video.

Smartphones may cannibalize large numbers, but they will hardly erase dedicated tools as long as the latter continue to offer a user experience that a flat touch glass can never replicate.