The Death of Good Cameras: What I Got Right, and What I Oversimplified

A new edition of the Simon Dudley archive, pairing an original article with a present-day follow-up.

Then: The death of “good” cameras

Originally published on LinkedIn on 2015-11-24. The historical text below is preserved as written, including its contemporary claims and author information.

Recently I got married

We had 150 guests at the wedding and about 148 cameras (there were a couple of toddlers who I don’t think had smart phones, but that’s only a guess).

For one afternoon my beautiful bride and I owned the internet, or at least a small corner of it while approximately 7,453 photos of our wedding were posted to social media.

We had an official photographer and we’re looking forward to seeing those pictures, but at some level the moment has past. Everyone who wanted to could see 7,453 photos of us did. Time was at some level more important than quality.

Except the quality was great

I own a fantastic Canon DSLR camera, and a great compact (Canon S100) and an iPhone. I decided not to take the DSLR on honeymoon, it was just too bulky. I did take the compact and the iPhone (of course). Funny thing happened though. I took zero pictures with the compact. The iPhone had a better screen, slow motion, better exposure control and panorama shot.

The battery on the iPhone lasts a week !!!!

Now if you’ve ever been on a cruise ship you’ll know they charge like a wounded bull for data so the phone stayed in Airplane mode all week (wow that battery lasts a long time doing that!!

So I used the iPhone even though it wasn’t about uploading the pictures instantly. It was about simply being better at taking pictures. Oh and I never had to explain how to use the iPhone when getting someone else to take a photo for me.

My wedding photography didn’t use an DSLR either

I was somewhat surprised to discover that the wedding photographer didn’t use a DSLR either. She had a full frame sensor on a SONY a7R. She loves it, the quality is as good as any DSLR full frame camera (SONY makes most of the world’s sensors), but with none of the hassle of a mirror that needs flipping out of the way every time you take a picture (or shoot a movie)

Sell those Canon and Nikon shares

DSLR sales are down 17% in the last 12 months and have been declining for years. This is not a healthy market to be in. And it’s all their own fault. Canon and Nikon have built a perfect Excession Event market. Two companies fighting each other while others come along and redefine what success looks like in the market. Believe me, they will make my next keynote.

So what?

This got me thinking. If Canon and Nikon are losing out to solid state camera like the SONY a7R or even to my iPhone what chance have the Video Conferencing PTZ cameras got?

After all capturing a good quality image in a meeting room must be a lot easier than the million options that an DSLR needs to cope with.

Mute Button

The most powerful way to stop a person speaking on a Video Conference call is to move the camera to look at them. The look of fear and loathing on the face of pretty much everyone (I’m personally immune, but most are not) is palpable.

I think it’s one of the reasons  might well be onto something for large rooms and why devices like the ConferenceCam Connect from Logitech are gaining popularity. They capture the image without intimidating the users into silence. They are also orders of magnitude cheaper and fit perfectly into flexible huddle rooms. They are effectively the iPhones for meeting rooms.

There will always be “good” cameras

The death of the “good” camera is not here yet, but the amount of work possible in Software enabling a simpler device to capture the image is impressive now and will only increase at a Moore’s Law rate in the coming years. For the largest of rooms, for auditoriums and some specialised environments they will be necessary. But for that team chat in a standard huddle room the solid state camera is ideal. 

About the Author: Simon Dudley

Simon is a contrarian. He makes a habit of being the guy who questions the orthodoxy, the guy who doesn’t believe it just because the good and the great said it’s true. This has not always been good for his ascent up the corporate greasy pole. However it’s been very good for his employers if they are prepared to listen.

The Book The End of Certainty "How to thrive when playing by the rules is a losing strategy" explains why groupthink and the doing what you’ve always done is no longer the right move.

To keep tabs on his work please follow him on: ExcessionEvent.com

View the original LinkedIn article

Now: the follow-up

In 2015, I wrote an article called “The death of good cameras.”

It began with my wedding. We had roughly 150 guests and, by my highly scientific estimate, about 148 cameras. Pictures were being shared while the official photographer was still doing the job we had paid them to do.

The point was that the guests and the photographer were providing different kinds of value. The photographer was creating a carefully produced record. The guests were letting people experience something immediately.

That distinction was the interesting part. The headline was doing what headlines do: behaving slightly worse than the article underneath it.

Quality includes everything the customer has to do

On honeymoon, I left my DSLR behind because it was bulky. I took a compact camera and an iPhone. The phone’s usefulness extended beyond the picture itself: it was also the device through which a picture could be shared.

A camera manufacturer might reasonably compare sensors, lenses and image quality. A customer also compares the effort required to carry the device, take the photograph, move it somewhere useful and show it to another person.

Those are different evaluations. The customer is entitled to use theirs.

That is the business lesson I would retain from the original article. A technically superior component can lose appeal when a competing product makes the whole activity easier.

Software changed what small cameras could do

The technical direction also mattered. Computational photography combined imaging hardware with algorithms that could improve the output of a small camera.

A research survey by Delbracio and colleagues describes techniques including burst photography, noise reduction and super-resolution. Its account explains how computing changed the capabilities of mobile imaging. [1]

The useful strategic observation is that the boundaries of the product were changing. A camera could be assessed as a system of capture, processing and use, rather than through the lens and sensor alone.

That does not mean optics stopped mattering. Light still has to reach a sensor. It means the final experience depends on more than the traditional component comparison.

Dedicated cameras did not obligingly disappear

The word “death” needs some qualification.

CIPA’s figures show that its reporting companies shipped approximately 9.44 million digital still cameras in 2025. About 6.31 million were mirrorless cameras and 0.69 million were SLRs. Dedicated cameras were still a market, with substantial differences between categories. These are shipments reported by CIPA members, rather than a count of every camera sold worldwide. [2]

Those figures do not, by themselves, establish why someone bought a camera or how much of an earlier decline smartphones caused.

They do make one correction unavoidable: my original title was too sweeping. The more useful question concerns which customers still value a dedicated camera enough to carry, buy and operate one.

“Better” always needs a user and a task attached to it.

A promising direction is not a winning product

In January 2016, I followed up with an enthusiastic piece about the Light L16. The original explicitly noted that it had not yet shipped and that professional adoption remained uncertain.

That caveat deserves to survive any reuse of the article. It was an assessment of a proposed product and a technological direction, written before the market had delivered its verdict.

A proper retrospective on the L16 should investigate its shipped experience, commercial history and customer response. This draft does not substitute an assumption for that research.

The distinction is useful well beyond photography. You can identify an important technical possibility while still lacking the evidence needed to choose its successful supplier.

The question for your own business

If you sell technology, look at the entire task your customer is trying to complete.

Where do they have to transfer information? What must they learn? What do they have to carry, connect, configure or explain? Which parts of the process disappear if they choose another solution?

That examination can reveal a competitor your product comparison never considered.

The camera story remains valuable because it makes the question tangible. I could appreciate my DSLR and still leave it at home. Admiration is a rather poor substitute for use.

Where have you seen convenience change a market’s definition of quality?

Sources

• Original: The death of “good” cameras, November 24, 2015.
• Follow-up: Death of good cameras, Part II: the Light L16, January 4, 2016.
• [1] Mobile Computational Photography: A Tour, Delbracio, Kelly, Brown and Milanfar, 2021. Used for the technical explanation, not to establish the financial performance of camera brands.
• [2] CIPA: Production and Shipment of Digital Still Cameras, January–December 2025. Total shipments 9,438,876; mirrorless 6,311,054; SLR 690,911. Member-company shipments are not retail sales or the entire imaging-device market.