2013, a dreadful year as camera sales plummet

2013, a dreadful as camera sales plummet: According to numbers recently published by CIPA (the Camera & Imaging Products Association), the camera industry is currently in a spot of bother.

It looks like camera sales took a steep nose dive in 2013 with shipped units down around 40% . Even lens sales took a hit with numbers down around 20%. After crunching the numbers published by CIPA, LensVid decided to make the information a bit more visually accessible and created the video above and the infographic below (click here for full-size).

For 2014, the outlook is even worse according to CIPA. Their current estimate is that overall worldwide camera sales will shrink to 55 million units, down from just under 69 million units in 2013. For comparison, overall camera sales were almost 100 million units in 2012. This means that for 2014, camera sales are expected to go down to almost half the units sold two years before, which is a pretty grim forecast for the camera industry that has been constantly fighting declining sales in the past years.

So what could possibly be driving these numbers? It certainly isn’t due to the word falling out of love with photography and filmmaking. The rise of social media and platforms like YouTube have seen the amount of creative visual content skyrocket in recent years.

While the pros will always look to work with the latest and greatest photographic equipment, consumers and most enthusiasts have probably reached a level of “good enough” with their current gear.  Most current cameras will produce photos and video that more than meets the needs of most people, so why upgrade when your results are already great for family snaps and videos of the kids.

One thing is for sure, if the camera companies want to drive up sales they are going to need to offer people a damn good reason. 4K video could be one of them. Another could be innovation that goes beyond just hardware and delivers deeper integration with cloud storage, social sharing and simple editing.

2013, a dreadful year as camera sales plummet