We have a couple of DSLR companies pushing colored bodies as some sort of new wrinkle to try to goose sales. The trend is very visible in Japan, which is a faddish country to start with. Apparently if you can't sell a black DSLR body, you can sell a red one. Or a white one. Or a pink one. Hello Kitty?
Really? When markets start producing different results on purely cosmetic changes, then you're in a different business than the technology business. You're in the fashion business. Heaven knows how many companies have missed turns in fashion. Now combine the two: miss a turn with fashion and miss a turn simultaneously with technology and you're...well, standing about five feet beyond the edge of the cliff and you're about to have one of those Wile E. Coyote moments.
We've already had one interesting illustration of this. Panasonic apparently brought near equal quantities of black, blue, and red G1 bodies into the US at launch. While blue and red DSLR bodies might be selling in Japan, they aren't in the US. What happened was that the black bodies sold out and the blue and red ones had to be discounted to sell. Moreover, having only blue and red bodies available actually lost potential G1 sales here in the US. By the time a black G1 was again readily available, other cameras had come to market. Cameras, like most tech products, have short half-lives. If you don't optimize the sales on day one, you never optimize the sales. Lost sales on day one due to a mistake (not enough brought into the country, wrong styles brought in, etc.) are never fully made up by subsequent moves.
Some of the high-tech style fad is driven by successful products, such as the iPod Nano, currently available in nine colors. But the iPod is a ubiquitous product. When everyone has one, yes, people want to differentiate their's from yours. When you sell 11 million of something in a quarter, you probably ought to have more than one style. I seem to remember a study about this from my MBA program, but my memory isn't serving it up at the moment. Basically, below a certain market penetration, don't differentiate; above a certain market penetration you have differentiate to fully realize potential sales.
My point is that DSLRs simply don't fall into a high enough volume worldwide to try color and paint schemes as a way of producing more sales. Curiously, the Japanese culture may be getting in the way. They differentiate by buying the same thing, but customized in some way. That's one way they show their individuality in a group culture. But as the US Panasonic G1 sales showed, that doesn't play everywhere. Here in the US we'll take our Model T's in basic black until the point where everyone has one. Then, and only then do we think much about differentiating cosmetically.
I've written this before, but the camera companies are just not global companies yet. They sell things globally, but they don't act like global companies.