Cameras and Photography Explained

LEDE ON

Sometimes a week goes by without any interesting or significant camera product announcements, but in which there turned out to be lots of photography-adjacent news. Last week was one of those weeks. Even Apple is now actively reporting supply chain constraints and pricing impacts for future products. Smaller players—which includes all of the camera makers—will have bigger issues. Without further ado:

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Commentary

Sony Makes Buyout Offer for Tamron

I was just about to write a longer article about consolidation when Tamron’s acknowledgement that Sony had made a buyout offer for Tamron hit the news wires. 

This appears to be related to the fact that Tamron recently found itself the target of an aggressive overseas investment firm (Effissimo Capital Management, based in Singapore), which has now managed to gobble up over 17% of Tamron’s stock. It’s a long, complex story, but Japanese companies generally regroup when under foreign ownership attack. Sony, which has the second biggest ownership stake in Tamron, likely made its US$1.2 billion buyout offer for Tamron partly to keep Tamron Japanese. It doesn’t hurt that Tamron is an integral part of the E-mount success, and that Tamron’s second biggest relationship is with Nikon, who is a coopetitor with Sony (i.e. Nikon and Sony have both a cooperative and competitive relationship that dates back to the previous century). 

Be careful about what you infer (or what you believe from other sites’ speculations). This is probably mostly about Big Money Seeking Bigger Money. Effissimo currently stands to make a huge profit from any Sony-buys-Tamron deal. Indeed, the fact that an investment firm made that kind of investment in the first place is that they understood Tamron’s stock to be undervalued, and they would be agitating for anything that makes the stock value go up. And up it has gone. After sitting just below the 1100 yen mark for most of the past year, it now is at 1434 yen (though that’s somewhat above Sony’s offer). 

For it’s part, Tamron has issued a statement indicating that they are contemplating Sony’s takeover bid. In essence, that short press release says that Tamron has established a committee to consider options at increasing corporate value. In other words, they’ll consider Sony’s offer, but they’ll explore other ways of making their stock more valuable, as well.

More than one site has written that Sony would grow their investment value by taking over Tamron, but I’m not so sure about that. The only way Tamron’s value to Sony would grow as a subdivision would be that there’s continued expansion of third-party offerings in other mounts. If this is just about combining the existing Sony and Tamron lens lines to make an uber lens lineup while getting rid of the offerings for competitive mounts, that has failure written all over it.

Tamron currently has 25 lenses, and Sony has 79. No mount has ever had over 100 current lenses offered by its maker, even back when the volume of interchangeable lens cameras selling each year was well more than double what it is today. There was a reason why lens lineups tended to be somewhere in the 60-70 range from each maker. As you move beyond that, you essentially start diluting your efforts because you lower individual lens volumes, particularly when you have as much overlap as the Sony/Tamron lines would produce.

Which brings me to consolidation. What I was going to write is this: the current and projected dedicated camera market can’t sustain the number of players currently producing products. 6m units (last year was 6.3m mirrorless units) with one competitor attempting to control 50% of that (Canon), makes for very low volumes for the smaller players. Canon and Sony also have their professional video sides which expand their mounts some. But Fujifilm, Nikon, OMDS, and Panasonic are all struggling to get to a truly sustainable mount volume (which I’d judge to be something on the order of 1.5m units).

So add things up. Let’s assume: Canon 50%, Sony 35%. In even a 7m unit volume, that leaves only 1m units for the remaining players. It’s the old Reis & Trout “third largest competitor in a market struggles to remain profitable” problem. What tends to happen is marginal players either go away, consolidate, or create a new product category. You may remember that from the late film SLR days or the late DSLR days. Well guess what, we’re back to it again: not enough volume for the number of players in the game. (But see final comment in article, below.)

Moreover, it doesn’t help that the Chinese are trying to elbow their way to the table. Initially through lenses, but it’s only a matter of time before they’ll try cameras, too. That will only increase the consolidation pressure, as the Japanese companies would rather consolidate in Japan than be acquired by foreigners or go away entirely. Which leaves us with really only four possible consolidations at the camera level:

• Fujifilm and Nikon — ironically, the first non-Kodak digital interchangeable lens cameras were a cooperative effort between these two companies. But the problem here is this: while the Nikon RED acquisition would be a really nice fit for Fujifilm, having APS-C, full frame, and medium format offerings would be a marketing nightmare.
• Nikon and Panasonic — Panasonic’s ego on the professional video side is the problem here. In my opinion, RED is now a more viable way forward than Panasonic’s weird multiple-mount pro efforts. But I don’t see Panasonic’s professional video side being able to admit that, let alone go alone with it. 
• OMDS and Panasonic — this assumes, of course, that m4/3 remains viable, which I’m not sure it is. m4/3 already has become niche, and it’s a small niche to start with. I don’t see this consolidation possibility as being meaningful in any way. It likely wouldn’t solve the problem of too little volume.
• Sony and Nikon — The level of cooperation between these two companies is much more than people realize, though both sides now have big egos on the high-end camera and pro video side. I think for this sort of consolidation to be possible, Nikon would have to essentially fail at multiple levels and require a savior. 

Will any of those happen? I’d place the odds fairly low, even though history and MBA wisdom says it should happen. While some may argue that the auto industry manages to have many players, vehicles are also much more expensive devices with far higher unit volumes and plenty of exploitable niches. The smaller the overall market and the lower the cost of the product, the more that the market can’t sustain many profitable players.

Without consolidation, there’s a high possibility that more than one of the smaller players becomes irrelevant in digital cameras. In order of that happening, it would go OMDS first (some might argue it’s already there), Panasonic second, Fujifilm third, and Nikon fourth. Why not the inverse between the last two? Because digital camera sales are a small part of Fujifilm, while they’re almost a majority at Nikon. Nikon basically has to make cameras work, or it is not a viable business overall.

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News

Nikon Lost Another Patent 

Hot on the heels of losing the RED patent in Japan, Nikon has lost another one.

It’s taken awhile to for the information to get out of China, but in mid-July the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) declared one of Nikon’s key Z-mount patents to be invalid, due to the lack of inventiveness. The particular patent in question, 202010127062.4, is basically the mechanical design patent for the Z-mount, which is the one that defines the four fins that are used to align and lock in the lens in place as you twist it in the mount, as well as the position of the electronic contacts. As far as I can tell, this patent does not apply to the communications used on the pins, which is really the way a lens becomes fully compatible with a camera. 

What other sites aren’t disclosing (or just plain getting wrong) is that the invalid patent ruling comes from Viltrox’s court filing in December 2025, not from Nikon’s suit against Viltrox in February 2026. The claims that “Nikon lost its suit against Viltrox” don’t seem to be supported by the documents currently circulating. What is known is that the CNIPA has declared one of Nikon’s patents as invalid, and that this is the patent contested by Viltrox in December of last year. Losing that patent is likely to impact the case Nikon brought against Viltrox, but there’s no news on that yet.

I’m still unclear as to what Nikon’s intention was in bringing suit against Viltrox in February, and whether the full scope of the original suit has even been fully decided. I suspect, but can’t prove, that this isn’t at all about lenses. Viltrox has, for instance, briefly shown a prototype of a camera, though I believe that was an m4/3 mount camera. But the recent Viltrox 26mm f/2.8 lens suggests another possibility: that Viltrox and Nikon worked together on a lens design, and someone in Nikon upper management felt that relationship got away from them. 

One thing that doesn’t get mentioned often enough is that many companies are suppliers to other companies, and this leads to all sorts of strange relationships. For instance, Nikon is a supplier of glass to many companies outside of their own NIKKOR efforts. I’m not sure if that includes Viltrox, but I know of four other lens makers that acquire glass from Nikon.

But the reality is that the whole patent system—indeed most intellectual property systems—has spiralled well out of control. What I learned about what you can and can’t patent in my years in Silicon Valley seems to have been stood on end, and people are getting patents for things that aren’t novel, non-obvious, or useful, and even for things that don’t meet the basic statuatory requirements. “Prior Art” is now being interpreted by some as “don’t do it exactly the same, just change something small and not meaningful.”  Virtually all lens mounts these days are of the bayonet type and have electrical contacts, so unless size and positioning of those are novel in some meaningful way, I don’t see how a patent for them can stand up in court examination. 

Thus, the result that a Nikon design patent is currently held invalid—which Nikon can appeal—isn’t particularly surprising. If I were adjudicating such a case, I’d be asking pointed questions about what made Nikon's claims unique inventions as opposed to mere modifications of something (bayonet mount) that’s been a design standard for decades.

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Comment

We’re All Shook Up

A 6.8 magnitude earthquake was registered in the Kumamoto prefecture in Japan last week. While that probably doesn’t immediately suggest a connection to the camera market to you, unfortunately, there’s a very significant connection: image sensors and filtration layers. Both Sony Semiconductor (image sensors) and Fujifilm (filtration) had to close their plants after the quake in order to evaluate potential damage.

The reason that this is a comment and not news is that, other than the initial plant shutdowns, we don’t yet know exactly what products might be impacted, nor how long the shutdown might continue. Moreover, the larger image sensors for dedicated cameras tend to get built in batches, so we don’t know specifically which sensors might have been on the fabs at the time of the quake. Sony Semiconductor regards that type of information as proprietary and to my knowledge has never publicly disclosed individual sensor supply issues.

So this story is one for which we won’t really know any details, though we may eventually see some products get postponed or deliveries delayed. 

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Comment

Sorry, No Rebate for You

Tucked away in Canon’s recent 2nd quarter financial results was the point that one of the ways that the quarter was so profitable for Canon is that they got significant tariff rebates (Apple also reported significant tariff rebates, heck, pretty much every company has been doing so). Specifically, 58b yen (US$361m). Did you get any of that money? No.

What’s happening is that most every company is retaining tariff rebates as a way to make their bottom line look better. A few, including Canon, are implying that they’ll use the money retained to offer customers future discounts. However, what they fail to disclose is that they raised their list prices, so those discounts very well may still turn out to make the product more expensive than it was before the tariff situation started in the first place. If you raised prices 15% to cover tariffs, but then discount 10% implying that you’re just giving back rebate money—Canon speak: “we have incorporated promotional activities to expand sales”—you’re effectively still inflating costs to consumers. 

Coupled with the increases in semiconductor and memory costs that the rapid AI expansion is generating, cameras simply sell for more money now than they used to. So far, at least here in the US, consumer spending is still increasing, though some (maybe all) of that increase is coming from higher prices. 

Cameras and photography gear fall under what is called discretionary spending. You don’t require those things to live, as you do for housing, food, transportation, healthcare, and utilities. As inflation and interest rates start eating into your income, you basically have three choices: (1) use savings, (2) borrow more, or (3) lower your discretionary spending. So far, the data says that here in the US people are doing #1 and #2, though they do seem to also have cut back on travel. But neither of those first two choices are sustainable for individuals, so eventually #3 becomes the only remaining method to them. 

CIPA data shows that full frame mirrorless, for instance, is taking a nose dive in shipments to the US recently. Some of that is that there haven’t been (m)any new releases in that category to goose sales, but you also have to wonder how much of that is weakness in discretionary spending starting to show up, too. The lower cost categories (compacts, and crop-sensor mirrorless) are doing better. 

New tariffs on tap aren’t going to help any, either. The potential for more price increases is already present, but the likelihood you’ll ever see a tariff rebate isn’t on the horizon at all.  

LEDE ON

You probably thought I was done writing about tariffs. Sure, the courts overturned the Section 122 tariffs and companies (but not you) have started getting rebates, but the Trump Administration has since imposed additional tariffs under Section 301. Section 122 tariffs were 10% to all countries with a trade deficit to the US, while Section 301 tariffs are 12.5% to 60 countries using forced labor (many dispute this). 

However, there’s now a Trump Playbook in effect at retail. The key play: before tariffs take effect increase your imports so that you have adequate inventory for the foreseeable future and courts get involved again. The idiocy of the recent US trade policies are thus revealed in this latest round: retailers basically are increasing the trade deficits in their sectors short term, which, of course, supposedly someone in DC wanted decreased instead. Can you say “own goal”?

Still, in case you haven’t noticed, the camera companies took the last tariff opportunity to increase their list pricing for many items. As a company, you don’t get many chances to raise pricing and not be the entity that customers complain about. The new higher pricing coupled with tariff rebates from last round have allowed what looks like big discounts. For example, a Nikon Z8 now lists at US$4300 and currently features a US$800 discount.  Yet when it came out it was US$4000, thus today’s discounts are really a net of US$500. 

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Commentary

Blah

One question I see more and more people asking with each new camera introduction is “what are we really gaining?” The days of clear feature or body form gains seem to be mostly over for the moment (at least out of Japan). Yes, more pixels, additional dynamic range, faster frame rates, and better focus performance is pretty much what every press release seems to say these days. But what is the tangible use gained from these? 

Most of it seems to be what I call “moving the margins.” For example, virtually all current cameras can record the full dynamic range of 95% of scenes when set properly. So what if the margin moves to 97% with some dynamic range “breakthrough.” Meanwhile, the most common usage bars are 16mp stills and 4K video. All current cameras can achieve those. Getting to 68mp stills or 8K video full frame sounds impressive—and again, I’ll always take more sampling all else equal—but for the most part I see it wasted by the vast majority of users. They’re buying horsepower they don’t need and might never truly use.

The most significant thing it appears most people are gaining these days is points or miles on their credit card. So sure, if buying a new camera helps you jet off to an exotic location to photograph, go for it. Just realize that you’re no longer in the pragmatic camera user category, but in some new elite 1% of image takers. 

It also strikes me that we’re in a period where customers are confused. What camera makers are doing with new products is just confusing them more. 

First off, we have those Worshipers of More I just mentioned. These customers think larger numbers are the thing that makes a new product better. More pixels, faster frame rates, more dynamic range, ad infinitum. Most folk of this congregation respond with their wallet to more, which ironically, makes what’s in their wallet less.

You have to ask yourself at some point “what am I doing (or going to do) with my photos?” For Web work, 2mp is enough (1920x1080). Indeed, if you start trying to push more then you slow the site showing the image down and you’re past the lowest common denominator display needs. For a great two foot wall print, 24mp is more than enough (6000x4000) and has been for some time, as print technologies hide really low level pixel issues due to ink spread, among other things. So what is it you’re doing?

The same thing is true on the video side. FullHD (1920x1080) is the lowest common denominator output and keeps file and transmit sizes manageable. 4K (3840x2160) is basically the top end of what anyone is going to display these days, even Hollywood. Anything more starts to get very costly. Sure, Netflix, Disney et.al., want us to record in 6K or 8K for them to “future proof” the work, but are you Netflix or Disney? 

So what exactly is it you’re trying to accomplish with your images? Do you need anything more than something like a Z6III to do that? 

Yes, I can find small things that the newer, better, “more something” cameras have that’s interesting and technically takes possible quality up a notch. I report those things regularly in my reviews. But have you noticed something consistent in my reviews of digital cameras over the past 21 years? That “How’s it Handle?” section is where most of the meat is, and time after time I find myself complaining about usability or access issues, not the number of pixels, the frame rate, or the things that made the camera new and “better than before.” 

Japan Inc has tried a number of times to put some marketing behind the usability aspect of a product, mostly to ultimate failure. In doing so—and probably the primary reason their marketing failed—they rarely try the “we listened to our customers and fixed the discovery, usability, accessibility, and convenience problems they told us about” line. That’s partly because they don’t actually know how to listen to customers, but also partly because engineering isn’t about design at most product makers. Tokyo needs to read my Good Design, Good Images article and do a thorough self-examination afterwards.

Many of you will remember that I’ve lambasted people who said a camera made photography fun for them. On the Interwebs I’m known as a Fun Hater. But I’m actually not. The word they’re looking for is “enjoyable.” When was the last time you said you enjoyed using your camera? Because that, too, goes along with what you’re trying to accomplish with your images. You should have a goal for your imagery, and you should enjoy using the tools that help you achieve that goal. 

To my point of view, the camera makers have lost sight of user goals, and is constantly trying to just churn updates and upgrades and dangle them in front of customers hoping to reel in cash. Many of the customers, too, have lost sight of both those things. You should enjoy taking photos, and the gear you use should help you do that, not become a biannual tithe to Tokyo. 

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Reminder

Thom Live Online Returns

At the end of this month, my teaching partner Mark Comon and I will have two free online presentations (presentations will be recorded for those of you who can’t make it to the actual session, but you have to sign up to get the recording). 

The first presentation, on July 28th, is all about the Nikon ZR as a still photography camera. Discover what Nikon never promoted (that the ZR is a very good still camera, but needs attention to how you set it up for that). We even have a ZR present for those that register, plus a drawing for SmallRig add-ons, free byThom books, and an exclusive t-shirt. 

The second presentation, on July 29th, deals with our just-completed photo workshop in Botswana. It was a very different year in 2026 in Botswana, with the primary park completely closed to tourism due to the high water levels caused by this season’s record rains. I’ll be talking about how water defines and refreshes the Okavango, and Mark will be talking about how adventure travel is sometimes actually adventure. But don’t worry. Animals were not harmed in the massive flood, they just moved out of the way, which introduced plenty of new opportunities for those that accompanied us on this year's trip. Meanwhile, I'll tell you the full story about how water shapes the experience in the Okavango. Most people think you just go to Africa for the lions and other predators. But do you know the reason why those predators are actually there in the first place? Turns out that elephant poop, papyrus, where hippos walk, and a host of other odd things all play key roles in defining why the Okavango is one of the best wildlife viewing habitats in the world. I promise there will be no pop quiz at the end, but you’ll still probably want to retain the information I present.