Apple, a company that is (mostly) running on yearly update cycles, is according to sources, being asked by new CEO John Ternus to “move faster.” My interpretation of that isn’t so much that Ternus wants shorter product cycles, but rather that he wants to see more features and performance out of each future generation. In other words, same cycle, more change.
Contrast that to what we’re seeing in the camera market: longer cycles, less change.
Some of this is not really the fault of the camera makers. They’re at the short end of the semiconductor delivery chain, and the big tech companies are grabbing all the fabrication time and frantically iterating as they do, making new camera image sensors and SoCs (System on a Chip) have longer gestation times. Fujifilm, Nikon, and Sony have all been hit with this slower delivery of new chips. All have products whose original announce dates have been delayed.
That’s not going to change any time soon. Given the small unit quantities involved, it may never change. On top of that, just getting enough memory to produce a camera in production is becoming difficult. You can put in an order for more memory, but it’s not likely to be filled in 2026/2027.
In Nikon’s case, any delay in EXPEED8 (which should debut with the Z9 update) actually pushes the entire schedule for products out further. It’s a critical path item. I’m pretty sure Fujifilm has this same problem, as they need to change their X-Processor to improve autofocus if they’re going to ever catch up to Canikony in focus performance.
Part of the problem is that most of Tokyo is still using the old Japanese Consumer Electronics strategy: introduce new technologies in the top product, then slowly roll that to the rest of the line. As I’ve written before (20 years before!), that is an out-of-date strategy and not likely to survive well the longer you use it. The problem isn’t trying to do new things first with your top product, it’s that everyone working on other products sits and waits for it to be done.
You can see Nikon’s mediocre response to this: they’ve dabbled here and there at a new feature (e.g. Film grain) in the lower models, but they’re not replicating that across the lineup nor does there seem to be any urgency to keep the full lineup updated to what could be done. If I were running Nikon development, I’d have a very long list of features and performance items that could be added to or addressed in the current products. The problem is that this would be perceived as “taking away” a possible feature for that top new camera. In other words, Nikon is sandbagging features.
Meanwhile, Nikon (and the entire industry) is lamenting that unit volume of the existing models is slipping. Of course it is. There’s nothing new to see. People have already made their upgrade-or-wait decision. And there’s a lot of folk still waiting. So when new camera introductions slip, their wait just gets longer.
I bristle every time I see Nikon top management speak of (essentially) milking the established Imaging products for money to fix their terrible Precision and other division decisions and performance. This is actually stated outright in their public management plan. What that says to a consumer is highly negative. At Fujifilm, imaging is more a hobby business, which seems more consumer friendly (e.g. it’s their hobby and it’s my hobby, we’re aligned).
What should be happening at every camera company is an intensive “let’s make our current products even better” effort. Fix bugs, add features, tune performance, and get the darned Bluetooth/Wi-Fi connections working not only more reliably, but with true user needs addressed. I fear, however, that these things are on the list for the next top model, not yet ready, so we consumers just sit and wait.
We need some Ternus’s in Tokyo.