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.