gdanmitchell
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Sauseschritt wrote:
Um.
How many decades exactly ?
Assuming "couple decades" is at least 3 decades, well thats shortly after the introduction of autofocus and still deep into the film area.
I'm taking a long view here, and thinking about how most people (who are not "serious photographers") did the kinds of photography that are now done on smartphones.
These are the folks who used to buy a point and shoot film camera 35mm or sometimes things like Instamatic or Polaroid to record their lives birthday and holiday gatherings, vacations, and so forth. I'm old enough to have actually used things like no-focus cameras equipped with only a film advance knob (120 film!) and a shutter button, and to have seen the advent of Polaroid and Instamatic, and then the more advanced small cameras of the 1990s or so.
But it isn't the specific technology so much as it is the functional purpose of these cameras which was to make the camera inexpensive, produce decent small prints (literally "prints"), easy to carry and use.
That role has now been taken over almost completely by smartphones, and this makes a lot of sense. The phone makes better photographs than many of the old consumer cameras, it is always with you, it includes features like AF and automatic exposure, it doesn't require a trip to the drug store to "get the film developed," and it is incredibly easy to share the images on social media and in similar ways. And for those who do print, the quality is quite decent better, I would argue, than what folks got from those old point-and-shoot film cameras... and even better than what they got from the digital point-and-shoot cameras before that market pretty much dried up.
I'm still unconvinced that smartphone cameras will supplant cameras of the sort that are typically discussed (and used) by folks in forums like this one.
In one sense that isn't surprising. Even back in the days when point-and-shoot cameras were used to do what is now typically done with smartphones, the percentage of people using high quality cameras to do photography was quite small. (It is easy for many of us to overlook that since in our worlds the good stuff was our focus. I was "doing photography" seriously by the time I was in high school, and it seemed like all my friends had, used, or were aspiring to own high quality cameras... but that is because I hung out with other photographers! More objectively, the group at my high school that was serious about cameras in this way was perhaps a dozen or maybe up to 20 students... in a school with well over 1000 students.)
The point is that the market for "high end" (sorry I don't have a better term, so I'll go with it) gear has always been a small minority fo people using cameras. If anything, the percentage might be a bit higher today due to the availability fo less expensive DSLR and mirrorless cameras and the fact that folks can do post-processing without access to a darkroom!
The challenge for photography companies isn't so much that smart phones are going to replace the high end market I don't see much evidence of that. (Those pointing to the higher sales a few years back forget that this was an unsustainable bubble as the technology came up to speed.) The problem is that their mass market for inexpensive, simple cameras is pretty much gone, taken over by smartphones, and it isn't coming back. The high end, loosely speaking, is what remains for them. That is a viable market, but it is smaller than the old mass market supported and, I'm convinced, it cannot support all of the high end camera companies still competing for that market.
Dan
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Come to think of it, I can't remember the last time I brought a "proper" camera to a family visit or other social engagement. The pictures would have been better, but the phone ones are more than good enough. 
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