farewell, Olympus cameras
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Because I unloaded all of my old Minolta and Pentax gear, I only currently own two cameras. They're both small Olympus bodies, an old film 35DC from the '70s, and my digital "OM-D E-M5 Mark II" (camera names are not as good as they used to be). But it looks like Olympus is now exiting the camera business. I'm sad to see them go, but this is not unexpected. After all, people are abandoning cameras. In a post to dpreview.com, someone said:
"Just looking at DPR's list of makers, you can see that a bunch of them are already gone. I count 18 different companies that haven't had a new camera or lens in almost three years:
- 2002 - Contax
- 2002 - Konica
- 2003 - Minolta
- 2003 - Toshiba
- 2004 - Kyocera
- 2004 - Sanyo
- 2005 - Konica-Minolta
- 2007 - HP
- 2009 - Agfa
- 2009 - Epson
- 2014 - Kodak
- 2014 - Lytro
- 2015 - Samsung
- 2016 - Casio
- 2016 - Sealife
- 2016 - DxO
- 2017 - Rylo
- 2017 - YI
And shared this. Note that the camera sales figures for 2020 are estimates for the entire year!
That's a 95% collapse in ten years. There's not a lot of consensus among those writing to the boards (for whatever its worth) but it seems that Nikon, Pentax, Panasonic, and Sigma are all sited as at-risk manufacturers. Who'd have guessed. Thanks, 2020.