Sony To Stop Making Low-End Digital Cameras

[Suhit Gupta]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=100508&ref=793506' target='_blank'>http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=100508&ref=793506</a><br /><br /></div>"Just a week after strong cameraphone sales figures were announced, Sony Ericsson's president says its parent has ceded the low-end camera market to mobile phones. Sony Ericsson president Katsumi Ihara says that Sony has given up the low-end digital camera market to cameraphones. While last week's sales figures showed that cameraphones outsold digital cameras nearly 2-to-1 in 2003, this is the first concrete statement from a vendor that the inevitable is beginning."<br /><br />This is not very surprising news if you think about it. It just doesn't make sense for Sony, a digital imaging giant, to make a piece of hardware that is soon going to be outdated even in camera phones. Camera phones have already made a huge dent in the low megapixel digital camera market and with camera phones set to take 1- to 2-megapixel pictures by next year, I doubt whether anyone will be buying digital cameras that exclusively take low resolution pictures.

[Gary Sheynkman]

a 1mp camera in a phone will not compare with a 1mp dedicated camera. I think there will always be a minimum of 3mp (for now at least)

[Jason Dunn]

Hrm...the optics and image quality in a cheap $150 camera are still miles beyond what any camera today can do. Seems about a year too early to abandon entry-level cameras...not to mention that not everyone wants a camera in their phone. Sony's always been quite Japan-centric though, so this may be a given in the Japanese market...

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

Well, Sony has what I call product diarrhoea.. their P series lineup is way confusing. I think what they'll do is to cull the low end 1-2 megapixel range, as well as those that have no optical zoom.