Sony, Olympus, Panasonic and Fuji are fully pushing their mirrorless system while big companies and Samsung, Canon and Nikon seem to not have a clear vision about their future strategy. This is the situation:
Samsung: They should announced the NX20 successor in January-February. In general Samsung will focus on new High End Camera and Lens products.
Nikon: The Nikon 1 system isn’t selling as expected and the future seems uncertain. With the new Nikon DF announcement they once again confirm that DSLR is their present and future strategy. There is no rumor about any APS-C or FF mirrorless camera release in 2014.
Canon: DPP (Digital Photo Professional) already had listed the EOS-M2 but it seems like Canon is delaying the camera release. Like Nikon also Canon sees the mirrorless camera industry as a “non-serious” market.
Of the three companies Samsung is the only company really investing and believing in mirrorless. But it looks like they still didn’t find the way to make their system successful.
49 Responses
Nikon: Toy cams and retro nonsense. 🙁
Canon: I would like to see M2, etc and watch them suffer. 🙂
Samsung: Not a prayer. They make good web devices though. 🙂
It will suffer, no matter when to release 🙂
The camera on Samsung tabs are not bad for snapshots & selfy
Samsung is a dead horse.
Compan instead of producing cameras and lenses, try to make cross breeding between phone and low end camera. What a waste of money and time.
Samsung has no flash system
Samsung has no fast wide angle lenses
Samsung has no long telephoto lenses
Samsung does not even have decent standard lens like Fuji !!!!!!!!
The only thing samsung produces is false promises about being number 1, about delivering 24f1.8, 16-50 f2.8, 50-135 f2.8, 135f2, 200f2.8, 300f4. Where are these lenses? Samsung promised that some of them would be delivered last year and remaining this year. NONE of them has been delivered. If one of them is not delivered, i would call it delay. But all of them? This is planned action !!! Samung knows now that their lensmount is a NOODLE lensmount. It’s not good for FF camera. They cannot compete with this lensmount against fuji, canon and sony. See electrical contacts !!! this is noodle lensmount. So probably samsung is planning abandoning this lensmount that’s why so many lenses that they promised, are not delivered. Samsung is a dead horse. They are very malicious company. Sony, fuji, 43 system allows to put any lens on their cameras, and any adapter. I got myslef the reversal ring and samsung does not want to tell me how to disable “no lens attached” error. They are not interested in your enjoymement of camera. They are interested in you paying them for stupid G4 connection so you’d talk over the camera. I also asked samsung how to tak double exposure photos. Any point and shoot camera has this feature. Not a samsung.
I made my purchase of samsung based on their OFFICIAL promises and official roadmap for the lenses. And i got CHEATED by samsung. So were you.
thank you samsung for cheating us.
Samsung has a 85mm 1.4 lens, no other manufacturer has that.
Most Samsung lenses are very high quality for an affordable price.
I agree that the Samsung Flash system has no High Sync Speed, that is THE probem of the Samsung system.
Samsung is like the gold producing donkey…
…so they must do something right – right?
Samsung has the best 10 mm fisheye
…the best ultra wide angle zoom 12-24 mm
…the best 20 – 50 mm kit lens
…the best 30 mm pancake
…and the best 45 mm lightweight portrait lens
…all of them well balanced with the lightweight bodys.
Lens monsters like fast tele zoom lenses would have an awful balance in conjunction with the light weight Samsung bodys…
…something, which is to expect with Sonys A7 bodys and fast FF lenses.
However, Samsung is not for everything – yet…
…this may change and as it seems,
it is about to change.
Ok. those lenses are all really good, but you should also admit the false promises from Samsung. Some lenses already 3 years in the freezer. I´d like to see some changes in Samsung´s directive board. If they want to become a respectable company, they must honor their promises. If they change their marketing and planning methods right now, no doubt very soon they could be the first photography equipment maker of the world.
Dude, try not to be so overly loyal. The truth is:
1) Fisheye doesn’t need AF and Samyang 8mm is better (both projection and sharpness)
2) Samsung 12-24 is hardly remarkable among other WA zooms. In addition, those are usually wider starting from 10mm, not 12.
3) 20-50 is quite good indeed, but is too narrow at wide end and lack of reach at the long. Just typical kit zoom lens (there are better kit zooms, although they are larger).
4) 30/2 is quite good, but, seriously, not much to rave about. Sigma 30/2.8 performance exceeds that samsung from f2.8, plus other 30-35 lenses are all just about as good or better (faster, have OSS, etc)
5) 45mm is hardly a portrait lens. Weird FL choice. You may end up liking it though if you like distorted faces 😉
Hey spoon,
check out this one:
http://www.dpreview.com/galleries/4164548502/photos/2374594/15mp-equiv-4704-pixel-width-12-24-zoom-nx1000
for the 12 – 24 mm
and this one:
http://www.dpreview.com/galleries/4164548502/photos/2523751/an-iron-butterfly-in-a-gadda-da-vida-or-life-in-the-desert-with-rust
…without big nose…
…weird?
I could show You some cute portraits from happy women,
which can be proud of their proportions – even if taken with the 45 mm (70 mm equiv. lens) and who loved the snap shots which I made with and without available light…
…and they loved the creamy bokeh…
…and they were really satisfied with the outcome.
Well enough and better than the Nikon DSLR outcome,
even without stabilizer.
Surprise, surprise…
…especially if You mount the 1 pound Samyang on a 1/2 pound body:
http://www.dpreview.com/products/samyang/lenses/samyang_8_3p5/specifications
compare this combination with the 1/6 pound Samsung fisheye:
http://www.dpreview.com/products/samsung/lenses/samsung_10_3p5/specifications
…and feel the difference.
OFFICIAL promises and official roadmap? Seriously? Where are they? Don’t tell me just from xxxxrumors….
here it is
http://www.dslrphoto.com/wp-content/plugins/feedlist/nx_lens_roadmap.jpg
And I really do not understand your attitude about mirrorless rumors web site. They do a great job !!!! They are nearly 100% correct. Photographer’s community needs site like that. We should rather say thank you to them. Don’t you think?
I may be wrong, but I think those are leaked roadmaps. Not officially released ones.
Those are leaked indeed, so people are getting their panties wet over something that may be false… Even if it is from the company if they didn’t made it official via a press release then they haven’t commited with their clients to an especific day of release for each product.
Who says it is official? Yes, I like this website, but please understand the meaning of rumors. Nearly 100%? Then pentax should have released a lot of FF DSLR…
The bigger problem of Samsung is distribution, it’s almost impossible to find Samsung mirrorless kits in most of Europe, it’s even worse for lenses.
I don’t know the situation in the US, but I’d wager it’s fairly close.
They won’t gain traction if they don’t even try to sell.
I really don’t get it…
Their system is not that bad, some lenses are actually quite nice and fairly priced, but if almost no one carries them, how do they hope to compete ?
Even Panasonic and Olympus are doing a better job at distribution.
I do not know why there is so much mindless Samsung-Bashing in the comment section, especially after the admin writes that Samsung is the only company of the 3 who take mirrorless serious.
In my local Saturn there is a wall where Sony, Oly, CaNikon and Samsung have equal space for their cameras.
If you google for “samsung market capitalization”, and compare it to “canon market capitalization”, “sony market capitalization” etc, then you see that Samsung must be doing something right.
Pretty weird I live in European country and you can easily find Samsung mirrorless here.
I live in a really big touristic city in Europe and from what I see Samsung, Nikon and m4/3 are the ones doing better, I get to see more Samsung mirrorless (white ones I imagine they are either the NX1000 or NX1100, they must have sold a lot with that promo where they gave away a Samsung Galaxy Tab with the purchase of their cameras) than other brands, the rest are mostly Nikon 1’s and Olympus and Panasonic (although fewer of panny’s than Oly’s) the ones you don’t get to see much are Sony NEX, Fuji X or Canon EOS M.
You have to remember that in the case of most camera manufacturer brands it isn’t the pro-line what gives them more revenue, au contraire it is their entry levels where they see most of their income (any expert like Tom Hoghan can corroborate this) while enthusiasts and pros are fast to diss them, the general public may like them a lot.
Most of the people buying these cameras don’t care about flash systems, big telephotos, fast wide angle lenses, etc. They want a small-ish (non DSLR) camera with better IQ than their point and pray or their smartphones.
Well, at least in France (and from my experience Belgium and UK), almost no photography specialist store even references Samsung NX hardware, electronics generalists usually have 1 kit referenced but usually not in stock and rarely on display, almost none has recent lenses, mostly stocks of first wave lenses, surprisingly it is more present with large generalist retail chains and discount/low cost internet retailers, which probably doesn’t help the system at all, since it might give the perception that it is cheap, inferior crap that no one but the cash-strapped would want to shoot with (and while not perfect, the NX system is actually quite interesting, more, in my opinion, than Sony’s NEX).
NEX on the other hand seems quite popular and it’s easier to get Pentax Q hardware than it is finding Samsung’s NX.
I’m also quite into museum photography which makes me somewhat aware of what part of the tourist crowd is using, for CSC I’d say M4/3 and NEX are roughly equally represented, followed from afar by Nikon 1 and Fuji X (mostly X-E and X-M), then a handful of Samsung NX and Pentax Q.
I have yet to see a Canon EOS-M in actual use… no, I tell a lie, I’ve seen one.
In Spain every specialist store (like Casanova Foto the biggest and most complete store of new and used photo gear in Barcelona -including everything from Hasselblad H4D’s to a used 1994 olympus point and pray camera-) has all the stock of their products.
Smaller stores too: Fotoprix? yeap, Nivel10? yeap and any other store near Plaza Universitat in Barcelona has them (full of stores specialized in electronics)
Also other non specialized stores:
El Corte Inglés? Check
Media Markt? Check
Fnac? Check
So… I dunno about France but here pretty much you can find them anywhere.
Yeah Canon, you are right, keep doing the awesome job…
still dont understand why people have so much love and hate for companies that produce cameras. I have Canon, Fuji and Sony and gave my brother Nikons. Why living in a little world???
Yes, Nikon and Canon do as if everything is still like in 2008. Which isn’t the case. Both have no convincing mirrorless strategy or system, both suffer from a decline in DSLR sales.
Canon particulary seem to be slept in. There products seem like “and another one and another one” since virtually 2005 or so. To say their product strategy is extremely conservative would be polite. If they don’t release a major mirrorless system with lenses and everything else in 2014, they will go down fast. Same for Nikon basically, the Df will not save then.
How do you know they have no mirrorless strategy? Maybe their mirrorless strategy is status quo, and there is no real need to expand into those niches.
Maybe their business strategy is to absolutely dominate a segment, or not to enter it at all. Especially if the segment is losing money.
There is no law of nature saying they have to match models or segments with any other manufacturer.
Mirrorless may look as a niche today, but it is the future. SLRs may still look like a solid market segment to some, but they’re headed towards becoming a niche, just like rangefinders did. A wise company looks to the future and plans for it. Canon may be doing that, but Nikon is clearly looking more towards the past than to the future. As for Samsung, they are a gigantic company for whom cameras are a pet project – they’ll do something significant when they’ll feel like it’s worth doing, but they’re not depending on cameras for their revenue like Nikon does.
Because people think that cameras pack some sort of mumbo jumbo magic that will make them better shooters… so they bash whatever isn’t their brand.
Still, you can not deny the fact that Samsung make better TVs and various web devices. It is a fact and the sales figures support it. 🙂
They do (although their laptops are really poorly designed).
C’mon mate, Saying that all laptops are poorly designed?!? This is a bit of overstreched….dont be a hater! Samsung produce many good stuff.
I have just purchased the Nikon D7100 as an update to my D90 however right now I believe Sony are flying and that by the time I come to replace the D7100 in 3-5 years time it will be to Sony that I turn. To be honest if Sony can come up with some good quality, reasonable priced, zooms covering roughly 20-70 and 70-300 (assuming Full Frame) Nikon and Canon will be increasingly abandoned for all but sports pros etc. I can not however seriously believe that the big two don’t have teams working away in the back of a lab somewhere experimenting with mirrorless designs capable of carrying their existing glass. If they don’t some heads should roll.
Nikon 1 is selling as expected.
I don’t know, judging by the products they send out it seems that they (N & C mostly) have a pretty clear vision about what *they* think the camera industry should be about. Whether or not you and I agree with them is another matter.
(It could be argued that Sony is the one with an identity crisis, how many different systems have they pumped out in how short a time? Not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing tho : )
If you cannot figure out how the industry will change, you have no vision of the future. A year ago C/N were anticipating strong DSLR growth and DSLR (as well as MILC) demand went down 16-18% – cannot remember the exact percentage. It is obvious that whatever vision they had has little to do with reality. They can adjust their vision, of course, but it remains to be seen how well they will do that. Nikon’s moves with the 1 and the Df tell me they don’t have much vision once they try to operate beyond the “compete with Canon” goal.
“still dont understand why people have so much love and hate for companies that produce cameras. I have Canon, Fuji and Sony and gave my brother Nikons. Why living in a little world???”
Because we are passionate people. And it shows on our work not only on our internet blogging. Personally speaking.
As a latin I understand passion well, but I still dont get the monogamy to a camera brand, sorry…
OK I am a firm believer of monogamy when talking about couples but… I didn’t knew we had to be monogamous with the chunks of plastics, electronics and glass we buy…
I’m passionate too but I can’t “love” a thing… that would be kind of a fetish deviation.
yep. you got my point….it’s a machine! why should we like just one brand and bash the others? can i like canon and nikon? yes, i can!
You can and nobody should tell you what to do with your money buddy, you can buy every brand of camera you want if that makes you happy!
Thanks Funny. Cheers
Samsung absolutely needs a prosumer body with prosumer features, like a huge buffer, a newer sensor, a very high res evf, ibis, a lot of physical controls, a better rear display.
All that must be delivered at a VERY competitive price to attract customers.
Right now, the biggest problem for the image of NX system is called Galaxy NX, which is the exact opposite of what I just mentioned.
The lenses are indeed very very good already.
Samsung: mobile phones, televisions
Canon: video, printers …
Nikon: just trying to survive
From still photography perspective.. these companies are so last week.
Up to 7-10 years ago, you would’t have ever said that samsung could rule the high end tv market and high end phone market.
So perhaps in 7-10 years it will rule the high end camera market as well, who knows?
Well, their market dominance wasn’t that hard to expect when they started buying lots of Japanese R&D people (mostly Sony engineers that were upset with the direction the company was taking). Unsurprisingly they now excel in areas where Sony did before.
It’s quite possible that the same thing happens with cameras.
Just the examples on Wikipedia. Some customers just like to inform themselves about the people they are paying their hard earned money to. A quick Google search will return boatloads of these scandals. All big companies do these kinds of things but Samsung is easily one of the worst in electronics.
Korean notion of democazyness:“Samsung has the government in its hands. Samsung manages the legal world, the press, the academics and bureaucracy.” (see below)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung
“In 2007 former Samsung chief lawyer Kim Yong Chul claimed that he was involved in bribing and fabricating court evidence on behalf of the group’s chairman Lee Kun-hee and the company. Kim said that Samsung lawyers trained executives to serve as scapegoats in a “fabricated scenario” to protect Lee, even though those executives were not involved. Kim also told the media that he was “sidelined” by Samsung after he refused to pay a USD$3.3 million bribe to the judge presiding over a case where two of their executives were found guilty. Kim revealed that the company had raised a large amount of secret funds through bank accounts illegally opened under the names of up to 1,000 Samsung executives—under his own name, four accounts were opened to manage 5 billion won”
““You can even say the Samsung chairman is more powerful than the President of South Korea. Korean people have come to think of Samsung as invincible and above the law,” said Woo Suk-hoon, host of a popular economics podcast in a Washington Post article named “In South Korea, the Republic of Samsung,” published on December 9, 2012. Critics claimed that Samsung knocked out smaller businesses, limiting choices for Korean consumers, and sometimes colluded with fellow giants to fix prices while bullying those who investigate. Lee Jung-hee, a South Korean presidential candidate, said in a debate, “Samsung has the government in its hands. Samsung manages the legal world, the press, the academics and bureaucracy.””
“The Fair Trade Commission of Taiwan is investigating Samsung and its local Taiwanese advertising agency for false advertising. The case was commenced after the Commission received complaints stating that the agency hired students to attack competitors of Samsung Electronics in online forums.[131] Samsung Taiwan made an announcement on its Facebook page in which it stated that it had not interfered with any evaluation report and had stopped online marketing campaigns that constituted posting or responding to content in online forums.[132]”
Pretty much like Apple and Sony though… this kind of stuff isn’t uncommon.
As I said, other companies do the same. But neither Apple nor Sony have this kind of influence on their respective governments, the law and the people. Also, the extent of illegal activities that Apple or Sony openly commit to are obviously less.
Besides, if Sony or Apple would for some reason cease to exist, the influence on their respective economies would be significant but not fatal. In the case of Samsung it would probably ruin South Korea.
And as regards cameras, you rarely hear of any big scandals around the big two. So yes, many do these kinds of things but you still can opt for choices that are less questionable.
Ridiculous statement. It´s all the same everywhere. The same could be said about Wallmart, Sony, Microsoft or Apple. And speking of corruption, did you forget about Olympus scandal with Yakuza mafia involved? And what about the same mafia in Tepco and Fukushima? Also in Korea there is a very strong competition: Have you ever read about LG, Hyundai…?
At least Korea don´t litter every day 300 tons of radioactive waste into the ocean.
The some people that dislike Samsung are mostly the very racist Japanese
*Insert angry fanboy comment and how my brand is much better than any other brand in the market*