Submitted By: Mette Eriksen on July 22, 2010
14 months ago, I gave birth to my first child, a little boy. Prior to his birth, I had spent a lot of time speaking with clients about the opportunity that mothers represent to the photography industry. I could see from the many of the surveys that we conducted in Europe and the U.S. that mums (or moms) take many photos and also print and share a great deal of them. Mums are typically less affluent than male Hobbyists, but they seem to be willing to spend a larger proportion of their income on photos. Now that I am a mother myself, I can speak with conviction about why mums are so photo-active.
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Submitted By: Eve Padula on December 16, 2009
InfoTrends recently published its 2009 Digital Still Camera End-User Survey for the United States. We have now been tracking this market for over a decade, but the changes that have occurred in just the past six years have been truly staggering.
Although the digital still camera market was not exactly in its infancy in 2003, it was certainly a much newer technology than it is today. Only 45% of the respondents to our 2003 survey owned digital cameras. According to our most recent survey, that percentage currently stands at about 70%.
Prior to 2005, digital cameras were primarily being adopted by more affluent households. Back in 2003, the mean annual household income among digital camera owners was $98,700. This average fell to $75,700 in 2004, which was still quite high but represented a considerable year-over-year drop. From 2005 through 2009, the average household income of our digital camera owners has hovered around $60,000 annually. The Figure below illustrates that the digital camera market began to enter the mainstream in 2005, and household incomes among digital camera owners have been much more stable since that time.
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Submitted By: Anne Valaitis on November 16, 2009
Today, Canon Inc. (trading symbol CAJ) announced a public cash offer for all the shares of Océ (trading symbol OCE). Canon intends to make an offer of € 8.60 per Share (cum dividend) for 100% of the outstanding Shares of Océ, representing a premium of 70% over Océ’s closing share price of Friday 13 November 2009 and 137% to the average share price over the last 12 months, this makes the deal worth about 1.1 billion dollars.
In the wake of other major acquisitions in the last year, particularly Ricoh’s acquisition of IKON, there has been much speculation about what Canon will do. Now that Canon has agreed to acquire Océ, it is clear that one of its strategic options has been selected. Read more »
Tags: Acquisition, Canon, Color, digital photography, Digital Printing, Enterprise, HP, HP Indigo, Inkjet Web Press, Kodak, Konica Minolta, Managed Print Services, Oce, Printing, Production, Publishing, Ricoh, Software, Solutions, Wide Format, Xerox
Office, Production | 
Comments (4)
Submitted By: Eve Padula on November 9, 2009
Over the past several years, InfoTrends has been publishing its Online Photo Services surveys on an annual basis. The changes that have occurred in just a few years have been truly staggering. When respondents to our 2006 Online Photo Services survey were asked which online photo service they used most often, Kodak Gallery (25%) and Snapfish (19%) captured the top spots. Fast-forward to 2008, and it becomes clear that traditional online photo services are being strongly affected by popular social networking sites. During InfoTrends’ 2008 Online Photo Services survey, the share of respondents who reported most frequently uploading their photos to Kodak Gallery (7%) and Snapfish by HP (7%) had slipped considerably. The top responses during that year were MySpace (48%) and Facebook (26%).
Our 2009 Online Photo Services study showed yet another shift. Although Facebook was a distant second place in our 2008 study, it surpassed MySpace to capture the top spot in 2009. Meanwhile, many of the traditional online photo services suffered year-over-year declines, which can again be attributed to the strong and growing popularity of social networking sites.
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Submitted By: Carrie Sylvester on April 22, 2009
These days, it’s difficult to find a mobile handset or smartphone that does not feature an embedded camera. In the early days of camera phone technology, the embedded cameras typically offered VGA quality (300k pixels). By 2007, the typical resolution was between 1 and 2 megapixels. These days, the average falls somewhere in the 2-3 megapixel range. In my 2008 camera phone forecast, I stated that “Since the introduction of camera phones, consumers have been demanding higher resolution. Although, “higher resolution” does not necessarily mean “better” pictures, in the case of camera phones, low-resolution certainly means low quality images.”
When I was evaluating my camera phone upgrade options, the photo enthusiast in me won out over the analytic part of myself. I’m a DSLR user, but I wanted a mobile device with a quality camera that included some smarter features than my old RAZR. After selecting the 5-megapixel Samsung Behold, however, I was promptly reminded that a good camera phone photo requires much more than just megapixels.
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Submitted By: Carrie Sylvester on February 11, 2009
A couple weeks ago, I heard of a new service that is bringing the ability to create and print photo books from Facebook. At first look, the Facebook application was not all that exciting, until you notice that HotBook (from HotPrints Ltd.) prints a photo book (16 pages and approximately 50 pictures) for $2.99. Before this application, there was little that could be done with Facebook images other than sharing with friends. For under $4 (including shipping), this is a nice offering for people hoping to do more with their photos on the social networking site.
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Submitted By: Carrie Sylvester on January 14, 2009
Canon Flex circa 1959
Canon USA and Japan celebrated the 50th anniversary of its single-lens reflex (SLR) camera.
According to Canon, its first film-based SLR sold in May 1959 and like a proud parent exclaimed that by year end 2008 it has sold over 53 million SLRs (39 million film SLRs and 14 million DSLRs) in 50 years. Not bad work if you can get it!
A company press release touted the year 2000 as the company’s initial entry into the digital era with the introduction of the EOS D30. In 2008, the company introduced the Rebel XSi (consumer level) and the EOS 5D Mark II (professional level) digital SLR models. Also notable is that the 5D Mark II is Canon’s first DSLR camera to incorporate full high-definition video recording. Read more »
Submitted By: Carrie Sylvester on December 4, 2008
Now that I’ve got you singing the good ‘ol tune from Dr. Hook (those old enough to remember it that is!
clip), I’ll admit that I took some liberties… this article has nothing to do with a Rolling Stone cover. Instead, it is about a magazine (VodaWorld) published by an African mobile telecommunications
- Summer Issue of VodaWorld being distributed this week
company, Vodacom, for its subscribers and service carriers. Although it’s not a magazine that reaches the masses, it has done something that to my knowledge has not been done before - it has used a camera phone photo as its cover shot. Okay, it’s no Rolling Stone, but 1.2 million copies of this magazine are distributed on a quarterly basis.
According to an article found on the African BIZcommunity.com site, the cover of the latest issue of Vodaworld magazine was shot using a commercially available camera phone, the Sony Ericsson C905 (8.1 MP) Cyber-shot. “The resolution of camera phones has reached the level where they’re no longer gimmicky; they’re real cameras,” states Andrew October, editor of the magazine. (Note: This camera phone is not available in the United States.)
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