If you are using Adobe Creative Cloud (the recent subscription-based cloud-based solution for Adobe tools including Photoshop), or if you know somebody using it, there are 99% chance that you heard that Adobe service broke down on 14-May and is just going back up as I write this. Note that Photoshop CC is only available…
Category: Market
Canon would abandon point-and-shoots
For sure, the recent financial report [PDF] from Canon shows that the situation is not perfect for them (But compare to Sony who announced it would soon sell its historical headquarters Osaki building in Tokyo). it’s clear that all photography equipment manufacturers are facing difficult times with a dwindling market eaten by smartphones more and…
Sigma’s surprise
Last week, Sigma surprised all of us with a very unusual announcement: Sigma Mount Conversion Service. It’s all about offering the owners of the most recent Sigma lenses (the Art, Sport and Contemporary series; currently seven lenses in all) the possibility to swap mounts. You bought a 35mm f/1.4 DG HSM with a Canon mount…
Heavy-wheight lenses for 2013
While 2012 was relatively calm in terms of new tele-lenses (with the significant exceptions of the Pentax 500mm and the progressive availability of the new great whites from Canon), 2013 appears ready to become a year of big tele-lenses at nearly all the manufacturers: Nikon launches an 800mm f/5.6 which is becoming the biggest product…
Goodbye Kodak
Kodak just filled for bankruptcy. It may not be the total end of the red and yellow logo. But they were already selling their assets and debt has been climbing up quite high in the recent months.
Olympus: How to end?
Olympus is going through really dire straits. The previous management has obviously organized some really risky finance operations (so risky that they turned to be catastrophic). Now that smoke and dust are settling down we can see more clearly (it produced a small hike up in the stock prices and we heard that the rumors…
Goodbye 2011, Hello 2012!
Happy new year to all YLovePhoto readers! I hope that 2012 will bring you joy and photography. It’s now time to look back at the year behind us and try and see what is coming in 2012. 2011 Two features were really striking in 2011: Natural disasters: The earthquake in Japan and the floods in…
The end of Olympus
This is not yet fully certain, but Olympus is today at the core of a maelstrom. So much of it that it is advisable to think about the possible end to the brand itself As a matter of fact, we are witnesses to an almost unbelievable financial chronicle on a background of fraud, creative accounting…
Thailand: Sony impacted products
For the follwing new products, Sony just removed all forecast of availability. NEX-7 NEX-5N NEX-C3 Alpha 65 Source: Steve Huff.
Thailand floods: Drama all over again
We may have been thinking that the drama observed in Japan last March were going to disappear from to landscape of photographic camera manufacturers. The catastrophic floods of Thailand came to bring us back to the sad reality. High waters are rushing through Thailand. The Bangkok county is now seriously preoccupied by the devastation and…
Pioneer enters photo market
Do you remember reading about it here? I was listing opportunities to see the photo market shaken by new companies and I told you about Pioneer (among others) as a company that could be interested. It appears that I was right: Pioneer just announced that they will start by creating a joint venture (JV) in…
Kenko-Tokina acquires COKIN filters
This is interesting to see how a previous article I wrote about the possible re-structuration of the photo market through some significant acquisitions has a nearly immediate echo. Actually, Kenko-Tokina, one of the companies I was mentioning as possibly interested in moving forward, has officialized its acquisition of COKIN SAS, the French leader of filter…
Ricoh + Pentax: Showing the way of the future? [Updated]
You have certainly heard the announcement that Ricoh just purchased Pentax from Hoya, its previous owner. As a matter of fact, it may have been surprising more than one, but it was already true that Hoya no longer seemed to know what to do with its photo division under the Pentax brand name. Since the…
Japan crisis: Photo industry update
After several weeks of very intense activity for all the companies hit by the very serious events of March 2011 in Japan, it is the right time to try and build a more complete image of the situation left by the Japan earthquake in the photo world. Nikon stated that its recent financial year has…
Samyang is back: 35mm f/1.4 & 8mm f/3.5 fish-eye
Apparently, Samyang has solved most of the issues it had with supplying raw glass from Japan for its new lenses. The Samyang 8mm f/3.5 Fish-eye CS VG10 lens, designed for the Sony NEX-VG10 large-sensor, is announced and immediately shipping. Also, the Samyang 35mm f/1.4 AS UMC manual-focus lens is available for both Canon and Nikon.
PMA/CliQ: A new date, without help from Japan
The news event (so we are told) is that the PMA Show (organized by the Photo Marketing Association) has just been moved from September 2011 to January 2012. But is it really because of the pressure put on them by the March events in Japan? I dare say NO. While it’s true to say that…
2010: Photographic market shares
photo © 2010 Cliff | more info (via: Wylio) International market research company IDC released its analysis of the 2010 market for digital cameras. Worldwide Digital Camera Market Shares by Vendor (in number of cameras sold) ================================================ Vendor 2010 2009 ———————————————— Canon 19 19 Sony 17.9 16.9 Nikon 12.6 11.1 Samsung 11.1 10.9 Kodak 7.4…
Japan earthquake, impact on the LCD
For all those who want to understand the kind of impact that the Japan earthquake had on the manufacturing of LCD panels, I invite you to go and check the excellent article in DisplaySearch Blog (Impact of the Japanese Earthquake on the FPD Industry) even though it was written only three days after the earthquake…
Canon to suffer 27% from earthquake
Bloomberg news agency disclosed their estimate of reduced Operating Profits at Canon, the world’s largest camera maker: They may drop to 400 billion yen – 27% lower than previously estimated. No information about how they computed these figures, but the readers of YLovePhoto know what it is all about the Japan earthquake and its consequences.…
Shortage at Samyang (lenses)
Samyang stays a South Korea lens manufacturer (and they have a catalog of both excellent quality and low-cost). But the March-11 tsunami hit hard one of their suppliers of special glass lens. Consequently, Samyang has been forced to announce some delays and difficulties to supply their products in the coming months. The list of impacted…
Japan earthquake, back to the consequences
Nearly two weeks after the terrible earthquake in Japan (let’s remind that on the 11 March 2011, a giant earthquake reached 9.0 rating on the Richter scale, being immediately categorized as the most powerful in the history of Japan and among the 5 most powerful in the world since 1900. Furthermore, the following tsunami was…
Japan earthquake photo news
As you certainly already know, a massive 8.9 earthquake has hit Japan North-East early yesterday morning (Japan earthquake photos at Boston.com The Big Picture). Consequences already appear quite dire and more than 1000 people are reported dead around the country (and this count will probably still climb steadily in the coming day while people currently…
Canon, Nikon are afraid of Sony
OK! Maybe not statue-frozen by fright, but Amateur Photographer gave us today a few interesting data points showing that Sony quickly progresses in the photo market including in the interchangeable lens camera segment. AP tells us that on the Japanese market, where Nikon and Canon together loose about 11% of market share, Sony reaches the…
Olympus: no more DSLR!
In a way, this was expected, but the news are now official. Olympus wants to develop itself totally in the EVIL kind of digital, like the cute little PEN cameras. More precisely, Toshiyuki Terada, Product Manager at the SLR Planning Department of Olympus, said to Fotopolis that this implied both not replacing the current DSLR…
Will Microsoft buy Adobe?
photo credit: Microsoft Sweden The rumor started yesterday (Friday): Microsoft was on the verge of buying Adobe right off the market. The Adobe stock price shot up by 17% during the day (triggering an automated circuit-breaker to stop pricing), after the announcement of a meeting between Microsoft Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Steve Ballmer and Adobe…