The End of the Road for Compact Digital Cameras?

As impossible to believe as it would appear, compact digital cameras of the point-and-shoot variety are on the wane. They no longer head the sales figures for the makers of cameras. That distinction belongs to SLR cameras and high-end cameras with mega zooms. Why is this? Are Americans so well-off now that they can no longer  bother with little point-and-shoot compact digital cameras? Perhaps there is a different way to look at this.

One of every two people in America has a smart phone. A very large proportion of those happens to be either a Blackberry or an iPhone. The iPhone of course comes with a five megapixel still camera and a 30 FPS 720p HD video camera. Some Blackberries come with eight megapixel cameras. These are devices that people have with them in their pockets at all times. Suddenly, even really slim compact digital cameras seem entirely too bulky and just of no real purpose. For most kinds of photography and video shooting, the camera on a  smart phone can be completely adequate. Not to mention, when you have your pictures and videos on a device like a smart phone that's already connected to the Internet, it becomes far easier to just put them on Facebook or share them with your friends in other ways. With a regular camera, you have to first upload your photos to the computer before you're able to share them with anyone. In a world where people seem to live on their social networks more than they do in the real world, makers of compact digital cameras had better build Internet connectivity into their cameras or get left behind.

Only a few years ago, it seemed like compact digital cameras had it made. People loved how convenient they were with no film to mess with. People pitied anyone with a film camera and marvelled at how with-it they were to have gone digital. And now, the digital camera is already being over the hill in many ways. Pretty soon, the only kind they will ever make will be built into another device (one that's already swallowed an iPod and a DVD player and a TV, by the way). People no longer need single-use purpose-built devices anymore unless they want to go for very high quality. The all-in-one smart phone will be all we have in the future - even if four out of five homes in America at this point owns a point-and-shoot.

Certainly, a dedicated point-and-shoot camera has a few advantages over a smart phone camera. It has a better lens, a better sensor, it has image stabilization, better zoom. But then, a smart phone has apps to help you edit photos right there. You can have five dozen photo apps on your iPhone and it's like having as many different cameras for the kind of functionality they lend your iPhone camera.

What is it that people do with their point-and-shoot cameras? They put  those pictures on Facebook. There are 50 billion pictures on Facebook already. It is the same story on Flickr. They find on these websites that of all the people who submit photos there, not one of the top ten devices used is a real camera. Case closed.