Will your next digital camera choice be based on colour?
Camera colour choice is becoming increasingly prevalent. Panasonic Lumix offers a colour choice for its new G1 Micro Four Thirds interchangeable lens system camera, though you're still restricted to mainly black finish for conventional DSLRs, with the possible exception of some silver models. But compact digital cameras have been available in a wide range of colours for several years.
Yoshi, our resident correspondent from Japan, suggests that it's increasingly likely that a camera store sales assistant in Japan will ask customers the question:"Which colour would you like sir/madam?"
"This looks like a more relevant first question you might be asked at a camera/electronics shop from now on, instead of "which brand?" or "how many pixels?" or "what price range?" says Yoshi, who has been interpreting a recently published report from BCN, a Japanese market intelligence company. BCN kindly granted us permission to quote their statistics from the report.
"Here is the market share of compact digicams in Japanese market," says Yoshi, adding:. "This is classified, however, not by brand but by colours."
Chart 1 (copyright ©BCN Ranking) Japanese digital camera sales by colour
"The chart above shows the change of popular colours for the past 12 months since October last year. You will see that two traditional colours are still popular but also notice that non-traditional colours like pink
and gold are gradually getting more popular," explains Yoshi, who continues: "I find it interesting that if you prefer traditional colours, then choose Olympus for silver and Canon for black (see the second chart below),
while, if you prefer non-traditional ones, then Panasonic for pink and Casio or Sony for gold (see the third chart below). In short, for traditional colours, choose traditional brands, while for other colours, choose newcomers."
Chart 2 (copyright ©BCN Ranking) Japanese digital camera best sellers in silver (Olympus FE320) and black (Canon Ixy D25IS)
Chart 3 (copyright ©BCN Ranking) Japanese digital camera best sellers unconventional colours - pink (Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX37) and gold (Casio Exilim EX-Z100)
"It looks like "berry colours" such as wine red or brown are the trendy colours for the coming X'mas sales season," says Yoshi.
Yoshi concludes: "So colours are getting a factor more important for the market share competition!?
Maybe technology/specification features across various brands/models are more or less similar these days and most cameras can not differentiate
themselves from others in a significant way other than colours?"
The question Yoshi asks is; have camera manufacturers run out of ideas on the R&D front, and are the days of major technical feature USPs in the past? Or are R&D budgets being squeezed by the current economic situation, leaving cheaper cosmetic design as the key differentiator?
What do you think?
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No more pixels but more colours please!
DPNow No more pixels but more colours please!
Here is a summary or excerpt from an article that has just been published on DPNow:
The Japanese ma... (more)
yoshi Re: No more pixels but more colours please!
I don't know what *that* yoshi meant by saying "belly colours", as *this* yoshi knows now quite well... (more)
Ian Re: No more pixels but more colours please!
Aha! That's berry good :D *LOL
Ian... (more)
yoshi Re: No more pixels but more colours please!
Thank you belly much! :rolleyes:
yo shy... (more)
