Moms and dads across the Rochester re...

Kodak faces shifting camera market

MATTHEW DANEMAN • STAFF WRITER • DECEMBER 26, 2010

Moms and dads across the Rochester region Saturday were capturing Kodak moments of their frenzied kids tearing through brightly colored paper, looking for Disney Princess & Me dolls or Red Ryder BB guns.

While many of those memories were captured on digital cameras, an increasing number were snapped on smartphones or cell phones, a trend that is putting a key Eastman Kodak Co. product into a tightening squeeze. The digital camera business, particularly for point-and-shoot cameras, faces a challenging future as consumers turn to higher-end digital SLR cameras or camera phones.

For the first 11 months of 2010, U.S. retail sales of point-and-shoot cameras were down 6 percent from the same timeframe in 2009, according to consumer and retail market research company NPD Group. Those 2009 numbers were, in turn, down 10 percent from 2008.

Meanwhile, U.S. retail sales of digital SLR cameras were up 20 percent in the first 11 months of 2010.

And German photo paper distributor Felix Schoeller reportedly has estimated that by 2014, there will be roughly 2 billion camera phones in the market, a 69 percent jump from 2009, but that the 593 million digital cameras in the marketplace then will amount to an 18 percent jump over 2009.

Increasing numbers of snapshots are being taken on smartphones. Denver-based online photo sharing site Photobucket saw a 400 percent increase this year in the number of photos uploaded from smartphones, and expects that growth rate to continue in 2011, President Tom Munro said. Smartphone photos stillaccount for less than 10 percent of the four million photos daily uploaded to the site, he said.

While the point-and-shoot market is going through "compression," said Philip H. Scott, a vice president in Kodak's consumer digital imaging group, "We don't view the U.S. or developed markets as the entire world. There are plenty of geographies where we expect point-and-shoot growth for the next year or two. And we're not a company focused solely on point-and-shoot cameras."