Panasonic says mobile phones “not a threat” to digital camera sales

Last week I went to a blogger event hosted by Panasonic, to show off and talk about its new range of digital cameras and camcorders. As you’d expect, they had plenty to say about new features, and how they’re linking these devices with online media sharing services – for example, direct video uploading to YouTube.

But I wanted to ask if they feel threatened by the popularity of cameraphones. With five-megapixel models becoming increasingly common, handset makers openly talk about usurping standalone digital cameras, particularly at the low end of the market. As you might expect, Panasonic doesn’t agree.

“They’re definitely not a threat,” said Mark Robinson, who looks after the company’s Lumix range in the UK. “They’re anything but. In fact, they can only be positive for digital imaging as a whole. They’re bringing people into the market, so we see them as an enabler, because as people get older, their needs develop.”

So how is Panasonic competing with camera phones? The company is keen not to talk pure megapixels, but to focus on the sort of features that are increasingly standard in its digital cameras. “Megapixels will plateau out at a certain time, but quality of the LCD, usability… these are the things that matter,” says Robinson. As does:

• Ultra wide-angle lenses (they have a demo showing how you get double the image space with a 25mm lens compared to a 35mm lens)
• All manner of ‘intelligent auto technology’ – face detection, motion detection, light detection, scene detection, shake detection…
• The company’s own Venus4 processing engine

The intelligent auto stuff was particularly interesting – an example of the camera really doing the work for you. So, its face detection sees that you’re shooting a person, and switches to portrait mode, but then it realises it’s night, so switches to night portrait. For example.

There’s no doubt that feature-wise, even £150 digital cameras still make mincemeat out of cameraphones. However, that’s not necessarily the issue. Really, the question isn’t whether digicams are better than phones, but whether most consumers care enough about those differences.

And it seems many don’t – Panasonic’s own research in a graph flashed up during the blogger event showed that the number of  people whose reason to buy a digital camera was ‘taking everyday snaps’ dropped from something like 37.6% in 2006 to 31.2% in 2007 (I had to scribble those numbers down quickly, but you get the gist).

For now, it seems the digital camera market is healthy enough, but it’ll be interesting to see how Nokia, Sony Ericsson and the rest set about including all this swizzy technology in their phones in the coming years. Perhaps Panasonic could license it to them and make a packet in royalties…

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