Markets of two: Microsoft, Nikon, Canon and Sony
Published September 25th, 2006 in GeneralWe all know about the market of two rule: Mostly only two companies get the big market share in each market. Coke/Pepsi, McDonalds/Burger King, Aldi/Lidl (in Germany), Boeing/Airbus. For a long time this was true with game consoles. There was Atari/Collecovision and later Nintendo/Sega. When Sony entered the console market, they squeezed Sega out. Then came Microsoft,
with no clear 2 company situation right now, Sony clearly leads (> 100M PS2 sold) with Nintendo and Microsoft at a second place (with both around 20M sold). Sony entered the hand held market, a clever idea as there was only one company. We’ll see how the next generation market plays out with the X360 in the lead, Sony a strong contender (although too expensive, this ist not the PS2 situation when everyone wanted a DVD) and Nintendo with a clever concept: attrack non-gamers, be the cheapest, have games with new ideas.
The IDE market looks the same, with Eclipse and IDEA the most used IDEs by the people I know (although it seems that Jbuilder is still very strong with SMEs). We’ll see how Netbeans, as an IDE which gets some traction, will stirr up that market. As an IDEA user I hope they don’t squeeze out Intellij.
The point of this post: I consider buying a new digital camera (DSLR). After being a Canon-man for a long time, I’m considering buying a Nikon camera. I have currently no investment in lenses anymore so I’m free to buy what I like. I think I might buy a Canon 400d, but the Nikon D80 just feels better, has better usability and doesn’t look as cheap.
BUT: Right now Sony has seriously entered the DSLR market with their Sony A100. It has nice features and a competitive price. As Canon ist the clear leader, Canon won’t be squeezed out of the market, so either it’s Nikon or Sony won’t be successful. What to do? :-)
If I were you, I would stick with Canon! Canon is producing from A to Z of the products with all in-house-developed and proven quality technologies. From the camera sensor and things around to lenses, optics and so. The other ones (including Nikon and Sony) usually have some of the key pieces to be produced in other leading companies.
After all, it’s very hard to ignore Nikon but not Sony, since it’s not a serious competitor for the moment. A100 does not do well at all on higher ISOs and is not as fast as Canon and Nikon ones, from what I’ve seen on the photos.
Yes, the A100 is no option for sure, the quality is too bad.
For Canon, the below $2000 cameras just feel so much cheaper than their Nikon counterparts. They look and feel so plastic. One of the reasons (call me crazy) I have apple laptops is that they look and feel so much better than everything else.
And menus and handling was always worse with Canon than with Nikon. So it’s a tradeoff, slightly better pictures (high iso, sharper) versus feeling better with the camera. In the end perhaps, a fine camera doesn’t make me a better photographer ;-)
Thanks for your opinion though.
Because I got some mails: The A100 is an interesting camera, the anti-shake with every lense is fine (though this will lead to cheaper VR/IS lenses or Nikon/Canon will introduce anti-shake in their bodies two and claim VR/IS is better than chip stabilization. People with the money to buy VR/IS now will also by VR/IS lenses when they have anti-shake in the body, they want the best they can get). The image quality seems to be worse than the D80/XTi.
But Sony has a very bad quality track record with me lately, though I had a Sony TV for more than 15 years, they are getting worse and worse. A MD broke and my Hifi broke, and their service is very bad (and expensive). So no Sony for me until they get better.
And take a look at the sony DSLR site http://www.sony.com/dslr and find me a decent prime there (yes, I know, take a Minolta one). They announced some, but they are not committed. And Zeiss prices are obscene (yes, I know, the quality …)
none; you can have a look at olympus e1, if you wanna; what about sigma dp1 or this one: http://www.macandphoto.com/2006/09/prise_en_main_d.html ? would love to see it in realita ;)
The first digital camera I owned was an Olympus 640×480 camera (the first I think with this resolution which was affordable). I wasn’t very pleased, so I can’t get myself to buy an Olympus.
A M8? I’m no journalist, just a poor computer scientist :-)
But the coming Pentax K10D looks nice (good lenses, anti-shake, ant-dust, weather sealed).