Thom Hogan, the well known authors of many excellent Nikon camera guide books, voiced his opinion in his June 21 blog post. In the post, he called for Nikon to wake up to the threats of cameras such as the Olympus E-P1 posted to Nikon’s future market position.
In his opinion, Nikon risks losing out growth opportunities from people who are “transitioning P&S users to something with higher quality and a bit more sophistication” and who Nikon should try to “sell something to everyone you’ve already sold something to”.
It really doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the Point-and-Shoot (P&S) users still dominate the digital camera user population. I knew many of them who want to get better image quality and performance in the compact size they are familiar with.
If history reflects what might happen in the future, Nikon should consider this seriously. By November 1962, Olympus sold more than 650, 000 compact Pen cameras and took 92.2% market sharing in Japan. None of the Nikon offerings in the affordable Nikkorex line at that time could match the price of Olympus Pen models.
