[Wall-E]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/2...CC20131229

[WDHewson]

Very interesting news story.

Several years ago one of my technical colleagues (chemist) predicted that the cell phone cameras were now sufficient for the average user that "Point & Shoots" would just cease selling.

And DSLRs were simply a bad idea from the start. A big noisy mirror and shutter flapping and vibrating is bad for image quality, and expensive to build versus a sensor that is simply clocked to get correct exposure.

[Wall-E]

Very interesting news story.

Several years ago one of my technical colleagues (chemist) predicted that the cell phone cameras were now sufficient for the average user that "Point & Shoots" would just cease selling.

And DSLRs were simply a bad idea from the start. A big noisy mirror and shutter flapping and vibrating is bad for image quality, and expensive to build versus a sensor that is simply clocked to get correct exposure.

Well.... Looks like your colleague was at least partially wrong.
There is still a fairly strong market for P&S cameras.
And he may have a point about the mirror, but that's because it's a carry-on from film SLR's. There are plenty of people that swear that their mirrorless cameras give better images compared to similarly priced DSLRs. The only thing I can't get used to is not having an optical viewfinder. I find the electronic viewfinder too slow to catch any sort of fast action, like sports.

[WDHewson]

It's a pretty small sample size, but I think that I've noticed the P&S departments in a few stores get pretty small compared to 5 years ago. And in at least one of these stores, there are no sales people who can tell you anything about a P&S, but they can take a picture with their iphone. The future will unfold as it will.