Digital Camera Shipments Continue to Grow

Last year, I wrote about how the times were changing for photographers. In that post, I reference the fact that industry analysts Lyra Research expected there to be 130 million digital cameras shipped by 2010. A few weeks ago, I came across an article that indicated IDC was saying that 131 million cameras shipped in 2007.

I guess the industry hit that milestone a bit early. So I’m making an understatement saying that 3 years is a “bit” early…

Based upon my conservative calculations, at rates of growth slower than we have been seeing, we will see almost 200 million digital cameras shipped world wide in 2010. And about 10% of them should be Digital SLRs!

That’s impressive growth for the photography industry. The funny part is that if you look at other stats from the US Federal Government, the number of “professional photographers” is no where near that size. The last published statistics estimate that there are less than 150,000 professional photographers in the US. This is why the industry typically uses the shipments of cameras as the indicator for market potential.

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