Sales of compact cameras were demolished by smartphones but we might be witnessing something of a renaissance. Is this another short-lived fad, or is 2025 the year that Canon, Nikon, and Sony embrace the point-and-shoot?
Photographer George Holden sings the praises of the Canon GX7 III, a camera released all the way back in 2019 but suddenly down with the kids. Holden is right; it’s back-ordered on B&H Photo, and a quick look on eBay shows models going for almost twice the retail price. (I had to look up “go fabless”; it means that Canon would outsource the manufacturing, saving them from making big financial and structural investments and making it less risky. I assume.)
If these predictions prove true, I’ll add a few more alongside Becca Farsace’s thoughts (see 8:41). For fear of sounding like a broken record, we need better connectivity with these devices, allowing for easy sharing to social media. Long-term readers might remember me complaining that my mom’s fridge is better connected than my camera, and I’m not sure that much has changed. In addition, these new compacts need stylized JPEGs that are as good as what Fuji offers, and preferably not named garbage like “Melancholic,” “Dramatic,” “Morning,” or “Dream” that Nikon thinks is oh so cool.
And one last thought: add internal storage and have them automatically upload everything to the cloud when you get home.
Is this the future? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
If there was a canon g5x mark iii, I'd order one instantly.
PS: I'd accept a price of up to 1200€.
Agreed to all of that about these cameras being connected. Short of having onboard 5G radio, these cameras should be able to remain as connected as our mobile phones, at least for auto upload to private storage (whether that be a personal NAS for privacy buffs or Google/Microsoft/Apple cloud storage for those who are ok with it). Sony, Panasonic and others are starting to get there with the premium products, thankfully.
An example would be turning on my phone's wifi hotspot and the camera automatically connecting to wifi to do its thing. Skip the middle step of using the phone local storage as an explicit intermediate step in the workflow (unless somebody wants that).