Nikon vs Canon

If you have any interest in high-end cameras, either practical or intellectual, here is a very observant article about how the Canon/Nikon battle is going. (Hint: Nikon is losing ground fast, it's sad.) (Note, this is only true in the high end, not consumer cameras. Under $1500, Nikon rules.)

ttl commented...

Well, there must be an order of magnitude difference in the size of the R&D budgets of these two companies. The fact that Nikon is able to compete at all is pretty amazing.

It seems to me these Nikon-is-a-has-been statements and articles appear regularly at the point in the product life cycles when the flagship Nikon camera has been in the market for quite some time and Canon has just come out with their latest and greatest.

Still, as I wrote earlier, Canon is constantly one step ahead. But if Nikon starts falling two far behind one might expect them to join forces with some other player, and then the competition would start anew.

JB adds:

It seems to me that Nikon has just made the marketing decision to push at the low end of the DSLR market. The D40 and D40x show this. They do not produce their own chips and Canon does. So Nikon is doomed to take what Sony hands them while Canon can innovate and produce sensors like the 14 bit Mk III. Nikon cannot compete in this arena.

Canon on the other hand has made the marketing decision to compete from the mid level to the top in the DSLR world. Their entry model 400D is competitive with the Nikon D80 leaving three Nikon models in the region below this.

Canon has possibly decided that the profit margin is too low in this area when you had a pack of wanna-be competitors like Pentax and Olympus driving the prices down.

So I don't think Nikon is failing, they just have a different plan which is based on their suppliers. Time will tell which is the most successful.

Of course Nikon cannot afford to fall completely into the shadows in the upper end of the market since that would damage their sales at the bottom. So they will have to come up with something to compete with the Mk III and the eventual 40D which we can assume will have some Mk III features.