Daniel Terdiman over at News.com has an interesting article up today on the first half 2005 sales numbers for digital cameras from IDC. Those of you read us regularly know that we're interested in the trends here, too—in fact Daniel interviewed us for the piece. The gist is this: IDC is reporting 1H2005 sales of digital cameras as 9.7 million units, up about 20% from 1H2004. Kodak is in the lead with 2.15 million units sold and 21.1% market share. Canon and Sony aren't far behind. While this is impressive, it isn't nearly as impressive as the nearly 50% growth we saw a year ago, in 1H2004. IDC sees this as evidence that the market is maturing and stabilizing.  Personally, I'm not so sure. 

The IDC numbers take a very traditional veiw of the market that I think may need to be reconsidered. It's unclear, for instance whether the IDC numbers include digital one-time-use cameras like the ones made by Pure Digital for retailers like CVS and Ritz Camera. It is pretty clear that they don't include phonecam sales. With phones shipping with 5MP sensors and Carl Zeiss lenses, though, Those are legitimate camera purchases that need to be taken into account, and they would certainly change the results. Some analysts are predicting that phonecams sales alone may reach 770 million by 2009. That's not stabilization, that's exponential growth. Of course, that's not wonderful news for companies like Kodak, Cannon, and Sony, who aren'tpositioned to compete in the mobile market, and for them sales really may have peaked. But camera sales on the whole look to continue moving up into the forseeable future. Where those companies still have plenty of room for growth, though, is in the high-end film replacement DSLR and EVF markets, and it would be nice to see those numbers broken out by IDC.