As it has come up in recent discussions, I thought I would look into it a bit more and also start a new thread.

I went back to the CIPA data and looked at Interchangeable Lens Cameras (ILCs) only from 2010 until present. As 2021 is not yet complete, here are the production (vs shipped) totals for each year through 2020 broken down by ILC totals, DSLRs, and mirrorless.

Name: Cameras Produced.jpg Views: 1124 Size: 34.1 KB


This graph represents a total of 141M ILCs produced from 2010-2020.

As for 2021, through October there have been 4.4M ILCs produced, 1.8M DSLRs and 2.4M Mirrorless. In general, 2021 is tracking to be about the same ILCs produced as 2020, unless something changes dramatically in Nov-Dec.

What strikes me most is that Mirrorless sales are not really increasing. Rather, they have been remarkably steady since first tracked in 2012. DSLRs peaked in 2012 and ILC production numbers have been following DSLRs down since.

Next, over in the R3 thread, we started talking about brands with some discussion regarding which brand was shifting faster, etc.

First, most of the articles I found reporting the Nikkei market assessment focused on total "digital camera" sales, which would be ILCs + fixed lens cameras. I mostly found data from 2018 through 2020 for digital cameras and used that data to generate:

Name: Cameras by Brand.jpg Views: 996 Size: 25.4 KB


I did find an article from 2018 breaking it down by ILC, which reported Canon 49.1% of the ILC market, Sony 24.9% and Nikon at 13%. Using the total ILCs produced as reported by CIPA in 2018, this is equivalent to 5.35M ILCs produced by Canon in 2018, 2.7M by Sony, and 1.45M by Nikon. Compare this to the results reported by DPR for 2020 of 2.76M ILCs by Canon, and 1.15M for both Sony and Nikon and we can start to answer the question from HDNitehawk in that Canon ILCs produced decreased from 2018 to 2020 by 48.5%, Sony by 57.7%, and Nikon by 20.8% while the number of ILCs produced overall decreased by 51.8%.

This is mostly just information for those of us that are curious about the market. Volume does not make the best camera. But, I will say I am happy to be invested in a brand that is, comparatively, doing well.