Will point & shoots be a dead product soon?

I wouldn't be surprised to see P&S's to be taken over by the camera phone....it fact, I would be surprised if it didn't happen. It happens time and time again in technology. Something new comes out and people look at it as a novelty...then it catches on and becomes a very useful item....then it replaces the "older" technology that everyone said it would never replace. Two biggies I can think of are digital cameras (killed film and most people never thought that would happen when digital was first introduced....as least not so quickly) and cell phones (killing the traditional landline).

I'm sure some P&S's will be around for a long while but their market will shrivel and shrink to very small numbers.

g12 f-ing amazing?

My Droid has an awesome 8 MP camera in it. And with the different camera apps you can download for it you can really do some neat stuff. I hardly ever use my P & S anymore. I use either my DSLR or my Droid.

Will point & shoots be a dead product soon?

One day DSLR's will be a dead product.

fotoworx wrote in post #11890734
Will point & shoots be a dead product soon?

One day DSLR's will be a dead product.

Not hardly. Not in our life time anyway.

phydoux wrote in post #11890994
Not hardly. Not in our life time anyway.

I suspect folks that use to ride horses said the same thing. It might not go away totally but I would not be surprised if it becomes a niche market.

phydoux wrote in post #11890994
Not hardly. Not in our life time anyway.

Yeah, and digital will never be able to replace film....at least not in our lifetime

If the trend is downward, that is the answer.

It will need to become a niche product capable of doing more than any phone, at which point it will be the middle choice between a phone-shot and an SLR (or whatever is after SLRs)

The shift will be to cell phones. P&S makers, such as Canon and Nikon, seem to behind cell phone cameras in terms of features. Not sure why Canon and the like still can't have built in Wi-fi, GPS tagging and Facebook uploading right on the camera. These are features they lack and why everyone post cell phone pics.

cdifoto wrote in post #11889897
Most images from P&S and cameraphones end up on social networking sites, not in print.

True, but a few months ago in my camera club we had a first place ribbon in the advanced color print category go to an 8x10 print that had been shot and post processed on an iPhone. Mind you, the photographer is extremely talented, chose a subject that was well suited to the tools at hand, and applied a filter that gave the image a nice look while hiding the negative aspects of a camera phone shot.

On the other hand, there are not many phones that have even 3x of optical zoom so there are things that a P&S can do that a camera phone can't touch.

PMCphotography wrote in post #11890275
Imagine if you could have a P&S with a 3G data connection ( as opposed to a 3G device with a camera attached.) That would open up a huge market if you could upload your P&S pics straight to your social network of choice

doesn't the new Kodak have something like that? They advertised the heck out of it a month or two ago, with its "straight to facebook" abilities.

After thinking a bit (and reading the posts)...maybe the line between cell phone and p&S will just blur into one big fuzzy market. Some equipment will be more camera that contains the smart phone features while some will be a smart phone that contains a camera along with everything in between.

jra wrote in post #11891694
After thinking a bit (and reading the posts)...maybe the line between cell phone and p&S will just blur into one big fuzzy market. Some equipment will be more camera that contains the smart phone features while some will be a smart phone that contains a camera along with everything in between.

Got to admit that an Android S95 could be a really, really useful device.

As Kramer said, in the future we'll be able to make a phone call just by thinking about it. Maybe that will be the same with photography. Maybe in 100 years our cameras will be connected directly to our brains. Think about how many amateurs there will be then...

phydoux wrote in post #11890994
Not hardly. Not in our life time anyway.

Of course they will be a dinosaur product. Technology moves on. I know it's hard to believe of our beloved and expensive gear.