Canon, Nikon, Sony, and FUJIFILM on the Future of Cameras – Video, Shared Platforms and AI

Industry Insights

by Johnnie BehiriToday

Subscribe to News - Industry

Four of the people who decide what our next cameras look like have sat down with the same Japanese newspaper, and they did not give the same answer. Canon wants to sell style and feel alongside performance, Nikon is putting its money into processors, sensors and video cameras, Sony talks about digital twins, and FUJIFILM bets on dials and film color. Read from a filmmaker’s seat, the most interesting part is how much of it is about video.

The interviews were published by Nikkei under a headline that translates roughly as “Cameras in the AI era: competition moves from specs to experience”. The publication spoke to Go Tokura, Executive Vice President and head of Canon’s Imaging Group, Hiroyuki Ikegami, Senior Executive Vice President and head of Nikon’s Imaging Business Group, Kenji Tanaka, who ran Sony’s camera business before becoming President and CEO of Sony Corporation in April, and Kouji Matsumoto, Corporate Vice President at FUJIFILM. The piece is in Japanese and behind a paywall, so all quotes below are translations.

Nikon puts video on its investment shortlist

For us, Nikon’s statement is the clearest. According to Nikkei, Ikegami-san says the company is focusing its investment on three things: next-generation image-processing engines, image sensors, and video cameras. He also describes a plan to build an engine and software platform that can be dropped into a range of different products.

That lines up with what Nikon told investors in May, when its Medium-Term Management Plan spoke of a full entry into the cinema market. It also fits the product trail we have followed since the RED acquisition: the Nikon ZR, the NIKKOR Z CINEMA lens development announcement and, most recently, N-RAW in the $1,399 Z5IIC. A shared platform is the logical next step if one RAW family and one color pipeline are supposed to run from an entry body up to a RED.

Ikegami-san is also candid about the cost of that approach. “It is taking a bit of time to cascade the features of our flagship Z9 down to lower-end models,” he says, adding that completing a lineup from high-end to low-end pulls the average selling price down. He frames the dedicated camera as a “smartphone + 1” device, something people carry in addition to the phone rather than instead of it.

What we do not get is a timeline. Nothing in the interview says when the new processor arrives or which camera gets it first. As we all are aware of, Nikon’s software pace has not always matched its hardware ambitions. ZR owners know it well.

Canon: more V Series, and lenses built for both jobs

Tokura-san’s starting point is the compact camera boom. “Young people are driving the current growth of compact digital cameras,” he tells Nikkei. “They certainly aren’t buying them just because of high performance or image quality; they enjoy the shooting experience itself, even if it comes with some minor inconveniences.” Canon’s lineup, he says, has so far been organized around performance and price, and now needs style and feel woven in.

The part that matters for video shooters follows from that. Canon intends to expand its video-oriented V Series, the line that so far includes the PowerShot V1 and EOS R50 V, and to add more video-oriented lenses that remain useful for stills. Seen next to the EOS C50 and the recent EOS R8 Mark II, this reads like a company separating its photo-first and video-first products more clearly instead of asking one body to do everything.

There is a commercial reason behind the tone. As we wrote when looking at Canon’s numbers in Canon’s Cameras Are Printing Money Again, compacts are currently doing a lot of the heavy lifting. A “V Series” that grows upward would give those buyers somewhere to go that is not a Cinema EOS body.

Sony thinks beyond the camera

Tanaka-san’s answers are the least about cameras as products. He describes what Sony calls spatial AI: “capturing the physical world using image sensors to create a digital twin, wherein we can make reality more attractive or simulate different ways of presenting it.” Alpha, in this picture, is one input device in an entertainment business that also includes film, music, and games.

He stretches the word creator accordingly. “Anyone who creates something and inspires emotion is a creator. This includes not only photographers and film directors, but also dancers, musicians, and athletes.”

It is a big-picture answer, and it comes from the person who now runs Sony Corporation, not only its camera division. It says little about the questions Cinema Line users are asking this autumn, with the Sony FX5 still not in customers’ hands. But it does explain why Sony keeps investing in volumetric capture, virtual production and sensor technology at the same time: for Sony, the sensor is the business, and the camera is one of several places it ends up.

FUJIFILM stays analog at heart

Matsumoto-san gives the most conservative answer on AI, and probably the most popular one. “AI can generate images, but only humans possess the subjective sense of feeling, ‘This is real,'” he says. FUJIFILM’s pitch is the physical experience: “Finding affection in the tactile, analog feel of turning dials or enjoying the distinct color tones of film photography is only possible thanks to our accumulated camera technology.”

For filmmakers, that philosophy already has a product attached. The GFX ETERNA 55 leans on exactly this heritage of film stocks and color science, and the Film Simulations are a workflow argument as much as a nostalgic one, because a look that works straight out of camera saves time in post.

What this means for video shooters

Put the four answers side by side, and one thing stands out: none of these executives talk about megapixels or burst rates. Two of them, Canon and Nikon, name video explicitly as where the investment goes. That is consistent with the shipment data, where mirrorless units are roughly flat while value rises (see our piece on the CIPA first-half numbers), and where growth has to come from somewhere other than selling stills photographers one more body.

“Experience” is a comfortable word for a manufacturer, because it cannot be measured in a lab the way rolling shutter or dynamic range can. A shared platform across a whole lineup, as Nikon describes it, saves development cost, but it only helps users if features arrive in the cheaper bodies quickly, and Ikegami-san himself admits that this has been slow. And as far as the interviews go, nobody addresses what working shooters complain about most this year: prices, memory costs and delivery times.

Whose answer is closest to what you want from your next camera: Nikon’s video-first investment, Canon’s V Series, Sony’s spatial AI, or FUJIFILM’s dials and film color? Let us know in the comments below!