2015 may be remembered for many things but certainly not for innovation in the imaging industry. In fact, 2015 was a tepid year for the industry in general. Product launches were few and far between, the compact camera market continued to slide and new technologies in different areas of imaging were sparse. The mirrorless market grew on a worldwide basis whilst the D-SLR market barely grew. All this indicates that 2016 can only be better.
Advances were registered in 4 areas:-
a) In-body 5-axis image stabilisation irst introduced by Olympus and then by Sony.
b) Improvement in the electronic viewinder and incorporating it in the eye-level viewinder in place of the optical viewinder. The mirrorless brigade were the leaders here.
c) Getting high quality stills from 4K movies. Panasonic is the pioneer here.
d) High resolution multi-shot mode as found in the Olympus OM-D EM-5 II. The Olympus, a 16MP camera, can thereby shoot at 40MP.
Happy New Year! Let’s hope 2016 is better for all the stakeholders in the imaging industry.
H. S. Billimoria
