Camera Innovation is Amazing

Most would believe that innovative and commodity products always exist in the same space. There certainly is innovation in the camera industry, and there are always people looking to pay for those innovations. But commoditization is about how the majority market view the products and the industry.

Therefore it comes down to whether customers see a distinction and value in the product advancements being delivered. If they do, then the market stretches beyond the base commodity level and customers willingly pay the premium. If they don't, because of cost or easy of use, then it remains a niche in the space until a time where is it either rendered obsolete because the market moves in a different direction, or eventually gets swallowed up in the commodity side of the business as a value-add.

For the camera industry, a good example of the commodity argument is small commercial applications. If consumers think it is sufficient to buy a residential camera system off the shelf at a big box, then innovations aren't really part of the conversation. Add in low cost manufacturers for the large commercial market pitching a comparable solution, and the innovations started having a real battle.

It reminds me of when I worked in the telco/ISP world when the phone and cable companies started competing using IP. The phone companies wanted to keep charging commercial pricing to small business customers, and those customers began to wonder why they had to pay so much more for what they perceived to be the same as what they got at home. Right or wrong, no technology argument was going to move these customers because in their eyes the question wasn't whether or not to have the latest features or reliability. What they experience at home was "good enough" for them at work, so that was all they needed to know.

Much like this example, the line is being re-drawn in the camera space between value (commodity) offerings and premium (innovate) ones, and the consumers for each are no longer just residential vs. commercial or SMB vs. corporation. The real question is where the line between markets is going to be re-drawn and how much of the market sits on each side.

Despite all these innovations, a number of the larger Chinese manufacturers are hyper aggressive in dropping prices as hard and quickly as possible.

I think it's impossible to seperate the innovation from the race to the bottom, as innovation requires adoption in addition to invention, and adoption is tied directly to the cost of the innovation.

For instance, in the case of true WDR, the innovation is more than the technology involved in creating the image, it's also the processes/technology that was created to manufacturer true WDR cheaper.

If Axis had its way it might still be high-end/niche and therefore less innovative.

Surely the massive Chinese government orders have created the economies of scale that have made these things more affordable to a great number of buyers everywhere, no?

IP camera is running computers; product development is software programming work. It’s labor intensive, not capital intensive. We are short on labor resource here, so you see the Chinese advance, they have more engineers work on RD.

Did I just read a positive story about the state of the industry? !

But seriously, reading this cheered me up a little. I've been somewhat down on the industry of late.

Who do you think is innovating?

China/Tawain/Korea or the rest?

Cheap cameras today are about as good as expensive cameras used to be, and expensive cameras today are capable of things that would have been science fiction a few years ago. Take it from a guy who started out installing VCRs and multiplexors- this is an amazing time to be in this industry.