wmurnahan wrote:
The only thing missing is a big telephoto. They have from wide to 400 covered pretty well.
Yeah, but Sony lenses are more expensive than and not as good as Nikon, which in turn are more expensive than and about equally as good as Canon.
Keep in mind that as a whole, Sony Corporation is one of the largest companies in the camera business.
Look at 2015 gross corporate revenue of the major Japanese camera manufacturers:
- Sony 8.2 trillion Yen
- Panasonic 7.7 trillion Yen
- Canon 3.8 trillion Yen
- Fujifilm 2.49 trillion Yen
- Ricoh/Pentax 2.15 trillion Yen
- Nikon 857 billion Yen
- Olympus 801 billion Yen
But 2015 operating income (i.e., pretax profits) tell another story:
- Panasonic 382 billion Yen
- Canon 220 billion Yen
- Fujifilm 197 billion Yen
- Ricoh/Pentax 115.8 billion Yen
- Sony 68.5 billion Yen
- Olympus 62.5 billion Yen
- Nikon 43.4 billion Yen
The share of each company's gross revenues generated by their imaging divisions varies a lot, too:
- Nikon 68%
- Canon 32%
- Fujifilm 15%
- Olympus 10.4%
- Sony 8.8%
- Ricoh/Pentax 5.4%
- Panasonic 3.5%
(Note: There's likely some difference in the way the "imaging divisions" are defined.)
Forbes "Global 2000" rankings for 2016 by gross sales and profitability (also shown is market capitalization in US$ as of May 2016):
#192 Sony ($34.1 billion)
#245 Panasonic ($22.9 billion)
#254 Canon ($40.4 billion)
$417 Fujifilm ($21.2 billion)
#748 Ricoh/Pentax ($8 billion)
#1182 Hoya ($15.9 billion)
#1271 Seiko/Epson ($6.2 billion)
#1473 Olympus ($14 billion)
Unfortunately, Nikon didn't make it onto the list (fell below the cutoff of 2000).
Actually, Sony bought Konica-Minolta's camera and photographic division in 2006.
Konica and Minolta had merged in 2003. Konica was the oldest Japanese manufacture of cameras and photographic equipment, dating back to 1873 (Pre-dating Kodak by several years... In fact, Rokusaburo Sugiura, founder of Konshi Honten as it was known at the time, exchanged visits and ideas with George Eastman, founder of Eastman Kodak.)
Konica and its predecessors (Konishi, Konishiroku, Rohuosha, and Sakura) manufactured film cameras from the 1910s, lenses from the 1930s, and 35mm SLRs from 1960 until the late 1980s, when they bowed out of the business prior to producing an autofocus model (although they sold the first successful AF point n shoot camera and had a series of successes with those). Rumor has it that Konica had, in fact, developed a new mounting system to accomodate AF, which they sold off to Sigma who still use it to produce DLSRs today. Konica continued making and selling P&S cameras and interchangeable lens rangefinder Hexar cameras until the merger with Minolta, who separately manufactured AF SLRs, as well as various other cameras. But the merged companies were one of the last major manufacturers to produce a DSLR, introduced in 2004.
Konica-Minolta continues to be a major player in business equipment, but sold their entire photographic division to Sony in 2006. That included a line of excellent meters that had originally been manufactured under the Minolta name and later under the Konica-Minolta brand, which Sony in turn quickly sold off to Kenko, who have further developed and still manufacture them. Sony kept the SLR, DSLR and compact/point n shoot cameras divisions they purchased and has developed those into the Sony line we still see today. They've been pretty innovative with their cameras... but have been less so developing lenses and keeping them affordable.
Someone else noted, and it's true, that Sony makes a lot of the image sensors used by other manufacturers, including most or all Pentax and Nikon DSLRs. Canon makes their own (and hasn't supplied them to other camera manufacturers until very recently). Canon bought CCD from Kodak, like everyone else, to use in their very earliest DSLRs. But in the late 1990s and early 2000s converted to using clearly superior CMOS sensors they manufactured themselves, long before Sony, Nikon and the others. The Canon D30 introduced in 2000 used a 3MP CMOS, as did all subsequent models. Nikon first used CMOS (from Sony) in their D2X in 2004, then in 2007 switch to CMOS, too, in their FX D3 and DX D300. I think Pentax' first CMOS camera was their K20D in 2008. They also bought that sensor from Sony, along with earlier CCD and later CMOS in other models.
I think all Four/Thirds sensors used by Olympus and introduced in 2008, have been CMOS. They developed those in partnership with Panasonic, who probably manufacture the sensors still today.
Medium format digital cameras continued to use CCD long after APS-C and full frame DSLRs had given upon on them, which often meant the MF digital were limited a top ISO of 1600 and slow 1 frame per second continuous shooting. In early 2014 Pentax announced their 645Z, one of the first medium format digital to use CMOS (50MP).