As we have been doing every year for the past ten years, today we are going to take a look at some industry statistics and we will be focused on the camera Industry in 2023 and see how it compares to 2022 and some of the years before.
As with every year that we cover the camera industry, all the numbers that you will see are based on the most recent CIPA (the Camera, and Image Products Association) numbers published in early 2023.
Total cameras sold
We shall start with the total number of cameras shipped (we use the terms shipped/manufactured/sold interchangeably although this is exactly correct, but close enough for the purposes of this article).
Note that this includes all types of cameras that CIPA has numbers (i.e. compact cameras, super zooms, DSLR, and mirrorless, it likely does not include action cameras, video/broadcast cameras, and cameras from companies that do not report to CIPA such as Leica/Hasselblad).
As you can see below in 2023 there was a minor decline in the number of cameras shipped from 8 to 7.8 million units globally. This is not a huge reduction but if you compare this number to pre-COVID times only 4 years before it is about half and the industry doesn’t have a lot of room to go to become unsustainable.
Total number of cameras shipped globally per year – a small decline in 2023
Camera lenses
Looking at the total number of lenses sold globally (this number does not include the number of lenses sold as part of fixed lens body cameras of course) we see a much more significant decline from 10 million in 2022 to 9.1 million – about a 9% drop. We don’t have a good explanation for this number other than the global economy in 2023 although even then we would expect this number to more or less match the reduction in interchangeable lens cameras that were sold (and as we will see shortly – this is not the case). If you have other ideas about this decline – please share them with us in the comments.
Total number of lenses shipped globally per year – a surprising decline in 2023
Non Interchangeable lens cameras (compacts/superzooms)
When it comes to compact cameras and super zooms the market has been in a downfall since its all-time high in 2010 but 2023 was the first time the number of cameras sold in this category went down below 2 million units and we can speculate that if we continue in this trend in the near future this number will plummet to less than 1 million globally. The smartphone truly killed the (compact) camera market.
Non Interchangeable lens cameras killed off by the smartphone industry
interchangeable lens cameras (DSLR+Mirrorless)
Now we arrive at the number of interchangeable lens cameras which include both DSLR and mirrorless. The numbers here are positive for a change with a small increase from 5.9 in 2022 to 6.1 and almost a million cameras more than the all-time low of 2020 and COVID.
But the more telling number will be in the next table where we will look at the difference between DSLR and mirrorless.
Interchangeable lens cameras in 2023 – a slight increase
DSLR vs. Mirrorless
This is possibly the most interesting table where we see a drill-down look at DSLR and mirrorless sales/ production in recent years and what we see is very interesting. The number of mirrorless grew from 4.1 in 2022 to 4.9 million in 2023 – a more than 19% increase.
On the other hand, we see a decrease from 1.8 million DSLRs to only 1.1 million – a big drop of 38% which is of course not surprising given the fact that only Canon is still making DSLRs (and Ricoh/Pentax in very small quantities although it seems that you can still buy Nikon DSLRs in some stores). We expect that DSLRs will be totally gone from the market in substantial numbers in the next year or two.
Despite the small increase in mirrorless numbers, it seems that the global market for interchangeable lens cameras is between 5-6 million units and this seems to be very much steady from 2020 onwards. We doubt that we will ever go back to seeing 8-10 million cameras sold globally per year any time soon.
DSLRs will soon go the way of the Dodo
Regional camera statistics
Finally, we wanted to look at regional camera (all cameras) sales/shipments in different regions of the world.
CIPA divides the world into Japan, China, (rest of) Asia, the Americas, and all other regions. Please note that our video had a couple of mistakes (which we corrected on the screen and are also corrected in the graphs below) as we got the numbers for Japan slightly off and we omitted the numbers for the rest of Asia.
Looking at the numbers two things come to mind. The rise of China as a huge market for camera sales (China is a bigger market than the rest of Asia excluding Japan, and this includes many huge countries such as India). The second is a fairly substantial decrease in Europe from 2.3 to 1.9 million cameras (over %17 reductions in one year).
We don’t have any good explanations for any of these numbers, the only thing that we can think about is the effects of the War in Eukraine on the economy in Europe but this certainly does not explain the large increase in China (especially since it economy did not grow by anywhere close to 17% in 2023).
Sales by region – note the drop in Europe and the increase in China
Past coverage
You can check out all our previous videos/articles about the camera industry below:
- What Happened to the Photography Industry in 2013?
- What Happened to the Photography Industry in 2014?
- What Happened to the Photography Industry in 2015?
- What Happened to the Photography Industry in 2016?
- What Happened to the Photography Industry in 2017?
- What Happened to the Photography Industry in 2018?
- What Happened to the Photo Industry: 2010-2020 – The Big Fall
- What Happened to the Photo Industry: 2020-2021
- What Happened to the Camera Industry in 2022?
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Iddo Genuth 
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