jancology.com

Today the Pacific Business News had a terrific story about Nikon shutting down their domestic production of 35mm film business. Although the story is a denial, they clearly state that NIkon sells as 5 times as much digital cameras (5 million digital to 1 million film based cameras). Nikon put up a press release on their website stating that there were no plans to do this.

I guess what will happen is that Nikon will not invest in film based cameras in the near future but the Nikon brand will stil be very visible on those types of cameras. I think the film based stuff will be further developed and produced in taiwan and malaysia and Nikon Japan will invest in digital. I’m not sure about the slr business and the pro cameras. I guess there will be an F6 although it maybe a combined digital/film cam to merge the D1/D2 and F4/F5 lines.

Nikon is much less vulnberable for digital then Kodak is. The Kodak brand is moslty know of its films and the production will drop very fast in the next few years. Today I was at the arrival of Santa Claus in the Netherlands and more then fifty persent of the parent’s cameras were digital and this will only increase.