Is Sony building a sensor monopoly?
It’s beginning to look like Sony is positioning itself as the Kodak of digital photography. Or perhaps the Intel.
Virtually all the exciting new cameras around are sporting Sony cameras — including Sony’s own RX-1, the Leica M, the Olympus OM-D EM-5, and the D-600. The new Leica is almost certainly using a Sony sensor. Fuji’s XF system seems to be based on the 16MP APS-C sensor with a custom color filter. Does the GH-3 use a Sony sensor too? And, if not, will it be competitive? I’d suggest that Panasonic relying on Sony sensors would be pretty disturbing given that for a long time Panasonic has been Sony’s only credible rival in video.
Now and for several years Sony’s sensors have dominated DxOMark’s rankings (perhaps Sony has cottoned onto DxOMark as the most cited sensor benchmark and is optimizing its sensors accordingly).
It’s also worth noting that Pentax’s K5 and K30 both use the same Sony sensor used in the Nikon D7000. And, for good measure, Sony has just invested a bunch of money in Olympus, giving it some kind of stake in Micro Four-Thirds. The camera module in the iPhone 4S is known to be from Sony, and it’s highly likely that in the iPhone 5 is also. (Who makes the camera modules in Nokia’s various “PureView” branded phones?) It seems like the only major holdouts are Samsung (who I assume are busily trying to clone Sony’s sensors) and Canon (and I for one am not going to buy a Canon DSLR to help prop them up until they give up on their ridiculous control layout).
The digital photography market is not an easy place to be right now. Smartphones with ridiculously good camera modules are eating out the ground beneath it, and at the high end Sony is cheerfully selling very nice sensor modules to everyone and letting them all kill each other. Sony (and Minolta) have never managed to dominate this market (aside from a brief period where their high-end point-and-shoots were all that enthusiasts could afford), so a chaotic melee where everyone ends up weakened and dependent on Sony suits them just fine. In this context, Sony’s injection of $400M into Olympus makes a lot of sense. In a world where Sony were trying to make NEX dominant it wouldn’t make sense to prop up NEX’s most credible competitor, but in a world where Sony just wants everyone else weak or dead it makes perfect sense.
Of course, Sony has been losing money for a couple of years now, so in order to capitalize on its success in the camera market (where it still makes money) it needs to get the rest of its house in order.