Produced by | Tiger Sniff Technology Group
Author | Zhang Jinyuan
Edit | Wang Yipeng
Header | Visual China
"Canon, moving is always there".
This slogan, which was first translated from "Delighting You Always", was originally given a footnote by Chinese users that contrapaid the literal meaning:
"Canon's models with the same configuration are much more expensive than those of its competitors, and you are only willing to buy Canon if you are moved. ”
Over time, however, this ironic joke has become a testament to Canon's influence in the Chinese market.
If you open Xiaohongshu and search for words such as "VLOG camera", then there will definitely be a recommendation of "Canon G7X3" in related posts, for people who are not familiar with Canon's product line, this name may be particularly unfamiliar, so you might as well elaborate from another angle: This is a card machine released in August 2019, with a starting price of 4999 yuan, and the current price of a second-hand trading platform is about 5500 yuan.
In other words, if you buy this camera in 2019 and use it to record some clips of your life, of course, it may be put in the cabinet to eat dust, and after 4 years you can sell it at a premium of more than 10%, easily outperforming the official inflation rate during this period.
The trading price of G7X3 on a second-hand trading platform
In the past, scalpers were Xi squatting on a wave of new iPhone and Mate series products after Apple and Huawei's autumn press conferences, and then selling them at a higher price, even being jokingly called "annual wealth management products".
But in front of Canon, Apple and Huawei are so bleak.
Is this Canon officially cutting leeks? At least as far as this machine is concerned, the answer is no, because the product dissemination cycle has long ended; is that the dealers are hype? It is also unlikely, because the channels are generally out of stock, and the dealers do not have bulk stock to sell.
But it is such a product that neither the official nor the dealer is interested in pushing, but it has become a sweet spot in the hands of users on social platforms, if you look closely, you will find that this situation is not an isolated case, in the case of the general decline in overseas camera prices, the price of cameras in the Chinese market is generally higher, especially in Canon's products.
What is the magic of Canon that can "grasp" Chinese users so easily?
A "not so correct" collective memory
Before discussing how Canon "handles" Chinese users, we might as well think about a question: what are Canon's advantages?
According to ZDC statistics, in terms of Chinese camera brand attention in 2023, Canon leads the way with an absolute advantage of 44.18%, while Sony and Nikon rank second and third with 24.82% and 17.21% respectively.
In 2014, Canon and Nikon both had a market share of about 40% in China.
Since then, "Nikon shoots landscapes, Canon shoots portraits" has become the default iron rule in the photography industry and continues to this day.
Nikon cameras are considered essential equipment for landscape photography, Canon is the best choice for portrait photography, judging from the user portrait of this sentence alone, Nikon is destined to belong to the carnival in the niche circle, and Canon's positioning for portrait shooting is more suitable for mass consumer groups.
But is that really the case?
Videographer "Sansetu" told the author that this conclusion can basically summarize the characteristics of the two brands, but the actual gap can be said to be very small, "In addition to the half-dead Pentax and Olympus, and the relatively niche Leica Hasselblad, the Chinese market is basically left Canon, Nikon, Sony three, at most plus a Fuji, consumers must still want to force some differences." ”
"If you use RAW (unprocessed, uncompressed) for filming, the images taken by Nikon cameras are not much different from those of Canon, but if you use JPEG format for filming, Canon is really more capable of color matching. ”
The biggest difference between the two formats is that the former is almost directly from the CMOS sensor to obtain the digital negative, which can preserve the post-production space to the greatest extent, while the latter is through a series of adjustments such as color temperature, color balance, image sharpness, etc., through the internal camera and even through the neural network for image processing, so even without post-editing, the quality of the finished film will not be too bad.
The characteristics of both determine that for non-professional videographers, the frequency of using JPEG format is much higher than that of RAW format, and Canon has deeply adjusted the portrait in JEPG format to make the finished film more suitable for portrait shooting.
That said, from the very beginning, Canon has been deeply ingrained in the minds of Chinese consumers with an image of "being good at portraits", although this impression is not entirely correct.
Of course, if you only rely on portraits, Canon may not be able to thrive in the current market.
Canon's bigger magic weapon is "misplaced competition". For example, the release of the SLR camera "300D" in 2003 was a very delicate time, when film cameras had begun to decline, and Sony was developing card cameras in digital cameras, and Canon actually had only one rival in the field of SLR cameras.
However, at that time, the price of SLR cameras was generally more than 10,000 yuan, and the Canon 300D created the category of "entry-level SLR cameras" with a starting price of 899 US dollars.
Canon 300D, the early silver body was complained by users as "unprofessional", and the later product was adjusted to black. Image source: Hummingbird.com
For example, after entering the mirrorless era, Sony took the lead in making users feel the significance of mirrorless cameras, while Nikon was very radical to upgrade the F mount with a diameter of 54mm and a flange distance of 46.5mm to a Z mount with a diameter of 55mm and a flange distance of 16mm, creating a camera mount with the strongest compatibility and theoretical performance among many brands.
Canon, on the other hand, did not have a first-mover advantage and was unwilling to overhaul its product line, so it focused on the "half-frame mirrorless" category around 2014 and achieved corner overtaking.
How to "cut leeks" with sincerity?
Objectively speaking, for a long time in the past, the pricing of Canon's product line was definitely "you get what you pay for", but this situation changed completely in February last year: Canon (China) Co., Ltd. issued a notice to domestic distributors to raise the price of its products by 150-2,000 yuan.
The hoarding behavior of some dealers after receiving the notice has further increased the price in the terminal market.
As for the reason for the price increase, the reason given by Canon is the high cost of raw materials and logistics, but the actual situation should be the retaliatory rebound of tourism at the beginning of last year, which greatly stimulated the market demand for cameras, and the previous manufacturer's misjudgment of the market situation caused a mismatch between its production capacity and demand, one of the most direct proofs is that Canon closed its Zhuhai factory in January 2022, which had been operating for 30 years.
In essence, there is nothing to blame for this kind of business behavior determined by supply and demand, but the question is, why can Canon's price increase be accepted by consumers? You must know that in the quarter when the price increase was announced, according to Canon's financial report, the company's revenue in the imaging business area was 192.4 billion yen, a year-on-year increase of 22.4%.
Perhaps we can get a glimpse of it from the Canon G7X3 mentioned above.
This camera is the third generation of Canon's card player series "G7X", in fact, at the beginning of the establishment of this product line, Canon did not think about its market positioning at all, and even the biggest selling point at that time was focused on "thin and portable", but in 2014, when smartphones developed explosively, such selling points were obviously not convincing.
In 2019, when flagship smartphones began to be equipped with the equivalent of 1-inch CMOS, it no longer made much sense to promote the camera performance of the card player, so when the G7X3 was born, Canon chose to focus on its camera capabilities.
Interestingly, in this year, the Vlog industry ushered in a blowout development under the joint promotion of several major Internet companies. ACCORDING TO THE STATISTICS RELEASED BY ZHIYAN CONSULTING, THE NUMBER OF VLOG USERS IN CHINA REACHED 249 MILLION IN 2019, A YEAR-ON-YEAR INCREASE OF 97.6%.
Unlike previous short video shooting, smartphones have several obvious problems when shooting Vlogs. First of all, the shooting time is longer, a 10-minute Vlog may be edited by the author from 4-5 hours of footage, and secondly, compared with short videos based on content creativity, Vlog shooting has higher requirements for the picture, and it is difficult for smartphones to meet these requirements.
Therefore, the hardware market for shooting Vlogs was gradually born, and two routes have evolved: one is the "pocket camera" represented by DJI and Yingshi, and the other is the so-called "Vlog camera" promoted by traditional camera manufacturers based on the characteristics of the card machine.
Photographer Sansetu told the author that G7X3 is indeed more suitable for Vlog shooting. First of all, its 18-200mm focal length can basically realize the propaganda of "one lens to go all over the world", and although the functions of digital five-axis image stabilization and non-cropping 4K are not too brilliant, they are just what they need to shoot Vlogs.
Of course, the "Vlog camera" is a bit of a hype for the caliber, but at least Canon still conforms to the market demand and really makes a targeted adjustment for the G7X3.
For example, through a firmware upgrade, the G7X3 has added a dedicated "Vlog shooting mode" for movies, and increased the tracking performance under autofocus and auto-exposure. In addition, for the convenience of novice users, Canon has also added a "zebra crossing function" for the G7X3, allowing users to grasp the overexposure in time, or the aspect ratio of the picture is marked down, so that users can grasp the effect of cropping in the post-production screen.
Canon's official firmware upgrade for the G7X3 continues until 2021
Trendy and user-friendly to new users, it's easy to see why, four years after the camera went on sale, the second-hand market is still a rare item.
Write at the end
In the camera industry, there are many century-old stores with deep accumulation, and among these manufacturers, you can not only see the highly iconic characteristics such as "Leica flavor" and "Sony flavor", but also feel the heavy historical burden they carry.
For these manufacturers, Canon is definitely an outlier, because so far no one seems to have summarized what the taste of Canon looks like. But from another point of view, the camera industry does need some products that are not so "sticky" and can respond to consumer needs in a timely manner.
The G7X3, which is not treated by professional players, but has "financial management attributes", is probably a proof.
Tips: I am Zhang Jinyuan of Tiger Sniff Frontier Technology Group, focusing on consumer electronics, semiconductors and display industries, welcome to communicate (please be sure to note your business identity, thank you.) WeChat: 18510113471).
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