In the last 10-15 years,

photographyhas exploded.

With the riseof digital imaging,

everyone is takingphotos

nowadays.

Casio is oneof the

companiesthat has beendriving this shift, and prospered

from doing so.

Interestingly, the companyhad no experience of

producing cameras prior to the rise of digital imaging.

Yet still, the company has emerged as one of the

survivors in this fiercelycompetitive industry.

In order to understand whythis happened, we must look

at the history of Casio.

The company has a fantastictrack record of introducingelectronics, destroying old

industries and reachingmass markets.

It all startedback in the

1960s and 70s when Casio

and Sharp leadthe electronic

calculatorrevolution.

Within a fewyears in the late

60s and early 70s, these companiesdestroyed manyindustrial giants

by launchingcheap, portable

and goodelectronic

calculators.

Just take a look at all the mechanical giants that collapsed in this shift:

Monroe…

Victor…

Burroughs…

Remington Rand…

Olivetti…

Facit…

With a competence base in mechanics, these firms could not keep up with Casio, Sharp, Texas

Instruments and the others.

After the shift to electronics, the calculator industrybecame a warzone of

competition. New, cheaperand better models were

launched at a furious pace.

Many companies entered the industry in the early 70s to dig gold, but very few survived this

Klondike business.

Casio and Sharp emerged

as two of the surviving giants

after the war.

In the 70s and 80s, the company thundered intothe watch industry and

massproducedelectronic watches.

Casio and its electronic relatives Seiko and Citizen put 1000 of the 1500 Swiss watch manufacturers

out of business from 1970 to 1985.

The eternallyincreasing

performance and decreasingprices impliedthat Casio had

to integratemany functionsinto one gadget

in order to remain

competitive.

Creating a calculator-wrist-watch was one attempt to deal with the continuing

decrease in prices.

After these two electronicrevolutions, Casio emergedas a household name with a very strong consumer brand.

The success wasessentially builtaround an ability

to rapidly wire new and betterelectronics into

consumer-friendlyapplications.

Both theseproducts were

based uponintegrated circuits

and an LCD screen. The LCD was perfect since

it was light, cheap, requiredvery little energyand could display the simple figuresthat were needed.

As time passed, thesemarkets became saturated

in the early 1990s and Casio started to look for new applications for its

core technologies.

These were the earlydays of digital photography…

In 1994, Apple launchedthe QuickTake camera.

It looked like a pair of binoculars, could store 32 photos and was the

first camera that could be connected to a PC.

The price? 800 dollars.

Kodak launched the DC40 and DC50 in 1995-96.

What about putting an LCD display into a

digital camera?

Remember, the LCD was cheap, consumed

little energy and itsperformance had beenimproved significantly

since the calculator era.

By using their coretechnologies, Casio cameup with the QV10 in 1995,

the first digital camera with an LCD display.

It had an image qualityof 0,25 Megapixels and required 4 AA batteries.

Not the greatest gadgetmankind has invented.

But the concept of having a LCD screen and this design turned out to

be very attractive.

Photos could now be viewed instantly, bad onescould be removed and new

ones taken directly.

Now the big Japanesedragons like Canon, Nikon and Olympus

invested a lot in developing this concept.

The Japanese firms worked jointly in an industry

association to solve critical technical issues.

The QV 10 came to definethe core elements and

design of a digital compactcamera and now it was just a matter of improving key components such as the

image sensor, the batteris and the LCD display.

However, Casio hadlittle past experience in

optics and thereforecollaborated with

Pentax in the beginning.

The Pentax Optio was co-developed with Casio. Pentax provided the optics and Casiomade the electronic components. Thanks to

the modular structure of digital cameras, this kind of collaborations worked well.

The corresponding Casio camera was called Exilim.

Once the digital cameras had reached good price and performance levels, sales exploded.

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005

Number of film and digital camerassold in the United States.

Having destroyedmechanical companiesand fought similar wars

before, Casio went into the fight and crammed moreand more pixels into their

consumer cameras.

Casio kept breakingrecords, launching

thinner and cheapercameras with morepixels every year…

Casio was the first company to launch a 3 Mpixel compact cameraand the second one after Toshiba with 4 Mpixels.

The company was also the first one that broke the 10

Mpixel barrier for compacts.

But the Megapixel war wasover only a few years later

and the market for compact cameras becameincreasingly unattractive.

There were 3 mainreasons for this:

1. More advanced’Prosumer cameras’ wentdown in price and could

offer more features.

Canon and Nikon had launchedSLR cameraswhich offeredmuch better

optics and onlycost a few 100$

more than a compact camera.

2. Mobile cameras started to capture the low end users

of compact cameras.

3. Compact camerascouldn’t really

incorporate more features and no one needed more

pixels at this point.

Most people can’t tell the differencebetween 6 and 10 megapixels.

All this implied that Casio’s compact cameraswere stuck in the middle,

in a segment that wasmaturing and increasingly

commoditized.

How do you break out of the commodity trap?

Well, Casio had done it before…

Remember?

Already in 2000, they launched a camera-wrist-

watch.

It was a fun gadget that couldtake decent photos:

Casio also usedits Exilim brand to launch a few

mobile cameras.

So far, the company had

kept away from the highly

competitive SLR segment.

In recent years, the market for digital camcorders had exploded.

What aboutdoing it over

again and make an

integratedcamcorder-

camera?

In March 2008, Casio

launched the EX-F1 – a

camcorder-camera with the world’s

fastest burstshooting

performance.

The camera can capture 60 images in one second, which is about 20 times faster than any

SLR has done before.

This is amazing, becausethe camera can take photosof events that are not visible

to the human eye.

A few examples:

A drop of milkhitting the water:

This cameraopens up a

new world of photography

sincevirtually

everymoment canbe captured.

Photographing nature and extreme events becomes much easier than before.

Moreover, it has great recording abilities, just takea look at the following slow-

motion video:

For less than 1000 USD, you can now freeze time, slow it

down and take photos of events you have missed.

The camera has 6 Mpixels, which is pretty good given

that takes 60 such photos in one second.

But the EX-F1 has a couple of weaknesses and sales havebeen somewhat restricted.

Thus, one can partly regard it as a prototype and an

indication of what is coming.

Instead of fighting the megapixel or SLR wars with Canon and Nikon, Casio re-defined the camera industryonce again by focusing on

completely different attributes.

Will the EX-F1 become another landmark camera from Casio, just like the QV10 forever

changed the camera industry?

We’ll see, personally I believe that this camera willhave a profound impact on

the industry.

It’s interesting to see howmany big changes in the

camera industry have beeninitiated by companies like

Casio which have a background in consumer

electronics and not in analogue photography.

It seems like Casio had learnt

quite a few thingsfrom the previousdigital wars they

had fought.

1. Being a follower is

simply not an option. In Pixeland Calculator

wars, you should either

focus 100% and be a leader or

stay away.

Once the race is about to

reach a deadend, you needto wire more

functions intothe same gadget.

Sources

NY Times review of the EX-F1Luminous LandscapeEX-F1 ad on youtubeAnother video

Image attributions

Christian Sandström is a PhD student at Chalmers

University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. He writes and speaks about disruptive innovation and

technological change.

www.christiansandstrom.orgchristian.sandstrom@chalmers.se