Why Nikon and Canon should be worried

There has been some recent speculation on iLounge that Apple may be about to enter the 'point and shoot' camera market. According to the authorised biography of Steve Jobs the three fields that he most wanted Apple to tackle were Television, Textbooks and Photography. We can speak of certainty with regard to textbooks as Apple has already released iBooks Author. According to tech chatter then an Apple 'iTV' is almost certainly imminent too. But does an entry into the world of photography, particularly the point and shoot variety, make any sense? At first appearance the obvious answer seems to be no. There's no doubt that the smartphone market has encroached into sales of point and shoot digicams. For example, the iPhone is by far the most popular camera that posts to flickr. This is for three main reasons; firstly, smartphones are omnipresent whereas most digicams are only carried for particular occasions. Secondly, our smartphones are connected enabling us to share our photos on our social networks almost instantaneously and finally cameras on smartphones are good enough to replace most digicams, though not DSLR's. So why would Apple enter a class of device that most agree that it has played a decisive role in making obsolete? To answer this question we need to know why Apple and Jobs were interested in photography. Firsly we know that Apple have always placed importance on decent optics in all of its camera iSight offerings. Secondly we know that Apple has produced professional photography (and movie) software in Aperture (and Final Cut Pro) in addition to its consumer iLife products (iPhoto, iMovie). This in itself is quite strange seeing a neither professional product is likely to have made much money for a company which traditionally abandons peripheral product lines. Unless of course these products are part of a longer term strategy. We also know that Jobs was very active player in Hollywood circles given his roles at Pixar and Disney. Jobs was also a very keen photographer – and we know he was never healf-hearted about anything. Indeed he was the official photographer at Larry Ellison's latest wedding. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, we know that Jobs had met with and was impressed by the people at Lytro with their 'light field' camera. Taking all this evidence together it doesn't seems plausible to me that Apple would enter the traditional digital camera market with a point and shoot camera. Where Apple ventures it tends to be much more disruptive. If Apple does release a standalone camera I’d imagine it will be something like a Lytro, but probably with still and video features, that was always on and always connected and had hooks into the Apple entire ecosystem. I'd imagine it would be a companion camera that displayed real-time output on your iPhone/iPad and could be controlled from such a device. Lytro has been around for about a year now and looks very impressive but also very, very niche. The Lytro solves a problem to a question we haven't yet asked ourselves. Time will tell but it wouldn't surprise me if Apple wanted to turn the photography world on its head by producing a new type of camera. If that's the case then Nikon and Canon had best start worrying now.