In the last 10-15 years, photography has exploded.

With the rise of digital imaging, everyone is taking photos nowadays.

Casio is one of the companies that has been driving this shift, and prospered from doing so.

Interestingly, the company had 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 fiercely competitive industry.

In order to understand why this happened, we must look at the history of Casio.

The company has a fantastic track record of introducing electronics, destroying old industries and reaching mass markets.

It all started back in the 1960s and 70s when Casio and Sharp lead the electronic calculator revolution.

Within a few years in the late 60s and early 70s, these companies destroyed many industrial giants by launching cheap, portable and good electronic 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 industry became a warzone of competition. New, cheaper and 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 into the watch industry and massproduced electronic 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 eternally increasing performance and decreasing prices implied that Casio had to integrate many functions into 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 electronic revolutions, Casio emerged as a household name with a very strong consumer brand.

The success was essentially built around an ability to rapidly wire new and better electronics into consumer-friendly applications.

Both these products were based upon integrated circuits and an LCD screen. The LCD was perfect since it was light, cheap, required very little energy and could display the simple figures that were needed.

As time passed, these markets became saturated in the early 1990s and Casio started to look for new applications for its core technologies.

These were the early days of digital photography…

In 1994, Apple launched the 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 its performance had been improved significantly since the calculator era.

By using their core technologies, Casio came up with the QV10 in 1995, the first digital camera with an LCD display.

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

Not the greatest gadget mankind 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 ones could be removed and new ones taken directly.

Now the big Japanese dragons 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 define the core elements and design of a digital compact camera and now it was just a matter of improving key components such as the image sensor, the batteris and the LCD display.

However, Casio had little past experience in optics and therefore collaborated with Pentax in the beginning.

The Pentax Optio was co-developed with Casio. Pentax provided the optics and Casio made 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. Number of film and digital cameras sold in the United States.

Having destroyed mechanical companies and fought similar wars before, Casio went into the fight and crammed more and more pixels into their consumer cameras.

Casio kept breaking records, launching thinner and cheaper cameras with more pixels every year…

Casio was the first company to launch a 3 Mpixel compact camera and 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 was over only a few years later and the market for compact cameras became increasingly unattractive.

There were 3 main reasons for this:

1. More advanced ’Prosumer cameras’ went down in price and could offer more features.

Canon and Nikon had launched SLR cameras which offered much better optics and only cost a few 100$ more than a compact camera.

2. Mobile cameras started to capture the low end users of compact cameras.

3. Compact cameras couldn’t really incorporate more features and no one needed more pixels at this point.

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

All this implied that Casio’s compact cameras were stuck in the middle, in a segment that was maturing 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 could take decent photos:

Casio also used its 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 about doing it over again and make an integrated camcorder-camera?

In March 2008, Casio launched the EX-F1 – a camcorder-camera with the world’s fastest burst shooting 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, because the camera can take photos of events that are not visible to the human eye.

A few examples:

A drop of milk hitting the water:

This camera opens up a new world of photography since virtually every moment can be captured.

Photographing nature and extreme events becomes much easier than before.

Moreover, it has great recording abilities, just take a 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 have been 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 industry once 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 will have a profound impact on the industry.

It’s interesting to see how many big changes in the camera industry have been initiated 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 things from the previous digital wars they had fought.

1. Being a follower is simply not an option. In Pixel and Calculator wars, you should either focus 100% and be a leader or stay away.

Once the race is about to reach a dead end, you need to wire more functions into the same gadget.

Sources NY Times review of the EX-F1 Luminous Landscape EX-F1 ad on youtube Another 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.org christian.sandstrom@chalmers.se