Throw-away cameras defy digital revolution

Sales of digital cameras have halved in Japan despite the introduction of new models. Picture / Reuters.

TOKYO - Sayaka Masuda's face was a picture of frustration when she realised she would have to buy a disposable camera in Kyoto, Japan's photogenic ancient capital.

"After I got on the bullet train from Tokyo, I realised that I'd forgotten my digital camera," said the biology student.

Thanks in no small part to the forgetfulness of consumers, disposable cameras still earn a place on Japanese kiosk and convenience store shelves 20 years after the first model was sold.

Across the Pacific, a heartier appetite for disposables - little more than a film coiled behind a lens and a flash - has provided some relief for a film market hit by demand for cheaper and sharper digital images.

The Photo Marketing Association said that in the United States, the world's largest photo market, about 202 million disposable cameras were sold last year. That is down from the record 218 million gobbled up in 2004 but defies the more than 20 per cent annual shrinking of the colour film market as consumers go digital.

So deep is the rot in global film sales that the world's third-largest maker of camera film, Japan's Konica Minolta, decided this year to pull the plug on making colour film, while AgfaPhoto of Germany went bankrupt, sinking the once-famous Agfa brand.

But digital cameras are susceptible to theft, loss and damage and that has been another key to the longevity of disposables - serving as a stand-in at the beach, say, or amid the cacophony of celebration and inebriation at parties and rock concerts.

One of the few countries to see a significant denting of sales is Japan, the world's second-largest photo market, where once-smitten consumers helped to ignite a global infatuation with disposables.

Domestic shipments slipped to 48 million in 2005, says Japanese imaging group Photo Market, nearly half the number shipped a decade earlier when Sayaka Masuda took her first disposable on a school trip to Tokyo Disneyland.

Single-use cameras are losing ground in a country famously quick to bin old technology in favour of the new, and where the incidence of theft is comparatively low.

The ubiquitous camera phone, just an arm's length away in bags and trouser pockets, is the latest predator on disposables' diminishing turf in Japan, where about 90 per cent of mobile phones can take photos.

But camera phones won't really encroach on the territory of single-use cameras until the printable image is sharper, says Ken Sugiyama, a spokesman for Fuji Photo Film, which introduced the first disposables to the world in 1986. "Digital cameras - that's the killer."

Given disposables' role as instrument of last resort, and their popularity among people shy of fiddly electronics, a shrunken niche should be maintained in Japan.

Certainly Eastman Kodak and Fuji, the world's top two makers of photo film, aren't shying away from inventing new flavours of disposables.

The latest single-use camera from Fuji features speedier film for taking clearer photos at night, adding to a range that has included models for taking underwater, panoramic and black-and-white photos.

"The move to digital cameras and the market growth of camera phones threaten sales, but there will continue to be a particular need for disposable cameras," said Masahiro Nakanomyo, an analyst at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities.

- REUTERS