The cameras being made now, and the market that shrank around them.
05Film Again · 05.1
Ricoh released a mass-market film camera in 2024. Its most consequential specification is the one it subtracts.
31 pieces in all
The Pentax bodies Ricoh has shipped since 2021 — K-3 III, Monochrome, KF, K-1 II — and the K-mount they all share.
07 pieces02Canon's RF, Nikon's Z, Sony's E-mount and the rest of the field after the mirror was dropped.
06 pieces03CIPA shipment data from the 2012 peak through the contraction — interchangeable-lens, compact, lens-only, and the used market.
05 pieces04Sensor geometry, Bayer and Foveon arrays, phase-detect AF, IBIS, rolling shutter, global shutter, RAW formats — the engineering behind the specification sheet.
07 pieces05The Pentax 17, Kodak's Rochester line, Ilford, Harman Phoenix, home developing, and what the scanner market looks like now.
06 pieces03 Six Million · 03.1
03Six Million
DSLR versus mirrorless is an engineering argument. CIPA's shipment data frames a different one.
In 2012, CIPA recorded interchangeable-lens camera shipments of roughly 12 million units — a number that felt, at the time, like a floor rather than a ceiling. It was, in fact, the peak.
12M
Interchangeable-lens shipments peaked in 2012 at roughly twelve million units, then fell to something under six. The compact camera’s collapse, counted in tens of millions a year, was the larger event.
CIPA annual shipment statistics · dc_e series
Everything else is on the section pages
01Still Making Them
A new DSLR arrived the year Canon and Nikon declared the mirror era over. Here is what Ricoh put in it, and why.
02Everyone Else
When Canon, Nikon and Sony abandoned their legacy mounts within a few years of each other, the engineering choices they made guaranteed permanent incompatibility.
01Still Making Them
The K-3 III Monochrome is not a black-and-white mode or a software conversion. It is the K-3 III's APS-C sensor with its Bayer mosaic physically absent — a deliberate subtraction that changes what every photosite does.