I’ve had kites on my brain for a few months now.

It feels like kite-areal photography should have taken off when cheap point-and-shoot cameras suddenly started filling drawers with the introduction of smartphones.

Photographers say the best camera is the one you have with you, and smartphones quickly left point and shoots behind by always being in your pocket.

“List of things to keep in your car” type articles used to suggest a film camera, in case you were in an accident and needed to take pictures. Now, they don’t even say that you should pack a camera because most people have a smartphone already.

I’ve been wondering how many point and shoots were produced, and how did camera makers respond to the introduction of the smartphone.

The Japanese Camera Manufacturers association has been keeping yearly tabs on how many cameras they ship, and how much they’ve cost (on average).

While the Looking at their data, you can see the introduction of smartphones with optics on par with a point and shoot that was the start of the decline. Units shipped never recovered from their 2010 high.

Looking at the cumulative sum, There are 1.017 billion point and shoots, just vibing in existence. Their ecological niche is occupied by smartphones, they sit in drawers, or some find life with firmware updates that allow them extra features.

To deal with the smartphone eating their market, camera makers started to make more expensive cameras starting in about 2012. The Japanese report average unit cost in that years yen, so this graph is in constant 2020 dollars.

So with a billion point and shoots, why are Cannon Powershots not being given away for free? The wind went from kites, which are only operable in certain wind conditions, require loading custom firmware onto cameras, to drones, where people can just crash them into bald eaggle nests with nary a care.