There were times when people started buying high-end digital cameras, not because they know/want to learn/interested in photography. They bought those digital cameras because they thought that the cameras would automatically take great photos. Thus the sales of high-end cameras were booming.

For the past 5 years I’ve seen a lot of people who bought D-SLR cameras and used the automatic settings, exclusively. They didn’t even bother buying lenses that are better than the ones they bought with the camera. For example, Costco and Sam’s Club often bundled the second lens with the camera kit.

Now that a lot of smartphones have decent to great cameras, a large portion of consumers no longer care buying dedicated cameras, let alone the high-end ones.

Unfortunately huge portion of consumers still believed that Megapixel determins the qualoty of the cameras/photos. Many manufacturers and tech “journalists” are still touting the Megapixel as a measure of quality.

I’m assuming that HN crowd knows that optic and sensor are important components to determine the quality of digital cameras.