General manager of Canon Consumer Imaging Ireland, Philip Brady, discusses how the mobile phone and picture sharing sites like Flickr have impacted on the future digital camera market

How has the camera market been changed by the explosion in popularity of user-generated content on photo sharing sites like Flickr?

There are about 18 million pictures up on Flickr at the moment and growing daily, and this has absolutely added to the sale of cameras.

It was predicted the sale of digital cameras last year in the UK would flatten but in fact it grew, and here in Ireland it grew by double digits.

Do camera manufacturers like Canon worry that sales will be affected in the face of the mobile phone, which now comes with a fairly decent integrated camera?

Ironically, the use of cameras, and a DSLR, in mobile phones has actually introduced people back to photography, so it has had a definite positive effect on camera sales.

Mobile phones are whetting appetites for photography.

Phones are for making calls. It’s nice that they have a camera feature but it does not replace the camera for special occasions.

Do you think most digital SLR camera users fall into the trap of point-and-click, never realising the full potential of what it can do?

Our cameras are quite feature-rich so Canon felt it was a good idea to let people know what they can really do with them.

Reviews will show that Megapixels have been a numbers games on the market for many years. Megapixels do not determine the quality, only the size of the image. The trick to a decent camera is the lens and the processor.

www.independent.ie/business/technology/framing-the-future-of-digital-cameras-1375809.html