Oh Rollei, what's become of you?

[belgiumreporter]

As one of the last victims of bancruptcy the only thing left from Rollei is the brand name wich is now used on cheap GO-PRO copies and a tri-pod range.

Is it sad that a once so famous brand has gone to the dogs, or is this just the way things go in a fast and highly competitive market? It's not like other camera brands haven't gone before them like Exacta, Pentacon, Contax, Zeissz Ikon, Voightländer... wich now in the best case live on as heritage brands, mostly owned by cosina .
Leica and Minox seem to be the only German camera brands that are able to survive, both of them producing specialised cameras for the enthousiast and or lenses for all kinds(third party) applications and so are other German lens makers as well. The thing is after all the Germans are gone, the Japanese brands are becoming under stress, Minolta, now Sony is doing very well, but Pentax and Olympus are struggeling to survive. The rumours of Nikon being in financial trouble are getting stronger as well. Is this because there's a shift towards mirrorless and will DSLR's in the future become a niche product like rangefinder camera's today? Furthermore will cell phones with sophisticated build in cameras and dedicated software make point and shoot cameras obsolete? Only the future will tell...

Maybe Rollei had some bad luck, nobody needed a digital TLR...

[julio1fer]

The TLR experience was the closest thing to a real-time digital display, in its time.

P&S are already obsolete. On a recent trip to Spain and Portugal I saw more people with film cameras (about 5 in three weeks) than digital P&S (none except myself). Many people with SLRs, though, a couple of Fuji X100 models and the occasional red-dot product. Phones are by far what people most use for travel pictures.

[belgiumreporter]

I have to confess i was reluctant on using my cell phone as a camera, but now i've got the new Motorola Moto G7 power things have changed as the quality of the images has come up to a standard i can live with.

The cell phone camera has become a usefull tool to get those snapshots you normally wouldn't make because you didn't want to take a decent camera along. In hindsight i am glad i got over my aversion to cellphones and was glad i had it along on my recent trip to Argentina as the pics i've made with it may not be up to exposistion or publishing standards, they do bring back some good memories.

Still, i'll be leaving soon to travel around India and the cameras that'll come along will still be the D800, coolpix9900 and a nikon keymission170 (for when the going gets tough). Along with the 12-24/24-80 and 70-300 lenses wich dosn't mean i wont be using the cell phone camera but that'll be mainly for selfies to send to the homefront.

Here's a few cell phone shots i took in Argentina