While it's true that consumers wanted to buy mirrorless systems, manufacturers also stopped making them in volume. Of course, by this point, both Canon and Nikon had released their own mirrorless systems and essentially stopped further DSLR development while reducing production. By 2020 they made up 54% of all camera shipments, compared to DSLR's 25%. Mirrorless was close to DSLR shipment values by 2018 and exceeded them in 2019. This is important enough in itself, however, it is the financials that are more impressive. 2020 was a landmark year in that more mirrorless cameras were shipped than DSLR 33%, as opposed to 27%, of total shipments. While DSLR shipments imploded, mirrorless has remained flat in a falling market meaning that they made up an increasingly larger share. The following year, 2011, also saw mirrorless make their first appearance in CIPA data (below) which showed 4 million units shipping, meaning that uptake was rapid by consumers and principally focused around Panasonic, Olympus, and Sony. But as soon as that spike in income had arrived, it rapidly began to disappear with 2020 marking a new low point of 9 million units shipped (¥420 million). OK, of these some 109 million were integrated cameras - high quantity, low value - but it did generate significant income and profit for manufacturers which in part funded the system development. This has to be viewed within the context of global camera shipments which peaked at 121 million units (¥1643 million) in 2010. And dabble they did after Olympus and Panasonic debuted Micro Four Thirds, with Sony, Nikon, Pentax, Canon, Fuji, and Leica all introducing new systems. However, the vested interests of CaNikon kept the DSLR dream alive - along with their income streams - which let other manufacturers dabble to see what the market was interested in. It appears so obvious looking back over the last ten years, that it seems inconceivable that mirrorless wasn't considered the future of camera design when it first appeared.
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