Where mirrorless is headed in 2019

Thom from Sans Mirror speculate on the mirrorless market in 2019 (archived). He gives us a manufacturer by manufacturer play:

Clearly, all the camera makers — other than Pentax, who’s still wandering around in the woods somewhere seeing if trees make noises when they fall — are going to be executing significantly in the mirrorless realm in the future. We’re now clearly into the DSLR-to-mirrorless transition period. How long that transition will take depends upon how fast the camera makers move.

This is what I’m predicting too: DSLR is down, mirrorless is up. It is a technological move and while it will not fundamentally change the way we use cameras, it will definitely shape its evolution.

The DLSR will probably die

The Computational Photographer wrote The DSLR will probably die. Are mirrorless the future of large standalone cameras?.

Let’s see why I think the reflex design is doomed, even though it has dominated serious photography for decades.

[…]

The DSLR has to die because the mirror is too high a cost for its diminishing benefits. The mirror adds to the complexity of the camera and its manufacturing, it makes the camera bigger, and it introduces challenges for lens design. And its advantages don’t extend to video, which is an increasingly important usage case.

[…]

Furthermore, the mirror in DSLR severely constrains the design of lenses, by preventing lens elements to be placed near the sensor.

This goes in the same way as what I wrote in September in The future is mirrorless. The reflex design was addressing a constraint to be able provide a through-the-lens view which is now provided using the current sensor technology.