Updated: the original had two months' worth of numbers slightly misallocated.
I've tried to point out that things weren't quite so wonderful in terms of mirrorless camera sales before, and some of you haven't believed me. Okay, we've got the first quarter CIPA shipment numbers now, and a previous year quarter to compare them against. Herewith the news (source: CIPA):
To put a number on it, 2013 mirrorless shipments were only 81.5% of those a year ago.
Here are the quarter by quarter numbers:
- Q1 2012: 740,846 units
- Q2 2012: 882,783 units
- Q3 2012: 876,919 units
- Q4 2012: 1,456,054 units
- Q1 2013: 603,532 units
In other words, the worst quarter in the five quarters CIPA has been separating out these numbers.
To be fair, DSLRs didn't knock it out of the park, either (chart scaled to match mirrorless scale):
While mirrorless shipments were 81.5% of last year's quarter, DSLRs were 76.8% of last year's quarter. Here are the full set of DSLR numbers:
- Q1 2012: 3,386,386 units (3.2 to 1)
- Q2 2012: 4,265,825 units (4.8 to 1)
- Q3 2012: 4,557,378 units (5.2 to 1)
- Q4 2012: 3,990,862 units (2.7 to 1)
- Q1 2013: 2,600,765 units (4.3 to 1)
Those numbers in parens are the DSLR-to-mirrorless sales ratio.