Nikon not worried by Nokia 41MP smartphone

Nikon has claimed that it's not worried by the new Nokia 808 Pureview smartphone, which features a 41 million pixel camera and Carl Zeiss lens, instead claiming that it is still growing in a shrinking market.

Speaking to TechRadar, Jeremy Gilbert, UK marketing manager for Nikon UK, said "As long as people come into photography, then that's all that matters.

"We're not thinking too hard about it, if we started worrying what the mobile phone industry was doing then that would complicate matters."

Last year, the Nikon Coolpix S3100 was the best-selling compact camera in Europe, while earlier in the year James Loader, product manager for Coolpix claimed that Nikon had yet to feel the bite from the rise of smartphones.

Decline

The news comes after it was revealed that compact camera sales were down 30% in 2011, when compared with 2010.

"We're still growing in a declining market," Gilbert said, "We're still building our proportion of the market."

Gilbert also said that Nikon was the top-seller of compact cameras during February 2012, knocking the previous leader, Fuji, off the top spot.

"Our L series [Nikon's budget range] is doing extremely well, and we have worked hard to get a much broader variety of cameras in supermarkets to increase distribution."

He joked that he'd like to see a head-to-head between the Nokia Pureview cameraphone and one of Nikon's compacts.

We'll be keen to put the phone up against traditional cameras when it becomes available for testing, watch this space.