The compact camera came back from the dead, but last year's sales were still a fraction of the point-and-shoot’s heyday

(Image credit: Rod Lawton/Digital Camera World)

Viral trends have suggested the revival of the compact camera – but now there are numbers to hint just how far the tiny camera format has come. The Japanese Camera and Imaging Products Association (CIPA) says around 9.4 million cameras were shipped worldwide in 2025, and 2.4 million of those cameras were point-and-shoots with fixed lenses.

That’s the highest number of shipments for compact cameras that the organization has reported since 2021. But while the numbers indicate the compact camera is having a revival, 2025 shipments from Japan are just a fraction of the category’s peak.

In 2010, more than 108.5 million compact cameras were shipped worldwide. The 2025 numbers are just 2.24 percent of the year considered the compact camera’s heyday.

While the 2025 CIPA numbers are just a fraction of the industry’s success fifteen years ago, the numbers illustrate a continued recovery since the dramatic drop across all categories in 2020, which is widely blamed on the COVID-19 pandemic. While the 2025 numbers for cameras across all categories have not exceeded 2019’s 15.2 million worldwide shipments, 2025’s 9.4 million shipments are the highest numbers since 2020.

CIPA puts all fixed lens cameras in the same category, which means that those fixed lens cameras include a wide variety, from point-and-shoots like the Canon G7 X Mark III to bridge cameras like the Nikon Coolpix P1100 to the high-end Sony RX1R III. CIPA only tracks numbers from its members, and while that includes Canon, Sony, Nikon, Fujifilm, Ricoh, OM System, and Panasonic, it doesn’t include camera companies outside of Japan, such as Leica and Kodak.

Along with tracking camera shipments, CIPA also monitors the price, in yen, of those cameras. The fixed lens camera category in 2025 shipped ¥151.459,698,000, which is about $971 million / £710 million / AU$1.38 billion / CA$1.33 billion.

Compared to the compact camera’s biggest year on record, and that’s 13.3 percent of the 2010 shipment values in yen. With the number of shipments at just 2.24 percent, that suggests a price increase over the last fifteen years. That could be from inflation and demand, but that increase could also be due to the fact that many compact cameras in 2025 lean more towards high-end features, whereas in 2010, budget point-and-shoots were still popular before smartphone photography really took off.

The 2025 numbers come alongside the December tally, where fixed-lens camera shipments were 90 percent of the previous month but up 141.2 percent over December 2024.

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