[Klaus]

Well, in this market environment you've got two options - be aggressive and target a gain in market share and higher production utilization - or you consolidate.

What you can clearly see is that Canon is in the first camp and Nikon is in the 2nd. Sony can afford to be somewhere in between. Of course, Nikon is also in a different situation - they are (or have been) massively dependent on their imaging department - whereas it's one of many for Sony and for Canon it's at least not that bad (albeit I'm not sure whether having a printer business is brilliant either ...).

While Canon/Sony shine from a consumer perspective it's the question of whether it'll work out for them. There is old business wisdom - never try to catch a falling knife. And this clearly applies to the camera market. "Funnily" it's probably not Fuji/Panasonic/Olympus/Pentax who are in deep s**t. It's the big boys with their massive production facilities. The small ones just reduce some lines in their single facilities. The big ones have to close complete factories and reduce R&D. It's a fixed cost nightmare.

FWIW, the same applies to 3rd party manufacturers. I'm slightly wondering how Sigma/Tamron/Tokina are doing. Sigma is the biggest lens manufacturer in the world ...