Why did Samsung stop making cameras? It's fairly simple: Samsung pulled the plug on its camera business in 2017, citing the growing popularity of smartphones and declining sales for standalone cameras. After all, Pentax, Contax, Minolta, and Konica have all disappeared from the camera market. On top of Samsung's strange positioning in the space, smartphone cameras practically rendered the low-end consumer camera market dead. So, in a sense, Samsung's smartphone camera quality helped kill its own business.