Flickr posted some interesting stats showing the most used cameras by Flickr members. As you see from the graph on top Sony and Fuji are gaining some shares while Panasonic is loosing terrain and Olympus also (less than Panasonic) But still, the most used camera remains the E-M5:
Let’s hope the E-M5II will be as popular as the E-M5!
68 Responses
What? Did you leave out the word “mirrorless” on purpose, trying to spread a blatant lie, or by accident? The E-M5 was reported to be the most popular MIRRORLESS camera on Flickr, but it doesn’t even make it into the Top Ten, which are, by the way, since Flickr is not really an enthusiast/semi-pro/pro platform, dominated by iPhones, followed by Canon and Nikon DSLRs:
https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7473/16085377738_58b991d7d3_b.jpg
Nevertheless, interesting to see that, in Flickr’s mirrorless stats, the E-M1, too, is as far up as number 6.
iphone should be disqualified as its mobile/cell/phone
peace!
All other cameras should be disqualified because they can’t do a phone call.
Yes…From a list of most used phones in flickr
Fuji rumors use word “suffering” of m4/3 platform , uhmmmm
But it’s true.
Year by year, M43 is loosing mirrorless marketshare, while Sony, Fuji and Samsung gain mirrorless marketshare.
What would you call it?
Is Apple suffering because they’re losing market share relative to Android in all markets?
Yes lol
Well Sony and Fujifilm were later to the game and the cameras just weren’t as good. Now Sony is cranking out more cameras than lenses. I don’t see Samsung being liked by people who are really into photography, but they might make a camera you can take selfies and post to Facebook with.
Anyway, with all this competition we have seen the mirrorless cameras get so much better than they used to be so we still win. Even a bad camera these days is 10x better than what we had 5-10 years ago.
According to Thom Hogan’s estimate (they don’t give split out figures) Fuji have a tiny market share.
That may be changing but they’re still well behind the main players. Personally I like what Fuji have done and if I was starting a system from the beginning would seriously consider them but don’t think they have much market share at the moment.
Sony are the big elephant in the room and by this time next year Canon will have joined them.
They’re not completely wrong; Sony and Fuji have nice and mature cameras now, and the market only has 100% to divide out 😉 – as long as the market itself is still growing, Olympus sales can still grow anyway…
That’s funny, I actually went to the link and actually read the article, and it was clear their listing for “the top ten cameras owned” on Flickr are various models across only three brands: Canon, Apple and Nikon.
Not surprisingly, Panasonic fails to place even one camera in the top ten of mirrorless. It could indicate their their hybrid, video-focused product strategy doesn’t appeal to photographers and that the camera line up becomes less attractive. If I look at the current horrendous gap between GM5 and GH4 and nothing in between, currently (discontinued models don’t spread a lot of confidence to buyers unless the prices are strongly reduced), the decline is understandable.
I was a long time Panasonic user, the G1 was my first mirrorless in January 2009. With the strategic change from GH2 to GH3 (too fat, horrible view finder, still no IBIS), the Panasonic product portfolio drove me into the Olympus camp (E-M5), and the Flickr numbers show, that I was not alone with that.
I hope, that Panasonic learns. That the GH4 competitors (E-M1, X-T1, A7) made it into top 10, whereas GH4 not, speaks for itself. (And if one argues that GH4 owners don’t post on Flickr, because they shoot video, supports my arguments, because it means that Panasonic lost the stills photographer).
I totally agree with you. I am a GH2 user and wanting to extend/renew my primary camera. Since the OMD EM5 Olympus had by far the more interesting cameras but their video sucks. And video was a major part for me chossing mft at all. GH3/4, especially 4, are stellar cameras but are bulkier and way more expensive then the GH2 at its time and that was already not cheap. The GX7 looks attractive and checks all my boces but I tried it and the viewfinder just put me off. I am a almost viewfinder only shooter.
So for now I am stuck in a system where none of the cameras from the past 2 years satisfy my needs… On the other hand sony has the A6000 for under 700€ with a compact lens, good autofocus, excellent image quality and good video or even full frame with the A7 with an ok 28-70 kit for 1350€ which is still cheaper than the GH4 body alone. Lens line up is not great and expensive for sonys but most people stick with the kit lens anyways. I am not suprised by the above numbers at all.
yeah,Gh4 is hybrid cam not photographer cam,
strength of lumix MFT not photograph but videographer ,do you know?
most of photographer use CanoNikon cam and still the same.
Yes, the GH4 is a photography cam.
Please know what you’re talking about before actually talking.
sorry , something wrong,
reply to @Mahler why it …???
Sure it is, but less than Olympus. Panasonic is linked to video, it is about 4k, high bitrates, cheap video functionality, wide range of cinema lenses available….
Sure you can take photos with GH4, but it isn’t designed well for still photography, while E-M1 is perfect from any camera.
Come now, the GH4 is designed as well as just about any camera for still photographers. It does the job just as well as an E-M1. It’s just not popular solely for stills because it’s very expensive if that’s all you want to do.
Not true. E-M1 can achieve better stabilization than GH4, can stabilize primes. For Fuji and Sony the sensor size difference is there. Precisely, GH4 is not popular because it’s expensive and offers less than other cameras do to still photographers.
Agree.
Flickr users chose E-M1, XT-1 and A7 because they are less expensive? I don’t think they are that naive. Pana fans are in denial by pretending sensor, color and features don’t make any difference.
If you can’t take a good picture with the GH4, you’re in the wrong business. Ultimate image quality isn’t as good as an A7 or NX1, sure. But unless you’re pixel peeping or obsessed with thin DOF, it’s not going to be immediately obvious.
Gh4 main selling point is 4K video (no denying here) but it’s also perfectly designed for stills. The only thing is there are somewhat better and cheaper cameras (like Nikon D7100) for this porpoise alone.
You used Gh2 for video and now opted for Sony A7 for teh same purpose, what a joke. A7s video quality is abysmal, like most of the Canon cameras. It’s full or nasty moire and aliasing + it has an under HD resolution. As a still camera it may be ok, but there are a lot of good Nikon and Canon alternatives on the market. A7 + lens is only marginally smaller than a D600 or 6D + equivalent lenses.
By your same argument, then, the fact that no mirrorless places in the top ten of Flickr postings, means that mirrorless “lost the stills photographer.”
Or, it could indicate that Flickr is not video focused, which would explain very well the numbers.
Who know, Panasonic strategy might work by avoiding competition with other cameras but trying to earn revenue from video shooter. The statistics doesn’t show how much market share Pana has.
If this is a true representation of reality, m43s is losing seriously to Sony and Fuji….It is quite dramatic.
May be they should be more different, like they were in 2008-2011. More daring, which coming up with a mirrorless system simply was. But Sony came with the first Rangefinder with NEX7, not one of the mFTs.
Sensor have remained the same moreless since 2012, may be it is time for something new but that is difficult and the current sensors are really good.
What would be really different and to my mind SO important for a SYSTEM is getting us good and well thought out lens lineups. Now mFTs has loads of lenses, which is very nice, but many of them are rather similar.
What are other systems lacking: a good enthusiast lens lineup. Invest in such a lens linup. Enthusiast means environmental seaing, really good IQ, reasonably fast and a reasonable price and preferably OIS (so you can use them on both Oly and Panny bodies without too much thought).
Like:
– 8-16 mm f4, 300 gram…………..€ 600,-
– 12-60 mm f2.8 to F4, 500 gram…….€ 700,-
– 60-175 mm f2.8 to F4, 650 gram ….€ 800,-
– 175-350 mm f3.5 to F4.8, 1200 gram….€ 1100,-
Send a letter like this to the M4/3 alliance, maybe they will hire you.
Its % of pictures uploaded to flickr, counting max 1 per account per week. Where is the drama?
One year ago there was a presentation stating that Sony owned half of the worldwide mirrorless market, so nothing new here and it only shows how much people care about a well though out lens lineup. You can’t equate market share with advance users.
For a year with no major consumer releases by M4/3, I’m not really surprised that they would lose usage share. And they only dwindled by 10% total.
I don’t expect the E-M5 II, which seems like the height of incrementalism, will be able to restore their market share, however. And I don’t really know what’s on the horizon for Panasonic that could do it, either.
In both cases, they are chasing the high-end, I guess, trading market share for profit margin.
I am not flickr user but 500px user ,
this post was nonsense.
well, why don’t you post stats for 500px then?
It’s all nonsense…along with the “expert” critiquing here about the big significance of yet another stupid graph. 🙂
Let.s get the Oly EM5 II into our hands and go create photos instead of predicting the negative future!
Rough times ahead for Camera makers. Camera phones have thrown a monkeys wrench into anything they could have imagined. Something has got to give and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few companies go the Kodak route.
You might as well say Instamatics threw monkey wrenches into SLR sales in the 60s. The instamatic is the best selling camera model of all time.
Mass market cheap cameras have existed since the original Kodak 135 years ago, and have always outsold more expensive cameras.
Pointing to phone cameras is an excuse camera makers use. Not that there is not some truth to it, but it hides the fact that camera makers charge too much for their cameras and their lenses, but are not accountable for the subsequent drop in sales. More: camera makers force a monopoly of prices on each geography, preventing the actual retailer feet on the street from meeting market demand by actually charging a price a consumer is willing to agree to. Camera product marketing is their own worst enemy.
Cameras and lenses are incredibly cheap, the cheapest they have ever been since cameras became mass market products.
I suggest you look at the price of the most basic SLR cameras or zoom lens in the 1970s and 1980s and adjust for earnings.
The Pentax K1000 is often quoted as a good example. It cost $300 when introduced in 1975 with a 55mm fixed focal length kit lens. Manual metering and no autofocus. That would be the equivalent of $1,350 today.
Why there is no Samsung? There is that strange Pentax K-01 but no full-featured NX system. Or are flickr users so gay so they don’t use Samsung?
Because NX system doesn’t sell much and is included in the market share of Samsung, which includes P&S and phones.
You shouldn’t use the word “gay” like that. There is nothing wrong with gay people.
Is NX system marketshare smaller than that of K-01?
btw this isn’t really marketshare, flickr users are not representative of camera users
And Instagram users are representative of light users of photography.
The more a camera sold, the more likely the camera is being used, right? The more a camera is used, the more likely people will upload pictures from that X camera on an Y site.
Thus you can assume if people don’t upload on Flickr with the NX system, then it didn’t sell as good as other cameras. Expect if there is like a cult for NX users to boycott Flickr and other sites for whatever reason.
Finally to support my claims look at the marketshare for mirrorless in Japan, the biggest mirrorless market in the planet at the moment. Samsung isn’t on the top 5…
Oh and the K-01 sold quite well, as Pentax has a dedicated “cult” following the company, plus -in the UK at least- we had lots of Pentax no-brainer deals throughout the last year.
Very few Japanese people buy Korean cameras as there is a lot of hostility between the countries. I believe most stores don’t stock them or other Korean products).
Agree with your other points.
Yes I am aware with that. That is just another reason why NX system doesn’t sell. If it can’t sell well in the largest mirrorless marketplace, then obviously it won’t make it high in the charts…
Are you saying Samsung NX is worse than Pentax K-01 which combines worst features of DSLR and mirrorless?
…in Russian retails at least, there are a lot more NXs than Fujis and K-01 is very rare
I am saying that the K-01 is a better selling camera, partly due to the Pentax brand name, partly due to deals, partly due to X and Y factors.
A better selling camera, doesn’t mean a better camera. I like the NX system myself, I may even pick an NX400 when it comes out, but that doesn’t change Samsung having the smallest marketshare from all companies.
Once you understand that price, marketing and brand recognition with medium quality can sell more than good quality and no brand recognition and sufficient marketing you will see what I ‘m saying.
Before I leave this conversation two suggestions:
1) Don’t become a fanboy, all brands/systems serve their purpose and at the of the day perform reasonable well.
2) Be less homophobic.
Cheers!
I am not fanboy, just I i don’t like nonsense.
Flickr data is not representative to total market share, e.g. because it’s mainly U.S. where they don’t sell much mirrorless cameras.
Samsung claims their NX system has 14% marketshare in mirrorless – makes sense. http://www.samsung.com/us/aboutsamsung/investor_relations/financial_information/downloads/2013/2013-samsung-electronic-report.pdf
Why are Samsung-phones more popular than most Japanese phones in Japan then, if this hostility you speak of is so clear? Even when those mentioned Samsung-phones definitely are in most cases an inferior product to the Japanese phones like Sony, Sharp, Fujitsu etc?
In Sweden most people buy Volvo ( and before Saab). Not because they hate Germans, Japanese, French and American etc. But because they like their national brand more than others.
Its the same in Japan. Most consumers there know that Olympus, Sony, Canon, Nikon etc makes good cameras. So they buy that. Samsung doesnt have a history of making good cameras, and their current cameras arent exactly known for their excellence either.
If you go into Flickr’s “Camera Finder” you’ll find that they have only added two NX cameras into the Samsung database: the NX10 and the NX1000. That doesn’t bode well for them being able to generate any meaningful statistics for the brand. https://www.flickr.com/cameras/samsung/
Yawn, any more rumors on the E-M5 II?
yes..yes….now, it is rumored that the EM5 will be a full frame camera with a new sensor, sensor shift and all of our existing MFT lenses will all work just fine, because Olympus has developed a image magnifier filter placed directly in front of the new sensor. Not only will it not degrade the image sharpness, it also give us one more f/stop on all of our lenses!!!! 🙂
That does it, Im preordering!
who wouldn’t ! 🙂
I don’t see Olympus repeating what the EM5 did, when there are better choices for I’m Sony and fuji, plus the fact that it’s not a big improvement from the old camera.
We’ll see….
I thought the same thing when I saw those numbers.
When I bought my E-M5, there weren’t that many mirrorless choices out there at the time. The Nex-6 and X-E1 were announced (and available) quite a bit later that year. I liked the X100, but really wanted interchangeable lenses. The Nex-7 didn’t seem to perform well with most lenses. Panasonic still was using the older sensors.
Now there are tons of choices, both new and used (including cheap original E-M5s), many at lower price points. And the full frame Sony A7 is in the ballpark price-wise as well.
It’s just hard to imagine this E-M5II doing well at anywhere near the price point of the original when it came out. Maybe the multi-shot high res feature is really amazing, but other than that, it doesn’t appear to be much different.
http://photorumors.com/2015/01/17/new-olympus-e-m5ii-accessories-leaked-hld-6p-and-hld-8g-grips-plus-a-new-fl-lm3-flash/
the em5ii’s grip will be sold in two different parts…. interesting…
Hmm, the black version dont look so bad..
In fact the ‘old’ E-M5 is such a miracle of balance and ease of use, that I am not going to trade it. Perhaps it will get more value as antiques 🙂
Miser
Yes, you must be some white trash using money as a substitute of photography.
That does it! Im buying a Leica M to prove you wrong!
You always recognize your own kind, poor spaz.
What is flicker?
Flickr (pronounced “flicker”) is an image hosting and video hosting website, and web services suite that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, and effectively an online community, the service is widely used by photo researchers and by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media.
Flickr is a bit of an odd bird, it relies on the exif to recognise cameras but doesn’t always get things right and it often doesn’t recognise a number of Panasonic cameras at all, so the marketing stats it produces are often a case of garbage in, garbage out.