The Sensor Size
The king under the sensor sizes is… APS-C! At least If we look at the Camera ownership ranking on Flickr. There is just one Full Frame camera under the top 10 cameras, the [shoplink 13457]Canon 5D Mark III[/shoplink] (7th). All the other top ten cameras feature an APS-C sensor. The best seller is the Canon 7D!
CSC Cameras
But let’s take a look at our little mirrorless-world. Who is the big fish in the small aquarium? As you can see in the graph above, it’s Sony. However, we X-shooters are no more a rare phenomenon on Flickr, but a quickly growing community. The M43 system is decreasing.
In 2013 and 2014, the most owned camera was the [shoplink 13887]Olympus OM-D E-M5[/shoplink]. The most popular X-series cameras are the Fujifilm X-E1 and Fujifilm X-T1.
But check out all the graphs and ranking here on Flickr, and then feel free to drop your considerations in the comments down below.
71 Responses
Sony trolls stampede in 3… 2… 1…
Sony trolls itself with so many camera bodies. 😉
( but add them together and they got some pretty high numbers )
Plankton always outnumbers higher life forms 😉
They might have a point. The excitement that came with the A7 system was something I only saw before with the X100 when it was first presented. Say what you will about the system as a whole, and the vision they have for it’s lenses (lack thereof), they have attracted A LOT of people to the promise of FF, and attractive options when it comes to different sensors for different users. I prefer Fuji’s camera and lens designs, as well as their mature approach to color output, but I am no big fan of X-Trans, or particularly just living in APS-C. FF is no longer bound by size it seems, or in many ways cost. I still think a FF X100 would be fantastic. As great as my Fuji files are, the images from my Df really sing in a way the Fuji’s, for me, do not. I can clearly see Fuji is not going to embrace another format for the foresable future, and will do just fine I’m sure. However, I can’t help but see that as a missed opportunity to make something really special.
FF is so popular because so many believe that it’s a holy grail of sensor sizes. It’s not. It’s not even a “full frame”, at least according to MF and LF shooters. If someone thinks that owning FF camera will magically transform him or her into better photographer, so be it. Questioning religious beliefs became a dangerous business nowadays, so I won’t touch the subject of glorious FF even in a cartoon.
But speaking from personal experience, in small format cameras I prefer APS-H. That’s the optimal sensor size for my style of photography. Both APS-C and FF sizes are compromises – again, for me personally. And among these two I prefer APS-C nowadays, simply because of the lightness of the whole kit.
FF MILC might be popular, but from where I’m standing, it’s just a DSLR sans mirror. Nothing really special about it.
Do we care what a dishonest turd like you thinks? No. Not at all.
Of course you do care, that’s why you keep coming back for more: http://is.gd/EPjbve
But peoples are different, with different preferences, many choose FF because they simply prefer it.
Mostly, a camera is just a tool to many photographers (who don’t really care about formats, MF, FF, APS, M43, choose the right tool for the shoot), or a toy to many enthusiasts (fans who love to prove one format is better than others, usually saying from personal experience coz that’s what they have), or a reliable friends to many general users (who don’t really care about formats, but intend to buy affordable functional cams).
But of course Captain, there’s no such thing as One Size Fits All Ultimate Budget Friendly Camera.
Yep, call people religious fanatics for wanting FF, then hide behind your “opinion”. Nice try, albeit a weak one.
I think you can say that most of the so hyped MILCs now appear to be a DSLR sans mirror. Including the X-T1, and even more with the battery-grip attached to it. This makes the whole ‘i just ditched my DSLR’ story such a joke. Now suddenly ‘going compact’ is a hype, while nobody wants to use the word ‘compact’. It’s like creating a mini-corvette, leave the back-seat fully away now – branding it with another name – than start pretending it’s better than the original one. If everyone on this forum likes APS/C a lot more than 35mm, well that’s fine for me. I only doubt that most of these APS/C-prophets never ever owned anything above that size and just make statements and assumptions, including about that way too much glorified Fuji-weight. IQ is not expressed in grams. The difference between a full-blown Fuji and a DSLR with a prime is not necessarily so different, neither the form factor. Let me put it this way, I really like to pick my 100% predictable DSLRs over the nice looking Fuji, that frequently misses pictures due to its FW quirks, inflexibilities and toyish battery life. While, Mr. Talbot, you’re right, I think that APS/H could have been a perfect differentiator for Fuji. And not CMOS, but an evolved SuperCCD.
LMAO. There’s no more trollish person on this board than YOU sir. YOU are THE most dishonest person one could ever find here. You do not even pretend to have credibility. You have no interest in credibility. Your dishonesty appears to have no upper limit.
Oh sick puppy, forgot to refill your prescription again?
Everyone knows you are dishonest, without any redeeming value of any kind. You prove that with every post you. Nothing but pure fan boy idiocy.
Now I understand why you are called LOL. Your comments are hilarious!
Glutton for punishment, aren’t you? Sorry sugarbutt, no alms today.
Be polite and just ignore the trolling people. Don’t make yourself look like them.
Internet discussion could be better if not suffered from this kind of things.
Nonresistance to evil is overrated.
Yeah, right, have fun with that. If that’s what you want to spend time for.
pfff….
Looks like Fuji are doing well. Flickr is not really that popular with pros, so it would be interesting to see a similar chart for zenfolio etc. I think Fuji are probably the most popular mirrors cameras for pros, I’ve seen quite a few wedding photographers with them, but none with m4/3 and only one with a Sony.
In reality, we have no idea how popular Flickr is with pros compared to Zenfolio or any other service for that matter. One thing is for sure though, it is not video oriented, so Fuji will show better than it is.
M43 system is suffering…sure…that’s why the number 1 camera on both lists (2013 & 2014) is an Olympus M43 camera!
Just look at the chart, m43 had lost about 30% of its market share.
From 55% down to 45%, so they’ve lost 19%…
It’s the most owned camera, but is it also the most sold?
The EM-5 is on the market since early 2012. Would be interesting to know how many of the 2014 OMD camera owners on Flickr also bought the it in 2014, and not in 2012 or 2013.
Looking at the overall CSC brand chart, I see the M43 decreasing.
Or perhaps the fact that those owners stuck with a camera for 2+ years is more indicative of its popularity than new purchases which may just as well be sold off after a few months because they didn’t deliver on their promise?
I know a lot of people who bought an M43 camera, especially when Olympus started making the OM-D models and the E-P5. I don’t know a single one of them who still uses M43 today. This isn’t an automatic ‘win’ for Fuji, though – many of them now use Sony, and a few went back to DSLR.
The big thing in mirrorless today seems to be churn. Those people who bought a Canon 10D, then a 30D, then a 5DMkII in less than a decade, or those who bought a Nikon D70, then a D300, and then a D600 in the same time period, are now swapping mirrorless systems at a crazy rate.
Whether you think these ‘early adopting pioneers’ or ‘restless fools with more money than sense’ is up to you. I don’t think this churn is a good thing for the camera industry, any more than it was a good thing for the camera industry when people were buying a new DSLR every two years. It gives an impression of there being a huge potential market for cameras, when in fact it’s the same subset of photographers moving from brand to brand.
And? Apparently m43 users are interested in a single camera.
Please people, read the original article and then pull conclusions. This is a hype article, telling nothing about true sales. Fuji remain a very small player in real sales versus all the others, these numbers are about postings on Flickr. Real photographers & artists barely ever post serious material on social media. If so, they’ll scramble en rework pictures in such way EXIF data is not even visible. Put also in equation that the use of social media peaks between 15-30 yrs of age, in particular parts of the world only and a lot of people are not even using Flickr. Of course, Apple & Samsung are the key players, and APS/C is king and everyone having an MLIC also owns a pair of black shoes and takes one day a week cornflakes for breakfast. Much ado about nothing.
“Real photographers & artists barely ever post serious material on social media”
Doesn’t matter, because “real photographers and artists” are only a very small fraction of the buyers, and play almost no role for commercial success of a model… Consumers make money flow.
“real photographers and artists”
Am I…fake? Morpheus?!
In fact, flickr has an awful lot of photos without EXIF information available, so much so that some camera-centered groups’ moderators purge photos that don’t exhibit EXIF information, or include that camera in the tags (and only that camera).
Moreover, most pros almost never post their work on Flickr. So that virtually eliminates that subset of buyers.
“Real photographers & artists barely ever post serious material on social media”. Nonsense, every pro photographer I know has a Facebook page they use to promote their work. Not many use flickr though.
I think that Fuji would be ahead of Sony if the survey only included pros, as the Fuji cameras are much better suited to pros.
It are only those ones that didn’t read the small letters. I stopped posting on Facebook-pages, Flickr and a few other once after I came to know a few issues about intellectual property. Maybe not in your country, but in mine people care a lot about this, nobody has to mess around with my property.
How is Flickr considered to be the detemining site for camera ownership? It’s not like everyone puts their photos there.
It is something that is called statistics. When you have a set of numbers, you can use those to statisticly calculate. For instance when TV channels tells us how many people are watching their show, they take a subset of all viewers (some users that have installed a special decoder) and use those numbers as representantive for the total set.
So, even that everyone does not put their photo on Flickr, the subset is significant, and will statisticly give a proper representation on the total numbers of camera buyers.
I disagree that you can conclude these specific statistics relate to an proper representation of camera buyers. There are multiple dimensions that have to be considered here and which are not:
1. Typical Flickr user profile (amateur’s, enthusiasts, pro). Does the lack of full-frame cameras indicate fewer full-frame buyers or fewer full-frame flicker users? Look at how the Iphone and other cell-phone cameras dominate flicker.
2. Are yearly figures derived from the photo upload dates the photo exif dates or none of the above when determining year to year usage.
Will a new Flickr member that has been taking pics with there X-e1 for 3 years but only starts uploading their photo’s in 2014 be counted in the 1st or second bucket.
3. Are the camera counts derived from distinct user / camera combinations year to year based on the photo’s taken in those specific years or once a user has posted a photo taken with a specific camera, does the count increase for that camera as of the posting date. As a flickr user I know there is no concept as on DPreview for users to specifically say whether they want/own or owned a specific camera so we must infer that these numbers are therefore derived.
4. It is possible that there are regional variances in the adoption of flicker and regional variances in the popularity of certain camera brands and models. Some models aren’t even available in some regions so without having a geographic dimension the results are less telling. Flickr should be able to derive regional variations in this data for the user base who is honest about where they are located.
5. What is the time lag for most users between when shots are captured and photo’s are uploaded to their flicker account.
Anyway there are lots of variables and lots of dimensions and this portrayal is very limited.
That some fine questions that I missed to take into account. Is there a simular statistic for 500px for instance?
All valid, but unfortunately that is not how the world works – we don’t know everything. That is also why statistics have been created. So, while you might be right in your disagreement with the available statistics, it is what we have now.
Unfortunately, taken by itself it’s not enough of a sampling, with too many variables. Trouble with stats is that they’re easy to cherry-pick and open to interpretation.
I don’t think anyone says it’s “the” determining site, but you can’t exactly ignore it, either. That’s why Patrick qualifies it rightly, both in the headline and the text. (As a sometime critic of Patrick’s word choice, I feel obliged to defend him on occasion. ;-))
Haha. My X-Pro1 just made it no. 10 in 2013. Not bad.
Not in 2014 top 10 mirrorless suggests people switched to other cameras from X-Pro1 or just used less
Compared to X-E1, X-Pro1 is clearly a somewhat loser.
OMD EM5 top 10? you mean top 1… both years…
You realize the EM-1 is also a m43? So according to this meaningless survey…
Out of the top 10 Mirrorless for 2014 – Oly (M43) accounts for 6.8% / Fuji accounts for 4.5% and Sony wipes the floor with both. Oly (M43) is up from last year so how is it determined that m43 is suffering?
Disclaimer: I own the EM-1 (awesome camera) but am not bound by brand loyalty. I love what Fuji is doing as the X-T1 is a great camera. Both companies have created great bodies and lenses. Sony on the other hand…they sure pump out a lot of bodies.
Hey who hasn’t looked at the A7 II and wondered if its time for an upgrade?
The admin reads the top 10 wrong. The EM5 is not the only m43 camera in both years. There are 3 in total in 2013 (EM5, E-PL1, GF1) and 2 in 2014 (EM5, EM1).
And I don’t think flickr is a good sample of real ownership. I have no doubt that the EM1, XT1 or the A7 are popular among enthusiasts, but these 1000+ bucks cameras are most owned across the board? Don’t think so.
He was speaking about the overall top 10, not the mirrorless. The lists then show the detailed ranking for mirrorless only.
He wasn’t. There are no mirrorless camera in the overall top 10. It’s dominated by Iphones and DSLR’s.
Check the flickr link yourself
Too bad you burst the idiotic fan boys bubble.
LOL at moronic fan boys.
you’re right. I’ve corrected
The most popular sensor size is a bit of a strange way to put it. None of these APS-C cameras from different companies are cross-compatible. Their “domination” means nothing and they could be using different sensor sizes since it would amount to the same thing.
This is not like Android where, even though you have dozens upon dozens of different phones from different companies using the same OS, it actually means something in terms of development and apps that all these phones benefit from.
Hilarious watching the drooling fan boys cling to any scrap of “data” that boosts Fujifilm beyond their CIPA industry *MEASURED* marketshare of 2%.
FUJIFILM users, more than ANY other camera brand owners NEED constant reassurance that their camera purchases were correct. This justifies their life and their religion.
No we don’t. Also what does it say about you that you feel the need to troll a website from a camera brand you obviously dislike?
Can you backup that data point with a link?
C’mon Patrick! Moderation screen -> Settings -> Pre-moderation. Set it to “non-verified” already 🙂
I’ve checked his comment history. A troll.
Certifiable. And judging by its speech pattern, operated by the same critter as… well, as usual.
I highly recommend premoderation for non-verified users, that’s the only possible way to stop it.
And you do want to stop it, because not everyone here havs a skin thick enough to tolerate personal insults _and_ come back. For example, I doubt that we gonna see Zack in the comments here any time soon.
Looking at the graph and the top 10 lists, I would conclude that professional photographer do not use Flickr….since both the D700 (pro camera) and 5D mark III ( pro camera) are at the bottom list. Therefore, IMHO, those listes are irrelevant 🙂 😉
This is mirrorless only. The top company overall for all images is Canon, #2 is Apple, #3 is Nikon. Mirrorless has a ways to go, though I expect that Apple will pass Canon in the next year. I am personally dumping my Canon gear and going A7II. I love the look and handling of the xt, but image quality is not up to full-frame…yet
As Mark Twain said: There are three kind of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.
This is a prime exemple. The author of the statistics was lazy and seemingly didn’t separate the cameras for each brand in mobile cameras, mirrorless cameras and DSLRs for each brand but instead decided all sales from one brand would be represented in only one category.
Thats why neither Nikon or Canon is present in the mirrorless graph despite they propably each should have more users than Pentax, who is surprisingly represented in the mirrorless graph. Are there really more mirrorless than DSLR Pentax users on Flickr?
While the lists of cameras used on Flickr can be of interest the graph for mirrorless is a joke as it ignores not only Canon and Nikon but Samsung as well. (As well as Leica, but that is more understandable as their representation propably only would make thin line.) Why even bother make a graph with so many brands missing? At least they should be included in an other group, just like in the graph for all brands.
These are not sales figures but rather data on what cameras are associated with flickr accounts. Also, the little Pentax sliver in the mirrorless data almost certainly represents the Pentax Q, not the DSLRs.
I see I in one place by mistake wrote sales, but in the rest of the text wrote about users. Fixed now!
But this doesn’t cange my criticism. How can Pentax Q be represented when these cameras are not even possible to find in the camera finder of Flickr?:
https://www.flickr.com/cameras/pentax/
Nikon 1 on the other hand is represened with several models: https://www.flickr.com/cameras/nikon/
The Flickr statistics are just such bad done they are being useless,
why use “suffering” that mean like “Racism”
camera is tool, all camera take best photo by photographer,
talk about format ,brand ,lens ect. but meet trolls every where
I know @admin is good guy please rethinking.
changed to “decreasing”
Google Translate as a moving force of political correctness.
Who would’ve thought!
This graph kind of confirms what I was already thinking, i.e. that within the mirrorless world itself the market share of Sony and Fuji grew at the expense of m43. I would expect Sony to grow further in 2015 and obtain over 50% market share at the expense of all other parties involved, including Fuji.
Olympus: 2013 6.3% 2014 7.1%
Fuji: 2013 3.5% 2014 4.8%
Doesn’t seem that way to me – both Fuji and Oly grew a bit year to year.
Sony 2013 11.6% 2014 13.7%
Sony grew faster than both, but only marginally, despite selling Nex style bodies for peanuts, and lots of fire sales. NEX A6000+kit lens for $698 now, dipped below $600 during Christmas sales, and I saw the A7 dipping under $1000 too. So SONY is intensively buying market share. If I recall correctly, SONY’s imaging division is 3 times bigger than Fuji’s in terms of revenue (and looks like, market share too). Well, if we are to believe Flickr statistics (as good as any imho).
He said “this graph”, not “the top ten table.” In the graph, Olympus goes from 30% to 20%, and Panasonic goes from 24% to 20% — in short, m43 loses roughly 15% — while Fuji goes from 8% to 18%.
Although I know many people who still shoot with M43, I agree with the underlying premise of your post as it is very much indicative of the concept of planned obsolescence which I vehemently despise, even though it is one of the biggest catalysts driving our economy.
This is why I suggested in my last post that prolonged ownership is perhaps a better indicator of a product’s success than new purchases.
I am uncertain of the point this Article seeks to make (prove) …
When I look at URL: http://blog.flickr.net/en/2015/01/13/camera-ownership-on-flickr-2013-2014/ mentioned in the Article I see that the above Graphic is but ONE of MANY.
The Article is Titled “APS-C most popular sensor size, Fujifilm gains ground, M43 decreases (Camera ownership on Flickr on 2013-2014)”, if we looked at that in three parts, with the fourth sentence serving as the delimiting parameter, then the Author of the Article is saying:
According to Flickr, during 2013-2014 the “Camera ownership” showed that:
1. APS-C (is the) most popular sensor size,
2. Fujifilm gains ground,
3. M43 decreases.
Flickr says no such thing. They say that while the most popular “Brands” are Canon, Apple and Nikon the “2014 Top 10 Cameras owned” is the Apple iPhone, holding 4 of the top 10 spots with it’s various Models.
While the iPhone may be “mirrorless” it is not APS-C.
Directly under that ‘Ranking Chart’ the Article on Flickr says:
“For both 2013 and 2014, the most popular mirrorless camera by far was
the Micro 4/3 Olympus E-M5, and by 2014 it was one of two Micro 4/3
format mirrorless cameras in the top 10. The high-end, full-frame Sony
A7 took the second spot, followed closely by APS-C contenders Sony NEX-6
and Fujifilm X-E1.”
Thus, according to Flickr (which your Article purports to report), for what _they_ refer to as a “mirrorless camera” Category:
“the most popular mirrorless camera by far was the Micro 4/3 Olympus E-M5, and by 2014 it was one of two Micro 4/3 format mirrorless cameras in the top 10.”
.
Why report on a single Chart (from a larger Article) and not present the facts on that particular Chart. Your Article infers that the single Chart represents ALL the Cameras used on Flickr (according to their Statistics), but that is not what Flickr says (nor the Chart).
PS: You also refer to the “M43 System”, that implies Mount and Sensor (a “system” would not be a singular). The M43 Mount is being used with APS-C and 35mm sized Sensors (instead of a M 4/3 sized Sensor) in the newest Cameras and Camcorders.