BCNranking posted the full detailed Japanese market share info based on the 2015 sales. Here are the top three of each category with comparison with last years share:
DSLR cameras:
Canon 56.2% (54,7% in 2014)
Nikon 36.7% (39,1% in 2014)
Ricoh 6.7% (4,5% in 2014)
Mirrorless cameras:
Olympus 34.5% (22,3% in 2014)
Sony 24.8% (34,3% in 2014)
Canon 13.6% (no info on 2014. Last year Panasonic was third with 11,9%)
Fixed lens cameras:
Canon 30.5% (28,7% in 2014)
Nikon 21.0% (15,3% in 2014)
Casio 14.8% (15,2% in 2014)
Lens sales:
Canon 24.1% (21,2% in 2014)
Nikon 15.2% (15,3% in 2014)
Sigma 13.5% (13,3% in 2014)
What’s interesting from a mirrorless point of view:
Olympus made a huge jump forward and Sony a huge jump backwards in 2015. This is really surprising!
And Panasonic “lost” the third place to Canon despite Canon certainly not having “pushed” the mirrorless system so far (just look at the poor lens line up).
What are your thoughts on those trends?
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Thansk rrccad for the info.
80 Responses
My thoughts are that ppl buy based on brand and “look” of the products, not technical specs. Canon with its ridicolous mirrorless offering is still at #3. If they only had a decent model (and I say decent, meaning something like a 70D) as a mirrorless, they’d become #1 immediately.
In m4/3, I think that gh4 and gx8 are better than olympus, yet the latter sells better, again thx to brand and look of its products.
Well, GX8 is relatively new after all. It did not have much time to make an impact, I guess?
It is too expensive to make some impact.
Not sure about that. It’s less expensive than the Sony RX100 mk4 (in Japan).
OK, I know only (high) european price(s).
Prices are indeed high on for both cameras (here). But since in general prices of cameras are up 30% compared to previous models (in Japan) nobody notices…
No… its likely considered too large by Japanese standards (especially since the highest grossing MILC over there is the EPL6 two lens kit).
If that’s true then Fujifilm should be at the top of the rankings.
In fact I don’t understand why it doesn’t sell better. It hass all the features ppl seem to want, plus a very good lens lineup (differently from EOS M).
But probably, ppl buying M just buy it thinking: it’s a Canon, it must be good! and keep the kit lens on it…forever 🙂
Because there’s no obvious fully “Automatic” mode on the more advanced cameras from Fujifilm.
Looks can’t matter that much, coz Canon cameras are seriously ugly. Unless people are still so proud to “finally own a real DSLR”. But I can’t believe so many people can be that stupid.
So people who buy a DSLR are stupid?
And looks are a matter of taste. I find a Canon 5D or 7D good looking for example.
I meant people who still believe entry level DSLRs are superior to all other cameras and are proud to own one are stupid.
Entry level DSLRs have a viewfinder. Isn’t that a decent argument to buy them over a mirrorless?
To get a mirrorless with an EVF you have to spend twice as much as a simple DSLR will cost you.
What I mean is:
In the “amateur/enthusiast” segment it’s a more serious rivalry. MILC and DSLRs have similar specs and similar IQ. So you choose based on other things: lens choice, compatibility of the gear you have, EVF/OVF differences, AF and so on.
But if you have around $400 (which is what most people decide to spend) and you believe that a viewfinder is essential in a proper all-round camera which won’t limit you (which is true), entry-level DSLRs have no serious competition.
I wonder why Canon market share is much higher than Nikon’s !
I also wonder why Sony lost so much ground to Olympus.
Sony focused on more expensive FF, which results in less units sold. Simple.
Canon’s market share has been higher than Nikon’s for decades now. Actually Nikon’s share is improving lately. 🙂
Brand loyalty, I know people who make maybe 20 photos per year and swear by Canon…
Sony is hardly targeting market share is it with its focus on FF cameras? More meaningful if profit / loss was part of the picture too.
Sony: No 6100 in 2015 and A7xxx is a fringe product.
Highly interesting. Especially the Canon EOS M: everybody lauhgs at it, nobody respects it, it has poor lenses portfolio, even Canon does not promote it a lot; however it turns out people buy it a lot. OTOH Fujifim, acclaimed and highly praised for it´s superb cameras, both having high-tech and “soul”, with 5 different mirrorless cameras and dozens of great glass wasn´t able to beat Canon with it´s single poor outsider (OK, now there are two). Unbelievable.
THe general population want simple. The EOS M with the green automatic mode switch appeals to the general public. They look at a Fujifilm and they get scared off by the seeming lack of an auto mode.
they get scared off by the price..
I have the X-E1 and is a great camera but only the Fuji wide angle lens alone costs as much as the whole EOS M system.
But the EOS M has a few very good and cheap lenses. Where else can you buy a superb wide angle for so cheap as the 11-22?
The existing lenses are enough for 90% of the shooting situations, maybe a wide aperture portrait lens is what missing.
Sure, Canon mirrorless system has the best line of lenses out there! It covers all uses, from macro to super-tele, from fast lenses for street photography to close-up and normal portrait lenses. You just need an adaptor, that’s it.
Without adaptor you can have the 18-55(sharp), 22mm, 11-22, 15-45 and 55-200. That is enough for a great travel system.
You can get the adaptor for macro and other uses.
The lenses you mention exist in all other systems. I mean: all – of – them. But the other systems do actually have portrait lenses, macros, etc. (at least Fuji and M43), and many other choices (long tele lenses). So, as systems come, they are all (and I mean: ALL) much better. But, sure, if you buy the name, then Canon is Canon. Although, I must say, if lens quality and and AF speed is not important for you, and you value portability only, why not a camera like a Sony RX10? And, still if portability is the most important factor, here: M43 beats Canon to the punch for all the lenses you mention.
Not quite all. That 22mm f2 for what, $130 is legit… and its small as hell. If Oly or panny made that lens for $130, I bet every m43’s owner would have it and treasure it.
The 22mm and the 11-22 are the only real gems of that system. The rest are just decent kit zooms.
The 18-55 is miles ahead of the Sony E mount 18-55 or 16-50 in image quality. I had it.
Yes, a friend of mine who is an architect asked me to find him an affordable camera and wide angle (± 20mm eq.). The Canon was the cheapest serious option.
Don’t you consider, say, samsung nx300 with a 12-24mm lens as a serious camera? why if so?
It’s a good combo but i would personally never buy into a dead system.
ok, that’s a point, but NX has many more native lenses than Canon M, for now. And much better bodies overall…
It all depends what you need. If i only need a wide angle zoom and a pancake lens i won’t care if the system has 25 telezooms, 13 tilt-shift and 30 other lenses.
Canon is not taking mirrorless seriously yet but it was a smart move to launch very good quality and cheap lenses covering all the basic needs.
Let’s face it. Canon sells since…it’s canon. If canon had a nx500 or nx1, they’d have sold like pancakes at 50% more the price 😉
I’ve owned that combo and it’s decent, but by now a little dated and also Samsung will not support NX mount any further.
dated…in which sense? It’s superior to any M camera…and the lens is sharper than the canon one.
If you want an even better camera, with 4K video and faster burst, with top end 28MP sensor, you have the NX500. I doubt canon will do anything comparable in the next three years or so.
We looked at many options. In the end he wants to have a Nikon anyway. It’s that kind of guy, but we still are friends. Nikon is likely to introduce some 1-inch compacts soon. One of them has a wide angle zoom. He waits for that one, or otherwise he will buy the Nikon 1 J5 with a wide angle. The Samsung should be great, but aren’t they quoting the camera market?
“But the EOS M has a few very good and cheap lenses”
Every mirrorless system has very good lenses. The problem is EOS M has only 5 (!) lenses and apart from the prime (the only prime in the lineup) they are all terribly slow. And I repeat: there are only 5 of them. Oly has 26 native M4/3 lenses, Pana 28, Fuji 19, even Samsung that already gave up has 16 NX lenses. And when it comes to users having only one lens the Fuji kit zoom is way superior to Canon 18-55.
And I am not going to repeat how poor the M body is (autofocus, features…). At Camerastoretv they laugh at EOS M every year.
The Canon EF-M equivalents to any lenses in the competing systems are either cheaper/smaller/better:
– EF-M 11-22mm: Excellent lens. Cheaper than Olympus 9-18mm, cheaper (though slower) than Sony 10-18 and cheaper/smaller than Fuji 10-24
– EF-M 22mm: Cheaper and smaller than the Sony 24mm/1.8, cheaper and apparently better than the Olympus 17mm/1.8, smaller than Fuji 23mm 1.4 and cheaper than 18mm F2
– EF-M 55-200mm: Equal to the Sony / Fuji equivalents but smaller. I don’t know for sure, but I’d be willing to bet it’s higher quality than the Sony.
– EF-M 15-45mm: Given how crappy the Sony 16-50mm is, I wouldn’t be surprised this lens is better while maintaining roughly the same weight.
The Canon lenses are good and completely in line with what I want out of a mirrorless system. It is just the bodies that let it down.
> EF-M 11-22mm: cheaper (though slower) than Sony 10-18 and cheaper/smaller than Fuji 10-24.
A (11*1.6)=18mm equivalent is missing quite a bit compared to the (10*1.5)=15mm equivalent Sony/Fuji lenses on the wide end, and is also as you say, slower. And the rest of your post is pure speculation.
Well, he’s basically right (if with some trick here and there you exclude Fuji, M43, Sony and Samsung from the equation…)
Canon’s few EF-M lenses cover possibly over 90% of what is usually bough by customers. They’re all of decent to very good quality and attractively priced.
Is this sales revenue or number of units? If the latter then cheaper systems would drive the rankings.
Number of units sold.
Not exactly “drive”.
Market share is simply a statistic that estimates the number of product samples sold – not the financial impact of this process.
to expensive body, to expensive lenses, not enough lenses…slow af…high batterieconsumption…no new a-mount ff
no new apsc e-mount lenses…
I think that’s a temporary annoyance.
I have an odd feeling they’ll move everything to full frame except for pocket shooters.
That would be a huge mistake. They would give away the entry level and the smaller ILC market to Fuji and Panoly. Instead, I think they will keep on releasing good bodies (such as the A6100) and few lenses, just in order to show they are still there but without actually committing to the format.
That’s Sony.
Making cameras is complicated. The weird thing is, in one camera they do AF great, in the next one at 6 times the price, they fail at it…
A6xxx better AF than A7 series, yes? Also the SLTs they have more “serious” approach than in A7, which I think is only for stills photography
1 x 3600$ may equal a profit generated through 10 x 360$ cameras. Market share through units won’t give a clear picture if a company is successful or not. And I believe quality is a guarantee for growth, while olympus cameras can be replaced by an iPhone 7 / 8
That’s more or less correct…
OR people really don’t buy Sony cameras. You accept the possibility of that being true? 🙂
I’ve heard thaht Sony brand is ridiculed in Japan.
I would gladly see worldwide sales.
except it’s negative growth, and other mounts are increasing their marketshare over the FE mount at a much greater rate. that means less used cameras and lenses available, less accessories, and over time, if that continues .. no new cameras/lenses at all as their shut the doors.
canon and nikon sell 3K+ camera bodies, and have increased their mount marketshare overall for ILC’s.
who do you think has a better strategy?
m43’s replaced by a cellphone… hyperbole much? Even if, one day, an iPhone’s 1/2.3 sensor is as good as a 4/3 sensor (likely never, but lets play along), that iPhone will not have ultra wide options, or portrait lenses, superzooms, telezooms, macro etc.
Does m43 look like it has a problem?
Not Oly, but the system as a whole could suffer if Panasonic is suffering.
Fuji!!!!???
Fuji is a pretty boutique company in terms of sales… though I think they are structured to be fine with that.
I wonder if the Mirorless sales system are stable or down or up compare to DSLR?
stable. eerily stable. 40.1% 2014, 40.2% 2015 (so far with one month of data left to report)
I suspect that over time .. this is what we will see globally around a 60/40 split between DSLR and MILC.
however consider that Japan accounts for 20% of the global MILC market, and only around 10% of the SLR market, should identify that Japan is still probably the most important single market for Japan MILC manufacturers
Not to mention, the overhead is far less selling domestically than it is globally for any obvious reasons.
I expect the mirrorless cameras will continue to improve technologically. Not that dslr’s can’t improve, but it’s hard to imagine that a mirror will continue to make a difference. I guess the market will follow sooner or later, even though now it doesn’t seem to move much.
First consideration: this is for the Japanese market. YMMV in your country. Not valid in North Dakota or Guam.
Second, the results cannot be easily dismissed in such a camera-happy market. While there is some home team advantage (Las Vegas gives 3 points to the home team), the numbers are noteworthy, particularly the trends. Sony must be a little perplexed and now likely have to bank more than they wanted on this years new batch of camera bodies. Their lens road map takes on more significance.
Third, woe to non-Canon companies. They might non make the top-ranked camera in any one segment but Canon remains highly competitive. The the adages “it’s all about the lens”, “invest in the lens and not the body” speaks to Canon’s ability to survive market and technology changes. Until some company figures out how to significantly reduce the size and weight of the lens themselves (e.g., pocket size for 600mm, f/2.8), Canon is well positioned to compete at a top market and financial level for now. If Canon can make relatively successful (again, not necessarily top ranked in tech specs) mirrorless camera lines, the other companies have a long war of attrition to wage ahead.
I agree. The lens system is everything.
And Canon will launch probably this year a 600mm F4 DO lens which looks
very small for such a lens. Not pocket sized but cannot be really smaller than that.
Well, they sure *can* be smaller. It just depends on the size the sensor needs to be to get a high quality image.
Lets say someone figures out some quantum breakthrough in sensor technology, where much, much smaller pixels can detect small amounts of light accurately, so that a smartphone sized sensor gives you the image quality and resolution of an A7R II sensor, your 600mm lens could be less than 4 inches long.
There is a lot of light everywhere, even at night. Most of our devices are just not as good at picking it up as our eyes. And we have fairly small sensors in our eyes. Maybe some biotech is in order 😉
Me thinks there is data corruption going on:
The Canon 6D shows as an APS-C camera.
Selecting Canon only pulls up the A6000 in the list.
Selecting Nikon only shows six Canon cameras and the Canon EOS KISS as the number one camera.
The EOSm2 shows up when selecting full frame
The data looks totally corrupt and six months old.
Every selection I make shows mistakes in their data and every refresh shows different results.
http://bcnranking.jp/category/subcategory_0008_month.html
the weekly page seems to have some bugs, however the data content is actually accurate if you look at the product listings. Nice try though.
Of course the data is corrupted. It doesn’t show panasonic #1, when clearly the GX8 is best camera 😀
If you look at the DSLR and “mirrorless” SLR sections, the numbers should add up such that the total comes to interchangeable lens section.
If you go through that exercise then DSLRs can only be a tiny fraction of sales overall. Canon have 56.2% of the DSLR market, and 13.6% of the MILC market, but only 24.1% of the overall ILC market. That means that in Japan DSLR sales are way behind MILC sales, otherwise the numbers don’t add up. The numbers cited would restrict DSLRs sales to about a quarter of all ILC sales.
24.1% is for lens sale, not cams
Could it not simply be that Sony’s line up is very confusing ? Look at the a7 series… An amateur, even serious, wanting to enter the offering in this product range is totally confused by the segments covered by Sony… Their marketing and communications staff need a serious shot in the arm. Their engineers are fabulous. Typical of engineering dominated companies…
I’m not confused by it: I’m simply put off by the AF, processing-speed and UI failures in a $3k camera, while their $600 camera avoids these failures completely.
The line up is simple enough:
– One base model for full frame fans on a budget
– One model aimed at low light and video
– One aimed at high res and still photos
But the budget full frame model is so budget, its low light capability is behind the ancient Nex n5
The video model’s AF can’t track anything in any light and various video functions I’d expect at ~$3k are blocked by processing bottlenecks. Finally, the UI has never been really been cleaned up and sorted and is basically a mess.
The A7R II is the model with the least flaws, so if that’s your need, you’ll get some joy out of that.
The other two models are far behind the 2 Year old a6000 in crucial areas.
So, A7 looks like great sensors soldered to a road full of potholes. I’m not buying. Better to spend some cash on a RX100 IV or A6100 as an interim camera until the A7 series hits mark III or even mark IV…
The market corrects itself.
Olympus returns to its natural state with a 50% increase in sales: leader of the mirrorless market once more. Fourth year they’re at the top.
Last year with Sony was an anomaly hence their 25+% decline.
If Olympus could just get their hands on some better sensors ~_~
Amen to that.
Canon actually has very good and small lens although limited range of lenses… sadly their camera is slow. Sony and fuji have some really huge lens almost defeating the purpose of a small camera.
This is definitely off since Olympus had 16% drop in global sales last year and dropped camera models as well as important staff members because of this. No way they could rank 1 anywhere and still have this poor of sales. Unless Japan has very little sales compared to the global market. Even just looking at Amazon rankings for 15 major countries, no Olympus camera even hit the top 10 spot for mirrorless sales last year.