If Flickr be trusted, the Yahoo-owned social photography site, then Canon is no longer world’s most popular camera brand. It is, I’m afraid, Apple. Have a look at the Flickr Camera Finder page, with graphs showing the number of Flickr members who have uploaded at least one photo or video with a particular camera on a given day over the last year. Apple iPhones are world’s most popular cameras. And that’s probably not even the whole extent of the shift in brand proliferation. The Flickr graphs are only accurate to the extent that the system can automatically detect a camera’s EXIF data, which is the case in about two thirds of the time. Given that this is usually not possible with camera phones, iPhones might even be underrepresented.
That’s it. You as a Canon or DSLR owner are becoming part of a minority that’s up against a major paradigm change. Words much too harsh, but remember the days when Nokia overtook Kodak as the world’s biggest “camera company.” Soon Nokia was to become the next Kodak, but before that, in broad strokes, Kodak didn’t manage to make the jump to digital and online while Nokia worked on creating “good enough” imaging in its first smartphones. Have a look at the history of Nokia camera phones.
So today not only the mobile market belongs to Cupertino (very happy here with my Lumia 830 BTW…), even the camera prosumer market and the dominant position of Canon are no longer up for grabs.
World’s most popular camera brands according to Flickr community (as per January 2015):
- Apple
- Canon
- Nikon
Canon still tops the list for DSLRs and Olympus for mirrorless, but Apple takes the number one spot for most popular individual camera. Quite a feat. Where will this lead to and end. It goes without saying that Flickr isn’t universally representative, but no doubt its broadly based acceptance worldwide reflects reality in a pretty good way.
It’s also save to say that Canon and Nikon are very conscious of Kodak’s fall from grace as the former market leader ignored the rise of Nokia’s hardware to swap the point-and-shoot cameras. Professional camera equipment with monster lenses is an all different game, for now. Who knows, one day maybe all even sports photographers carry is a phone.
