Camera2Web.com

Myron Kassaraba's weblog about digital photography on the web

Friday, November 24, 2006

Canon is King on Flickr


Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch had a post a few days ago on the data that was being collected by Flickr about the different cameras used by their users. I hadn't see this before and have had some fun poking at the numbers.

Flickr currently claims to host about 230 million photos. Though some users can withhold their EXIF data from view and some photos have has it stripped out by a desktop app, I'll wager that these numbers are still a pretty good representation of the overall community. In adding up the numbers from the major brands I found a few surprises. Even though Kodak and SONY are top selling consumer digital camera brands, they are very under represented in the universe of Flickr photos. SONY has only two models with over 1 million photos, Kodak does not have any, their top model has 695K photos. Compare that to Nikon, with 8 models (not just dSLRs) with more that 695K photos and Canon has 33 models with more than 695K photos!

When it comes to Total Number of Photos, Canon is King (from Flickr data):

Canon 75 Million
Nikon 26 Million
SONY 22 Million
Olympus 13.9 Million
Kodak 10.6 Million

Canon is still the leader by a wide margin in overall digital camera sales (see all the numbers) with a projected 20,650,000 sales in FY2006/07 (ending in March '07). That's a 22% increase over last year. This is more than double Nikon's total DC sales of 8,500,000.

Nikon is coming on strong in the more profitable dSLR market with close to a 50% increase over last year up to 2 million units closing in on Canon's 2.45 million. Nikon has had a big hit with both the D50 and D80 this past year and a new D40 with a $599 MSRP is on the way.

Getting back to Flickr, I can't help but wonder what impact if any the RAW/NEF controversy last year had on pro's use of Canon vs. Nikon? I just picked up a D70 from a friend who had upgraded to a D80 and am looking forward to dipping my toes into dSLR-land. I can tell you already there are now a lot of accessories to tempt me....... Dear Santa, I could really use a 28-200 VR lens..........