The race to the bottom – all three companies are trending down
While I was offline last week, multiple websites reported that Sony surpassed Canon and Nikon in the full-frame market. Some websites even went further and declared Sony as the winner in the camera wars. The original report came from BCNRanking and claimed that Sony’s full-frame market share went from 31% to 38%, while Canon dropped to 36% from 37.8% and Nikon to 24% from 29.1%:
A similar article was published also by Nikkei.
What many websites forgot to mention is that this data is only from the Japanese market (not worldwide) and is collected only from a fraction of the retailers in Japan that sell photo equipment. The report is also for only full-frame cameras and it doesn’t include other formats like APS-C.
As usual, Thom Hogan has a much better and deeper explanation/analysis of the report in his article “Internet Declares Sony the Winner” – here are a few quotes, but I encourage you to read the full text:
“The usual conclusion I see from stats like those that BCN posted tends to be something more like Sony will continue to gain and eventually completely dominate what remains of that market. I’d caution people to avoid that type of naive conclusion.”
“Again, this is in Japan only, and with a slightly non-representative store sampling that can be gamed by manufacturers.”
“Despite all that, we’re going to see lots of “Sony Wins” articles and posts shortly. In Japan. In a subset of stores. By a small margin.”
Via Digicame-info, graphs translation via PetaPixel
