on landscape The online magazine for landscape photographers

Camera Survey

A Landscape Photographer's Tools

Tim Parkin

Tim Parkin

Amateur Photographer who plays with big cameras and film when in between digital photographs.

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Just over a month ago we asked our readers to tell us what cameras they used for their landscape photography and we had a great response. We've spent a bit of time analysing the results (my programming skills come in useful still occasionally) and here they are!

Camera Survey - SLRs by brand

Well, this isn't too much of a surprise - the Nikon/Canon thing is pretty much a toss up. Pentax comes in third but we should add that we got spammed by the Pentax forums when word got out that we accidentally classed the K as a compact.

Camera Survey - CSCs by brand

On the compact side, it's probably no surprise that Panasonic have got the vast majority of the market but the balance between Canon and Olympus surprised me. We'll look at individual cameras in a later chart.

Camera Survey - full frame or crop

So I wondered just how many people were shooting crop sensor cameras as opposed to full frame. It turns out it's pretty close but the majority own larger sensor cameras.

Camera Survey - film cameras

Let's add film cameras to the mix to see just how many people are still in the analog market. Well, it turns out to be quite significant! This is obviously self selecting to an extent as there aren't many places online that cater to film and digital but even so the number of people that also have film cameras is substantial. However the following diagram shows that people using film are also using digital and very few only own film cameras.

Camera Survey - film or digital cameras?

So there are a large number of people using both film and digital. How about the individual cameras that were used.

Camera Survey - SLRs by name

The old classic the 5Dmk2 is still incredibly popular but the D800 has taken the landscape photography world. When you take the D800 and D800E together they're the most popular camera by some margin.

It does appear that a lot of people have moved to the 5Dmk3 though but there are a significant number of people happily using the original 5D and the original Nikon D700.

Let's take a look at the compact camera market.

Camera Survey - CSCs by name v2

The LX series is still very strong but Fuji have take a large part of the market and Sony are doing well but the OMD E-5, in particular, has been an incredible win for Olympus considering the struggle it's had recently.

So how many cameras are people using?

Camera Survey -number cameras people are using

OK, it looks like I'm in the minority here with my 14 cameras. Most people seem to be quite sane and only own a few. Most people seem to have a main camera and a compact support camera or two.

So there you go - if anybody can think of any other questions we can write some custom code to add a few more graphs. You can get to the interactive infographic here.

Thanks to everyone who took part and the winner of the Michael Kenna retrospective book is Douglas Bruce! Owner of the original 5D Mark I. Thanks for submitting Doug and congratulations!



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