Top 10 Digital Cameras on Flickr 212
zokiii writes "This list represents the top camera makes and models used to create photos uploaded to Flickr. The list is generated automatically by periodically sampling the EXIF data from the stream of recent uploads." This is actually an incredibly simple idea, but a really useful one when considering a new camera to buy. Score three points for scrapers.
Stats (Score:5, Insightful)
Interestingly, these statistics show that most of these cameras are solidly in the middle "pro-sumer" market and demonstrates that both Canon and Nikon did good when they went after a market that was primed to explode much like the 35mm market did in the late 70s and early 80s. Technology in both cases made it possible to build high quality cameras at affordable prices.
Of course this means good things for the consumer, but watch out for a new megapixel war much like what we saw with computers and the Mhz war. Of course just like the Mhz war, the MP war is going to be mostly hype as I've seen some damn fine images from 6 or 8 MP cameras that were far above the quality produced by some higher MP count cameras. The secret is going to be the size and quality of the individual imagers on the CCD, the quality of the image management chips (I tend to prefer Canon's DIGIC) and the quality of the lens.
Re:Stats (Score:4, Insightful)
They do not say if they are reporting the number of cameras by user or if they go by the number of pictures. For example, if they go by picture they are telling us who uploads the most pictures, if they go by user they are telling us how many cameras are used. They do not discuss the methodology.. They also do not provide numbers nor graphs. It is an awful way to communicate statistics.
Re:Stats (Score:5, Informative)
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And it looks a little lazy not to factor in the number of pictures; they have all the data after all.
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$ for $ it is the best one out there..
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I've seen some damn fine images from 6 or 8 MP cameras that were far above the quality produced by some higher MP count cameras
That's because megapixel counts are misleading. You need to square the number of pixels to double the quality of the image. Jumps from 6 to 8 to 10 sound big but are negligible. I'll think about upgrading when the 36-64 megapixel cameras are out.
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(Roughly speaking:)
A larger 6 MP sensor will in general give a better image than a smaller 6 MP sensor.
Given two sensors that are the same size, the sensor with a larger pixel count has smaller pixels. A smaller pixel gets less light to sample. So at some point more pixels won't get you a better image at a given sensor size.
Over time the technology is impoving so a sensor of a given size and pixel count can be in general designed b
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the sensor size makes alot of diffrence but when you get to the dSLR's that realy isn't the worrie as all of them have good sensors.. the worrie is the lens... while i like my sigma i some times use a friends canon lens.
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A bigger problem is that upping the pixel count won't help unless it was the limiting factor in picture quality before. Taking advantage of increased pixel counts requires good lenses and good technique. Even on a 6 MP camera you can easily get pictures where the limiting factor in quality is a bad lens, poor choice of aperture, or inability to control camera shake. Adding pixels in those cases just enlarges the blur. If the problem was camera shake, adding pixels will often make it worse by reducing se
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I don't think you will see even prosumer cameras much above 10 megapixels. Above that level, cameras become a bit harder to handle because you have to control for camera movement much better and you have to have at least middle of the road lenses to get the full impact of the capture size. D
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They took a shot of a rather tasty presenter lass in a catsuit, and enlarged the images to cover the side of a multi-storey building in the centre of Birmingham.
There were slight differences in the appearance of the two unbelievably large posters, but resolution was
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You've raised an interesting point though: at what point does the
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It depends. Certainly you can't just stick any lens on an 8mp camera and expect it'll give you the full resolution that the sensor is capable of.
But even most cheap (and I do mean cheap, sub-$100) zoom lenses are capable of maxing out the resolution of an APS-C-sized 8mp sensor at least at the
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I beg to differ. In 60 years, my 2 GHz machine will be long in the landfill (or recycled, or...) In any event, the machine will be gone.
The photos I am taking with my digital camera, though, will still be around. Maybe I will be showing them to my grandchildren.
Digital cameras are one place where hardware and the quality of the data creat
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Once you get to a certain level of resolution noise becomes MUCH more noticeable than a difference of a few megapixels.
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OK, the MP and MHz wars are similar but there are differences. For one thing, consumers don't know how to interpret tech specs that well, and for computers there are bunches of them, and I realized the MHz war was silly when the first pentiums came out. But even synthetic and/or "real world" benchmarks are not that good, and different computer systems can score differently on differnet tasks. That will always be the case. There also is the "good enough" factor, and today just about any computer is now g
ISO, color and sensor size (Score:4, Informative)
2. Also with film it is possible to get ISO 50 film (Velvia for ex.) to match its resolution and color range it will take even more MPs.
3. When talking resolution MP are not the whole story, the sensor size is just as important. A small sensor with a lot of MPs is bad news since the images will be very noisy. People don't usually take this into consideration and only look at MPs. A lot of super-zoom and consumer models now have managed to fit a 10MP in their body but the images are nevertheless much worse than the same MP count images from a DSLR with a larger sensor.
I am assuming the lens is not a limiting factor.
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Then you'd think wrong [dpreview.com]. The only digital cameras using CMOS are the Canon digital SLRs (and very fine CMOSes they are, too, giving arguably the best image quality of the 35mm or smaller format options).
All the rest, including Canon's non-SLR digitals, use CCDs (mostly manufactured by Sony, although Fuji has long been showing Sony how much better CCDs can be if you make them in a hexag
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In actuality, it is horrible use of statistics. The numbers are little more than a popularity contest, showing the more popular cameras, not necessarily the better cameras. If you want to use a camera that a lot of other people are using, then follow what the numbers show. However, that will not guarantee that you will get a camera that actually meets you needs.
To the point
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I have a 3MP camera that kicks the crap out of most everything else. Fuji S1 It even takes better photos than a Canon Digital Rebel.
I have an advantage though.... I have a $1500.00 lens, the rebel comes with a $22.95 (quality wise) lens. If the rebel used the same quality lens it would be pretty much spot on but still lacks my color saturation because of the different design of the CCD. but then my camera cost way more than the Rebel did.
Lens is 90% of your picture. Camera quality t
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On a digicam, I'd say that the preset JPEG quality settings make up at least 50%, reducing the lens' importance to ~40%. If you can shoot raw or TIFF, that's an option, but it'll dramatically increase the cost of storage, and, in the case of raw, the time and effort it takes to get usable pictures. One of the things I look for is a demo shot that includes a leafy tree, to see whether the "best quality" JPEG settings
DSLR != ProSumer (Score:2)
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There was a huge race at the beginning to get up to 4MP, but past there, progress has been relatively slowly trickling upwards.
There are many other characteristics that consumers use to compare cameras: price, size/weight, LCD si
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Interestingly, these statistics show that most of these cameras are solidly in the middle "pro-sumer" market...
I was very, very surprised to not see any members of the Nikon Coolpix or Fuji Finepix consumer lines show up, as these seem to be quite popular among my acquaintances and small business clients. There's also a Kodak line (name escapes me now) that folks seem to be taking a liking to. The Finepix line in particular has been popular with my clients in real estate.
We can argue that the prosumer c
Small error (Score:4, Informative)
Guess it says something about the demography of the posters though.
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http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos350d/ [dpreview.com]
Re:Small error (Score:4, Interesting)
There's a fast comparison of those two at dcresource [dcresource.com]
Basically 350 has a few improvements, it has more internal memory (hence 14 instead of shot bursts), it has usb 2.0 instead of 1.1, its just under 15% lighter and has a better battery, iaacte (i am a camera test engineer (at Phase One))
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Re:Small error (Score:4, Informative)
Almost, but not quite. 350D and Digital Rebel XT (so positions 1 and 3) are the same.
Digital Rebel is the 300D, while Digital Rebel XTi is the 400D.
Also, here's the original (much more extensive) source [flagrantdisregard.com], which is way more useful than just some stupid blog linking to it. Also good to see is this (month old) graph [photodoto.com] of the relative movement over time.
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Well it sure sounds like a product name crafted for the US market. I keep waiting for some USian with a mean sense of humor to suggests the name 'Canyonero' to Ford's marketing people as the name for their next SUV. I bet the thing would stand a good chance of hitting the market before they figured the gag out.
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With about 30 seconds of training ("here's how you set it to full automatic and here's the zoom") I taught my mother (flashing 12:00 on the VCR and calls me about every other time she tries to play a DVD) how to take photos with my digital SLR. It's no harder than any other camera, ot
Fairly high end cameras (Score:5, Informative)
1. Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XT
2. NIKON D50
3. Canon EOS 350D DIGITAL
4. Canon EOS 20D
5. NIKON D70
6. NIKON D70s
7. Canon PowerShot S2 IS
8. Canon EOS 30D
9. Sony CYBERSHOT
10. Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL
Don't know if this is really useful for the "average" consumer, but does give an interesting view of who posts on Flickr. It would be interesting to compare this with other sites like pbase and see how the camera distribution changes as the demographics of the users (and the intended audience of the site) changes.
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A friend of mine had a Sony camera a couple years ago. The LCD stopped working and it was still under warranty. They told him that only the parts were under warranty and it would cost $180(US) in labor to fix it.
He tossed the camera and vowed never to buy anything from Sony ever
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Really??? You'd base your choice of an $800+ camera on a list that doesn't give any indication of photo quality or camera usability, but simply indicates the mass volume of pictures taken?
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A great deal of the users on flickr are amateur photographers, I have recently become interested myself. From my experience of flickr the people on their know their kit. So if a great many flickr users are using entry level canons then that is enough to at least recommend them to me.
From there I go to a place like dpreview.com, check out their review of the canon eos 350D [dpreview.com] and see that it is both a good camera and reasonably priced (within my budget).
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It is interesting to the hobbyist (Score:2)
But I agree, to the "average" consumer, flickr top10 is not the place to look. It is much
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- Nikon D70s is a barely upgraded D70
- Canon 30D is a barely upgraded 20D
- Canon Digital Rebel XT is the US name of Canon EOS 350D
Yeah, I'd have to agree with you on the 350D and D50 being "cheap" consumer-level cameras, although they do produce great images, using pretty much the same sensors than the mid-range 20D/30D and D70/D70s. Most differences are in the control interface (better ergonomics for manual or semi-auto modes on the mid-range models than on the consumer ones, slower shut
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The Rebel XT is a very nice consumer DSLR. Canon packed in almost all the features you find on the very expensive professional models, to lesser degrees (Less RAM for rapid-fire shots, no ISO 3200, etc.) It uses a Canon sensor and it's a very good one - the photos you see from the Rebel XT are really quite something, and when you compare it to even the most expensive Nikons, the Rebel usually produces a better image.
I haven't found anything on the
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Are these Skewed? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wouldn't it be more accurate to generate stats by user? (ie: x% of flickr users have camera Y)
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But you could normalise the data instead...
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but a really useful one when considering a new cam (Score:5, Insightful)
It tells you what other people are using. By this logic I should be driving a Ford Mondeo (and using Windows on my PC!)
Re:but a really useful one when considering a new (Score:2)
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or see FlagrantDisregards top 100 models / makes (Score:4, Informative)
John has this for flickr too, and shows the top 100 makes and models. I think he uses the Flickr-API, ie not a scrapper. He says on the page "The lists are generated automatically by periodically sampling the EXIF data from the stream of recent uploads." and I think he hits that stream via the API...
Flawed in more than one way (Score:2)
On the other hand, in the top 10, there is both one entry for the Digital Rebel XT, and one entry for the 350D, which are actually the same camera, the first being the name under which it is sold in North America, the second the name under which it is sold in Europe.
Erm no? (Score:2)
So if everybody started using Ford Pinto's you should too? Dont mistake most common with best, much less best for you.
Photos, not users (Score:3, Insightful)
For version 2 of the stats, it would be really useful to have it ignore multiple camera models from the same user. It would also be neat to see it compare post-processing apps and general camera 'categories' (i.e. cell phone vs. p&s vs. slr).
Popular != good (Score:3, Interesting)
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Flickr gets over a million new pictures [flickr.com] uploaded on a good day. I really don't think skewing the results is that easy (assuming the 'periodical' sampling is not predictable).
I also think that people who spend a fortune on a digital camera are the pros buying a D2Xs or a 1D Mark II, and those are much less likely to upload pictures. Low-end
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I don’t know of any circumstance where Flickr would prevent you from keeping that data in your photos.
Pbase also has a nice camera database (Score:2)
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Most point and and shoots do include this info. Focal lenght is as relevant on a P&S as it is on a DSLR.
spelling police... (Score:2, Insightful)
s/Camers/Cameras
I'm starting to lose faith in slashdot...
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Wow, and you've only been here like two weeks!
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Useful list? I think not. (Score:5, Insightful)
So what does this list tell us?
The people who spend a lot of money on their 'prosumer' cameras take a lot of pictures. Well, they would have to, otherwise they just wasted that money on their prosumer camera. And they're also more likely to spring for a premium flickr account. Well, they would have to, what with all the crappy pictures they have to take to legitimize buying an expensive camera.
Even looking at the individual users pictures tells you nothing about the quality of their camera. They might just be really good photographers, or they just throw out 9 out of 10 shots because the camera sucks.
These statistics are pretty much useless to anyone. They're only useful to flickr itself; they can now dream up new ways of advertising, like show ads for camera accesories based on EXIF info.
Now, if they had a list of camera models by number of users, that would be more interesting (probably more accurate portrayal of marketshare than the manufacturers themselves give off). Or of models that are used to post the fewest pictures before the users photos suddenly change to another brand (in other words; quickly abandoned crappy models). Models that are used most for dark scenes with/without flash. That sort of thing.
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Oh, and:
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Maybe I'm simply not in the know -- I usually do dark scenes without flash with my Nikon F2, Ilford film, a stativ, and a good lens. :-)
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While I agree with you - what would that metrics tell? Inquiring mind wants to know.
Maybe I'm simply not in the know -- I usually do dark scenes without flash with my Nikon F2, Ilford film, a stativ, and a good lens.
it's just an example of a piece of statistics that would make a bit more sense.
For the lower end of the market (i.e. your NON-Canon EOS/Nikon F models) the performance in low light is particularly horrendous, what with the tiny len
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I expect better from /. (Score:4, Insightful)
As one other photographer already mentioned part of.
1. Pro photographers are not going to store info on flicker
2. Pro photographers are going to be outnumbered by non pros, thus changing which is the best "camera"
3. It has been proven that a good photograper can take a better photo with a disposible camera than many consumers can with the "best" camera.
4. Others have noted that some cameras are lumped together, and others have multiple categories by the way the data is sampled.
5. No ratings of which photos are best are factored intot he sampling.
Sure, mod me down for this, but it doesn't change the fact that this story is totally BS.
Re:I expect better from /. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Top Ten Digital Cameras Used by People on Flickr
aka
10 most popular digital cameras on Flickr
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More stats, please... (Score:2, Funny)
(Yes this is sarcasm)
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I'd like to (Score:3, Informative)
Link to the original? (Score:3, Informative)
Don't forget about pbase! (Score:2)
Camera not as important as the photographer (Score:2)
Where it becomes a challenge is when you're in situations with low light, where only the better cameras have low enough noise, or when you need a particular lens.
I have seen many excellent pictures taken by cheap consumer point and shoot cameras. I ha
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-- Chris
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Flickr users are likely to be creative enthusists.
In both cases the popular equipment isn't necessarily the best. In photography it's not necessary to have the finest equipment to do the finest work (especially on the web) and those who have a true need for the best gear aren't likely to participate on a public website. As for