Following on from the “which lenses are most popular” post, this post is about which are the most popular Canon cameras among FoCal users from May 2012 through to October 2014.

The Data

Since 2012, users of FoCal have had the opportunity to upload their results data back to our servers.  We’re really excited about being able to return this data back to our users in FoCal 2, but for now we wanted to present some of the information in interesting ways.

For the charts in this page, we’ve counted all the unique Canon cameras for the calendar months from May 2012 to October 2014 then worked out the the proportion of each camera as a percentage.  We’ve also built a yearly view, presented in the pie charts at bottom of this page.  Each camera is only counted once in a month, so even if a camera was used for several tests it will only be counted once.

Without further ado, here’s the charts…

Cameras by Month

The percentage of cameras for each type is shown by the coloured bands, with the total of all the bands accounting for 100% of the cameras.  Unlike the previous post, we’ve managed to keep the camera colours the same across the charts!

2012

2012 is mostly dominated by the 7D (the top red band), and the 5D Mark III (the middle green band).  The 5D Mark II (mid blue band) is pretty popular, but losing some ground to the 5D Mark III by the end of the year.

The 1D-X appears from July this year, and the 6D starts to make an tiny appearance from November 2012 .

2013

The 5D Mark III stays very strong for 2013 and the 5D Mark II continues to decline by at quite a slow rate.  The popularity of the 7D decreases a little at the same time the 70D starts to be used which may not be a coincidence.

The 1-series cameras seem to stay pretty static across the year which is maybe not too surprising.  A 1-series camera is quite an investment, and users are likely to keep hold of them for longer than a lower-end camera.

2014

(Note that the data for October is incomplete as we’re only half way through the month, so the points may change at the far right of this chart)

With no new cameras available in 2014 so far, the bands are pretty static across the chart.

2012 to 2014

(Note that the data for October is incomplete as we’re only half way through the month, so the points may change at the far right of this chart)

This chart shows the complete set of data from May 2012 to October 2014 so you get a 2 year view of the popularity of Canon cameras.

Year View

The following pie charts show the percentage use of each camera throughout the complete year.  The data is the same as shown in the charts above, but gives a clear view of the camera popularity over the year.

2012

 

2013

 

2014

Caveat

It’s important to understand that this data is a view from FoCal users who choose to upload their data.  That’s going to be a specific and limited set of overall camera users, and it’s also only going to apply to cameras supported by FoCal.  Having said that, the data sets are quite large and should give a fairly representative view of the situation as a whole.

We do also “sanity check” the data to make sure we’re not including obviously erroneous data.

What’s next?

Next up we’ll have the same data for Nikon cameras, and then we’ll present some more specific comparisons of similar bodies/lenses to give a view of how the situation changes over time.

We hope you find this information useful.  Feel free to leave a comment and let us know any other views of the data you’d like to see.