Apple iPhone beats Nikon as the number two camera brand used on Flickr
Yahoo’s flagship image sharing site Flickr has been dominated for years by two historic camera brands, Canon and Nikon, who shared over 20% of the Flickr user market share. That was until 2013, when iPhone image takers began gaining ground, and reputation, with exponentially improved cameras.
The iPhone 4, 4s and 5, respectively left professional and pro-sumer camera maker Nikon, in the dust for two consecutive years, according to Petapixel. While the iPhone gained enough momentum in 2013 to come out on top, challenging Canon for a few percentage points, Canon is still a hard one to beat. Apple has been consistent in improving the camera on all its devices, but the latest inception of iSight in the iPhone 6 has the potential to take on even Canon, in 2015.
Should big camera brands start worrying?
Not really... but they may want to start gearing up, and take consumers on the low end of the market a bit more seriously.
1.5 Micron pixels, f/2.2 aperture, 1080p HD at 60 fps, 240-fps slo-mo, and time-lapse video, is a lot of features to compete with, especially when pro-sumer cameras like the Canon Rebel T5 stock lens is still a 18-55mm f/3.5. Great lens for starters, but not nearly as fast as the iSight.
The cost is also another factor. Users want to take better pictures, but not all users are professionals and willing to shell out over a thousand dollars to get an f/2.2, or f/1.8 extra lens for a cropped frame camera with a built-in price tag starting at $400-$500 . On top of that, most decent lenses on the cheaper side, do not have extra (and expensive) features like image stabilization sensors (IS), while the iPhone has it built into the sensor, and into the price, which most users benefit from through their mobile carrier offerings.
Enough with the megapixel argument
There is a reason why the iSight 8 megapixel camera holds up to the 12 or even 18 megapixels of a prosumer Canon or Nikon: the sensor. Any photography buff knows that megapixels do not necessarily correlate to image quality. The sharpness of the pixels depends on the quality of the sensor and the size of the individual pixels. Even on cameras featuring a higher number of megapixels, the sensor might not be enough to prevent pixel noise (the rainbow-colored pixel dust that appears most often in dark areas of digital images). Pixel noise can be somehow adjusted, either automatically by the camera sensor, or through adjusting the settings and lens manually, but sometime, there may be a hard limit on how much one can adjust.
Will the iPhone replace the pro-sumer DSLR?
Yes, we’d be laughing too, alas, stranger things have happened, and since Kodak and Polaroid have decided to make smartphones, the next five-ten years are going to be... well... at least interesting, and we are not placing any bets, yet.