IPhone passes Canon Rebel XTi as most popular camera on Flickr

Here's a tidbit that's sure to irk Flickr's elitist photographers: The iPhone has just topped Canon's high-performance Digital Rebel XTi as the most popular camera on Yahoo's popular image-sharing site.

The iPhone, with its bare-bones, two-megapixel camera, has been battling for the No. 2  spot for months in a tight race with two other Canon cameras and the Nikon D80, according to a graph plotting the overall user percentages of each model on Flickr's Camera Finder.

But recently, the iPhone (displayed in yellow on the graph) shot up to No. 1.

The newest iPhone 3GS added much-improved photo-taking quality, with features such as video, auto-focus and white balance. Still, its lack of a zoom lens and a flash put it at a major technical disadvantage compared to dedicated point-and-shooters like the 10- to 12-megapixel Canon Rebels.

Flickr has long been a popular spot for professionals to dump their hundreds of digital stills. The website is an ideal place for ...

... pros to display their work to the world and for long-term cloud storage (as long as they've paid for a pro account, to remove the 200-picture restriction).

But the Rebel's dethroning doesn't seem to indicate a major consumer shift away from professional-quality cameras. Rather, it's more of a shift in the battle among cellphone cameras, in favor of the iPhone, as well as a change in how people share digital photos. Apple's smart phone has outpaced the share of user uploads compared to other camera phones. The Nokia N95 holds a distant second, followed by a couple of BlackBerry models.

IPhone users are notoriously heavy consumers of mobile Internet -- in some cases, surpassing the amount of time they spend surfing the Web on their computers. That could mean they're apt to share the photos they take on more websites, rather than suggest that the phone's camera is supplanting more powerful devices.

We've been tracking the Apple-Canon race on Flickr for months. Strangely, this isn't the first time that the iPhone has jumped past the Rebel -- even though the graph doesn't show it. Hours after iPhone took the lead, the leap had been inexplicably stricken from the record.

When asked about the discrepancies, Flickr spokeswoman Lucy Chung wrote in an e-mail, "The graph in Camera Finder updates at every moment so there's no specific reasoning behind the changes. One can assume though that with the recent iPhone 3GS launch, the iPhone now includes two models whereas other manufacturers separate out their models, which could explain the inflated numbers."

Let's see if the change actually sticks this time.

-- Mark Milian

Comments

[Darren Spinelli]

Way to make up something out of nothing. The differences between the Canon XTi and XSi are subtle and should be lumped together if all the iPhone generations are going be lumped together. But that wouldn't make for yet another sexy Apple article.

[James]

Mark, interesting piece and I'm glad someone picked up on it. This trend is important for camera and phone manufacturers alike, regardless of whether the numbers are off. However, I'd like to point out that the Canon EOS Digital Rebels are not point-and-shoot, but rather digital SLR cameras with significantly more impressive features and abilities.

[Abhishek Kumar]

I dont think it is because of iPhone's camera being superior, which it certainly is not. I would attribute it to the ease of uploading your snap taken through iPhone to Flickr.

[eric]

wow, that was fast...

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/07/14/iphone-flickrs-2nd-m.html

[Grazing]

What kind of graph has no access points? This data is virtually useless. We don't know if this comparison is for the month, the year or the last 3 years. That's relevant. Your quantity numbers make a big difference too in evaluating those wide bands of difference - AND would tell us if there's really anything to be crowing about here. Additionally could we also have some actual use data -or even a link - to be able to assess what this sentence actually means: "IPhone users are notoriously heavy consumers of mobile Internet -- in some cases, surpassing the amount of time they spend surfing the Web on their computers. " Besides the fact that no one knows how to make a graph anymore at LAT, a little more actual reporting would be nice. Maybe this is news. But maybe - and at this point more likely - it's PR spin.

[Mark Milian]

We didn't make the graph. Flickr did. And it's just about all they would tell us. And PR spin for who? Flickr? What's the angle? "We make horrible graphs. Come to our website?"

[Tracy]

Anyone who is a regular on flickr, knows that this graph changes all the time and since flickr doesn't give up their secrets, we don't know how it's made. I would hardly blame the Times for flickrs graph. It's so easy to post a shot from your iPhone from wherever you are, so it makes sense that there are more posts from iPhones. It doesn't make it a better camera or even more popular camera, just the camera used for most of the shots posted to flickr.

Some people like to be very reactionary and don't have the capability for self editing prior to posting. Nice article, Mark.