Surprisingly: The most popular camera brand in Japan is not Canon, Nikon or Sony

A recent survey was conducted in Japan about which camera brand is the most popular and the end result is very surprising. While Canon, Nikon and Sony are big brands with high market share, the camera company that people love more is Pentax / Ricoh .

Accordingly, Sony, Canon and Olympus accounted for 27.4%, 23.8% and 23.4% of mirrorless camera market share in Japan respectively in 2020. As for the DSLR market, Canon and Nikon accounted for 57.4% and 39.3% respectively. In other words, the major players have taken up 74.6% of the mirrorless camera market and up to 96.7% of DSLRs.

Meanwhile, Pentax / Ricoh only accounts for 3% of the market share with all its products being DSLRs. Although not a big brand anymore, Pentax / Ricoh with a history of 101 years still won the hearts of photographers with 2224 out of 9000 (24%) votes. Nikon, Canon and Sony occupied the following positions with 19.9%, 13.7% and 13.6% votes respectively.

Survey results about the favorite camera brand in Japan

Netorabo – the channel that conducted this survey explains: “Pentax and Ricoh are two photography companies established in the film camera era like Canon, Nikon and Olympus before merging. While other manufacturers are both Pursuing the design of mirrorless cameras, Pentax still “sticks” to traditional DSLR cameras and this may have satisfied photographers who still have a passion for this type of camera.”

The three major camera manufacturers in Japan, Canon, Nikon and Sony, have now turned to new mirrorless cameras and have shown signs of giving up on DSLRs. Perhaps in the near future Pentax will have a larger market share when it is the only company that will accompany the followers of traditional cameras with optical viewfinders.