Last night I ran a quick Snap Poll in an attempt to get a better understanding of how my site visitors viewed both Nikon's new mirrorless camera, but the state of the mirrorless market itself. A couple of things before we get started with the results:
- I poll my site visitors both randomly and openly on a regular basis. At this point I have hundreds of thousands of responses and a pretty good idea of who they are. To over-generalize, they tend to be what these days are called enthusiasts: serious photographers who are looking to improve. I do get some more casual followers from time to time, but most people reading my site are both active serious photographers and active buyers in the camera market.
- I broadcast the availability of the poll on my Twitter and Google+ accounts, and on my Web site only. While my Tweet and post were retweeted and reposted a handful of times, looking at the timing of responses I doubt that those influenced the results greatly, if at all. I arbitrarily set a 3000 response limit and that almost filled before the first retweet. Overall, it took only a couple of hours to hit the limit, and considering that was late night where most of my readers reside, a fairly impressive response.
- Yes, I know I closed off some possible options. I didn't allow a "maybe" response in terms of buying the Nikon 1 for a reason: I wanted to force people into a quick yes/no opinion, not let them equivocate. Again, this is a snap poll, what I call a "testing the waters" type of survey, and I was trying to see how many were really committed to what they had or what was about to appear.
- Despite being only four questions, there's a lot of cross analysis that can be done (for example, do current m4/3 owners think another camera is the most compelling?). I'm not going to report that here. I'm only going to give the base results for you to ponder. But the cross analysis was actually more interesting than the base results ;~).
Without further ado, the base results:
Question 1: Do you own a mirrorless camera? 2461 no, 639 yes. That's 21% of those surveyed owning a mirrorless camera. I'll bet that's a higher number than you expected.
Question 2: Which mirrorless camera do you own (assumes yes in first question)? 552 m4/3, 138 NEX, 16 NX, 6 X100, 12 other. Of the 21% that owned a mirrorless camera, 86% owned an m4/3 camera. Given that I've reviewed and covered the three major mirrorless cameras, that m4/3 number is a bit higher than I expected, but it could be readers mirroring my own preference at the moment.
Question 3: Will you buy the new Nikon 1? 2692 no, 408 yes. That's 13% yes. I suspect that's a higher number than you expected, too. It's significantly higher than the result on the Nikon Rumors poll, for instance. Given that we have serious photographers coming to my site and that the Nikon 1 is targeted at a different user, this is an eyebrow raising statistic. Yes, it could be somewhat jaundiced by my reporting of the Nikon 1, but based upon email and Google+ comments by poll takers, I'm not sure it is. (By the way Nikon, your choice of brand name is really, really bad. You can't effectively Google the term Nikon 1. Google seems to have caught this fast and put in a fix, but it's still a bad search term and going to cause problems with cruder search engines.)
Question 4: Which is the most compelling recent mirrorless camera? Hold onto your horses folks: 995 (32%) NEX 7, 802 (26%) Nikon 1 V1 model. Do I need to go further? The next best showing was the Olympus E-P3 at 385 (12%). Everything else (J1, E-PM1, E-PL3, GF-3, G3, GH2, NEX 3C, NEX 5N, NX200) was down in the single digits, and way down in the single digits, including the Nikon 1 J1 model (ugh, that name just grates).
Given the make up of my site visitors, it shouldn't be surprising that they favored the NEX 7 and E-P3, which target them directly. The Nikon V1 number has to raise eyebrows though. Some people are seeing something in the announcement that others aren't.