Speculation is one thing, facts another.
Do you have any hard figures to back up this up?
Old stats from the times before Leica took itself private to keep stats private don't do it for me.
Stephen
This an interesting conceptual exercise. Now, I think Flickr is more or less a brand-neutral place (as far as Fuji and Leica are concerned). We can also probably assume that in aggregate, photographers shoot and post at similar rates. Neither brands are known for machine-gun sports bodies either. So how many images have been posted by users of Fuji X ILC bodies?
XT1: 7,148,815
XE1: 6,129,690
X100S: 5,782,477
XE2: 3,611,200
XPRO1: 3,351,323
XM1: 2,644,163
X100T: 1,601,313
Now I understand that there are more X bodies than the ones I listed above. I also understand that Flickr is very much US-centric and that Fujifilm may have a larger market share in Asia. Nonetheless, we estimate that the total number of images uploaded to Flickr by X ILC bodies to be in the 30 million range, and likely a bit higher because of the other X bodies (and people who remove EXIF). We'll call it 35 million.
So what's the equivalent for Leica?
M: 1,465,355
M9: 3,467,686
M8: 2,259,445
MM: 281,236
We'll add the X and Q systems for fairness:
Q: 183,620
X1: 1,044,399
X2: 494,020
The other models, as well as the S and T system do not register on the camera finder tool. The total comes out to be ~8 million. Therefore, according to Flickr, there are about
4.4 times as many Fuji ILC users as there are Leica users. We can argue that both numbers are under-estimated (Leica users don't care about Flickr, etc.), but I think this estimate is at least on the right order of magnitude.
For a second perspective, we can look at 500px:
There are 98,967 photos tagged with "Fujifilm". A certain proportion of them will be shot with real film, but this number is likely not significant. A much larger proportion will be from Fuji point & shoots. Although since this is 500px we are talking about, we can speculate that people are using nicer cameras on average.
There are a total of 18,144 photos tagged with some combination of "Leica M8","Leica M9","M monochrom",'M240','Leica S' and 'Leica Q'. This comes to a ration of Fuji to Leica of
5.5 - somewhat close to the Flickr estimate!
For a third estimate, I repeated this exercise for Tuchong.com, which is basically Flickr for China. Comes out to 5.9x in favor of Fuji.
I think it's not unreasonable to conclude that
1. Fuji does sell many more X cameras than Leica sells Ms, and also many more than the total number of German-made bodies sold by Leica 2. The ratio of Fuji ILCs to Leica German bodies is in the 4:1 to 6:1 range, perhaps a bit higher in Asia.
For a final comparison, there are more than 100 million photos on Flickr tagged with "5D mk3" alone...so yes, both Fuji and Leica have tiny, tiny markets compared to the likes of Canon and Nikon.
And yes, it's a slow afternoon
😀
Edit: it occurred to me that a possibly better metric is used camera sales on eBay. But high-value items are resold less...so there is also bias involved.
