Canon sold 44% more cameras than Sony last year

Canon is the undisputed king of the camera market, with an indomitable share of 46.5% – and it sold 43.9% more cameras than Sony, which sits in a distant second place with 26.1% market share.

That's according to the annual Inspection World Share data report from Nikkei Shimbun, a Japanese daily business paper (by way of Digital Camera Info), and to see that Canon owns almost half the camera market is a pretty incredible stat.

There is a caveat to this, of course, as Canon makes some of the best DSLRs in addition to the mirrorless cameras and compact cameras that Sony deals in. And as much as DSLR sales have crashed, Canon still sold 1.32 million of them – which eclipses the 1.25 million mirrorless cameras sold by Sony, according to the Industry Map report (shared by Digital Camera Life). 

The advantage of selling DSLRs in addition to mirrorless and compact cameras wasn't nearly so helpful to Nikon, however, which sits in third place with an 11.7% share of the market.

Behind it are Fujifilm in fourth, with 5.8%, Panasonic in fifth with a 4.2% share, OM Digital (Olympus) in sixth with 3.5%, and Ricoh coming in seventh with just 0.8% of the market.

In other categories of note, Canon and Fujifilm respectively hold an 8.6% and 6.8% share of the lucrative medical imaging market, while Sony rules the CMOS sensor market with an iron fist at 88.1% – crushing its closest competition, Samsung, which holds a share of just 18.1%. 

With Sony seeing huge growth in (and consequently doubling down on) the vlogging camera sector in 2023, it will be interesting to see how that factors into the figures this time next year. 

You might be interested in seeing how the best Canon cameras compare to the best Sony cameras – and how all the major manufacturers stack up in the best mirrorless cameras overall.