Since about mid 2012, users of Reikan FoCal have had the chance to upload results data, and it’s allowed us to build a pretty good picture of the behaviour of a lot of lenses and camera body combinations. When FoCal 2 is released, we’ll be giving this data back to the FoCal users, and in the run up to that release we’ve been using the data to prepare various information posts.
First in the set, we wanted to show which lenses are most popular for both Canon and Nikon camera bodies.
For both Canon and Nikon, we’ve looked at the number of different lenses used for any FoCal tests across a month, and built some charts below to show which lenses are the most popular. There’s also some more detailed tables which show the top 10 for each month for all the data we have up to September 2014 available here for Canon and here for Nikon.
The Charts
The charts are created by taking the year-long superset of the top 5 lenses for each month. In simple terms, we take the top 5 lenses for each month and then add all those sets together to get a group of the most popular lenses for the year.
Canon
So, here’s the 2012 chart for Canon lenses. The 9 lenses listed at the bottom are the superset of the top 5 lenses for each month:
The Canon 24-105 f/4 is the most popular for each month, with the 50/1.4 and 70-200/2.8 Mk II lenses coming next. The 24-70/2.8 mk II starts appearing from September 2012, and managed to be in the top 5 lenses for the rest of the year.
2013 is a bit of a busier year, with 11 lenses in the lineup. The Canon 24-105/4 is still the most popular lens for every single month, with the 70-200/2.8 II and the 50/1.4 still being the next most popular lenses. The first third party lens – the Sigma 35/1.4 – starts appearing from March 2014 and stays fairly low level, but still manages to get into the top 5 of all Canon lenses for at least 1 month of the year.
(Note that the October data for 2014 is up to the middle of the month).
Again, the 24-105/4 is holding the most popular place, with the 70-200/2.8 II and 50/1.4 jostling for 2nd place across the year.
From this data, I think it’s fairly safe to say that the general weight of Canon users do seem to favour first party (i.e. Canon own) lenses.
Nikon
The way we started collecting Nikon data meant that there was some ambiguity between a few lenses through the 2012 data. We are sorting this out to remove the ambiguity but it’s not complete yet, so the useful Nikon data starts from January 2013.
The story is very similar for Nikon – first party lenses are most popular, with the 24-70/2.8 and the 70-200/2.8 II being the most popular throughout the year.
The same pattern continues across 2014, with the only third party lens being the excellent Sigma 35mm f/1.4.
More Data
If you’re interested in looking in more detail at this data, you can see the top 10 lenses by month for all the data we have here:
What’s Next?
We’ll be publishing more information, including comparisons of popular lenses across the months and camera body usage, so check back here soon.
3 comments on “Which are the most popular lenses?”
data is knowledge 😉
Thank you
Can you test lenses with a noncovered camera? I have an EOS-M@.
Hi Steven,
Currently the answer is ‘not really’ and not really in a brilliant way at least. However this is something we would love to support and there are some ideas on what we might be able to do, don’t expect a solution tomorrow but sometime in the future we are looking to provide something useful 🙂
(General note, it is not possible for us to monitor the blog comments in the same way as the support / ticket system, please raise support tickets with questions and they will be answered more quickly!).
Best Regards,
Dave