Canon vs. Nikon Marketing Strategies

I meant to post this last year but somehow didn't get a chance to finish writing it, thus please back-date this blog to 2008.

Canon and Nikon have been fighting in the SLR and DSLR market for several decades. From the 60s to mid 80s, Nikon dominated the professional film SLR market share. When Canon came out with better technologies such as auto focus and other electronics automation after the mid 80s, many pros (especially those who shoot sports) switched to the Canon EF-mount system. For the next few decades, Canon SLR (and lately DSLR) dominated both the pro and consumer SLR market. Today the competition is just starting to heat up. Every few months, both companies come out with something better and/or lower priced than the other brand. Both companies get a bulk of their revenue *not* from their professional grade camera equipment, but with a flood of plastic, cheaply made consumer grade equipments (sub $500, sub $750, and sub $1000 SLR cameras and cheap kit lenses).

The consumer grade segment of the market is most vital to both companies because they account for a bulk of their revenue and thus is their bread and butter. One way to gauge the competition is to go to a store. I go to Costco frequently and chuckle whenever I see both Canon and Nikon DSLR boxes side by side. As of late 2008, the two consumer grade cameras that Costco sells are the Canon XSi and D60. While both try to compete for similar price range, looking at the boxes, one may feel that they're actually aiming for different types of consumers!

Below is a 2008 Canon XSi picture I took using a Canon SD740 point-and-shoot camera at Costco. The box shows a frozen action of a boy catching a football. Guys love sports. Guys love frozen action, and zoom. There's something about BIG ZOOM, having a big zoom is like having a nice sportscar with XXX horsepower and YYY torque. Guys want the biggest plasma/LCD TV. Fastest cars. Most megahertz computers. Things of that sort. This Canon Rebel is a guy's camera. Just look at the specs, it's sexy!

Below is the exact same item as above but has a different packaging, in 2009. Look at the fancy jargons like "Optical Image Stabilizer Double Zoom Lens Kit", and below, a bunch of fancy stuff like "12.2 MEGAPIXELS", "Digic III", "3 inch LCD", "3.5 Frames per second", "EOS", "Picture Style". Wow! If I were a guy who loves to look at specifications all day, I'd get a Canon Rebel because it's obviously better on a spec-by-spec comparisons.

Let's now look at the Nikon D60. You see a woman with a bunch of smaller images on the side (baby smiling, flower, kids, etc). There's no sports. There's no emphasis on frozen action. There is no fancy jargons to woe you. There IS however lots of emphasis on people... portraits... softness... prettiness... connection to people. No jargon, just "FAST, FUN, & EASY." Nikon's strategy is about connecting to people in the simplest possible way.

Let's look at another Nikon, the D5000 (2009). Unlike Canon that screams technical jargons and specifications, Nikon box simply says "Smart, Sharp, Simply Brilliant." Again the emphasis is on people. Happy people, with happy emotions.


Let's look at yet another Nikon, the D3000. Similarly, it's got happy people. Kids. The camera captured the moment. "Incredible pictures, incredibly easy."


So what's going on? Canon's strategy is to use what they're traditionally good at: sports and specs. Do you remember the late 1980s when Canon EOS Rebel flooded TV with their ads blitz? "It's so easy to use, amateurs can capture Andre Agassi like a pro!" Canon loves to show pictures of sports, frozen in time. In addition, Canon uses higher specifications (higher megapixel, more frames per second, higher processor name, etc) to lure certain types of buyers-- the Specification Peepers. Boys. Men. Guys. People who generally want the highest megapixels, biggest LCDs, most horsepower, most torque, biggest lens, biggest of everything. Canon is the ultimate boy's toy, because boys can brag to each other that they have a biggest spec'ed camera, the Canon. You know,"my cannon/piano/whatever is at least 3 inches longer and thicker than yours so I'm a more dominant male", that sort of thing. Spec for spec, Canon will have more features, for the same price or lower. Canon [on paper] is the most incredible machine on earth. Not surprisingly, Canon is an engineering company where engineers design and optimize the camera by spec, and they will out-spec any competitor, period.

What does that leave Nikon with? Nikon's strategy isn't to use specification to sell. Nikon doesn't need to compete on specs, because not all specs are relevant to the discerned buyer. For example, higher megapixels doesn't mean better image quality (in fact, more megapixel means more noise at night). There are other things to consider, like contrast and color rendition that Nikon excels at. For example (on similar settings), Nikon tends have warmer and more accurate auto white balancing hence psychologically more eye pleasing portraitures (this is all according to DXO Mark). In addition, Nikon tends to have lower megapixels but better night time capability (higher ISO with lower noise), whereas Canon tends to have higher megapixels (great during day time) but less night time capability (higher ISO with higher noise). Of course, color/contrast/night pictures are difficult to sell so instead of trying to describe it as specs, Nikon marketing decides to simply put portraiture of people on their boxes hoping people could just see how great their cameras are. There are other intangible items that Nikon hopes discerned users can feel such as better built quality (vs. the cheaper plastic housing of Rebels); Nikon is traditionally known to be more rugged and this has been true since the 60s when more journalist used Nikons to take pictures of Korean and Vietnam war than any other brands, and that more Nikons went to space & NASA than any other brand. They are also known to have excellent usability, and usability consistency in their product lines (a consumer D40's UI isn't too different than that of the professional D700).

None of the differences should be a surprise. The two camera brands have had very different philosophies since the 50s and 60s. Canon embraces the latest and greatest technologies while mass producing them (at the cost of durability) whereas Nikon is conservative and will only embrace new technology when absolutely necessary. Also, they have had very different philosophies in what types of images their cameras should capture. In the old days for example, Canon traditionally values more resolution (at mid-aperture), whereas Nikon values more contrast at wide-open. Below is an illustration of a 1950's pictures (directly from Dante Stella's article on resolution vs. contrast trade-offs in lens design, http://www.dantestella.com/technical/nikoleic.html):


On the left is Canon, which gives great resolution at mid-aperture. On the other hand, to the right is Nikon which gives great contrast wide-open. There is no "wrong" choice in trade-offs, just preferences. Photographers shooting sports or landscape is likely to opt for the company that values great resolution (higher MTF 30 lp/mm and higher megapixels on the Canon), and photographers shooting portraits and/or at night is likely to opt for the company that values contrast (higher MTF 10 lp/mm and better ISO on the Nikon).

Today, the differences in contrast and resolution between the two companies is no longer a big factors in choosing the "right brands". Both companies employ engineering techniques to yield some of the best products that we have seen to date, and both companies make lenses that yield very similar resolution and contrasts. Today, what makes them different is that Canon is consistently making higher megapixel cameras (21MP) that looks amazing during day time and decent at night, whereas Nikon is consistently making lower megapixel cameras (12.1MPP) that looks decent during day but superb at night. Like the old days, Canon still uses more plastic parts today to save costs and pass the savings to consumers (e.g. 5Dmk2, T1i) whereas Nikon has slightly better built quality to endure harsher conditions better (e.g. D700, D90) but cost more.

In short both companies embrace very different philosophies and employ different engineering techniques and both create great products. Sometimes there is no right camera to use for every single possible situation. For certain situations, Canon can be marginally better than Nikon, and vice versa. I for one prefer Canon and its superior pro-telephoto lens selections for events such as sports/bird shooting, but at other times I prefer Nikon for their Creative Lighting System for shooting portraitures, product shots, and night time.


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Links to other sites:
Trade-offs in lens engineering:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/understanding-series/understanding-mtf.shtml

Contrast vs. resolution philosophies of Leica, Contax, Canon, and Nikon:
http://www.photoethnography.com/ClassicCameras/index-frameset.html?focusing.html~mainFrame

Modular Transfer Function (MTF)

Courtesy of Norman Korman (http://www.normankoren.com/Tutorials/MTF.html)

I was going to post this long time ago but today I'm motivated to finish it because a friend asked me "I have a 15MP Canon T1i camera, should I buy a Canon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 IS to replace my 18-55mm version?" Well, it depends. If the lens will give flexibility when shooting kids from wide to zoom, AND it's only going to be used on the internet (1600 pixel width), AND you don't care about optical quality, then by all means get the 18-200mm lens. On the other hand, the results may be disappointing when zoomed in to 1:1 resolution or printed at 8x10 or 11x14 and above because super zoom lenses like the 18-200mm get convenience and trade-off with inferior optical quality. So if one must use the 18-200mm lens, one might as well as shoot it on a 8-10MP camera because at full 15MP, pictures will have a tendency to look "soft" and "mushy"... they will look not much better than shooting with a lower megapixel sensor and then upsize it later in Photoshop.

Let me just say that when I need convenience, I'll simply use my wife's Canon SD750 point-and-shoot, which is a superb camera to shoot casual events... kids, pets, what not. I don't usually care about optical quality for casual events. In fact I don't expect the quality of the SD750 to remotely match that of modern DSLRs+pro-lenses. On the other hand if I'm serious about something, I'll get SLR equipments but not just any SLR equipments-- pro-lenses. There's no point of buying a toy consumer 18-200mm lens when a point-and-shoot will shoot just as well. Having that said, two years ago I bought the Canon equivalent-- back then a spanking brand new Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR. I had it for about 2 months. I sold it (on eBay) after only using it for 2 months because I was very disappointed with its optical quality. In fact, eBay today is full of used 18-200mm lenses-- people are now starting to discover that super zooms don't project good quality images, and are dumping them back to the used market.

So let's assume now that optical quality is in fact of high concern, how should one determine in general whether a lens is well matched for a particular MP sensor? You compare technical specs. However unlike looking at a single MP value, lenses are a bit more complicate. Lenses are usually characterized using the Modular Transfer Function (MTF).

Originally MTF started from USAF in the 50s when the air force wanted to know how much "lines PAIRS per millimeter" (lp/mm) a lens can resolve (this is different than l/mm!). The higher details, the more information they can get from the Soviet Union using high altitude spy planes and spy cameras. In the old film days, lp/mm was used commonly because there were only a few common formats: 35mm, medium format (45, 67, etc) and it made sense to talk about lines per millimeter projected on film. Today with a plethora of digital sensor sizes, people use lw/ph or lwph (line width per picture height) in favor of the older lpmm unit. Keep in mind, the two aren't equivalent and requires calculations to get from one to another, but for the sake of simplicity, let's just agree that the higher MTF value, the more details a lens can resolve. By the way there are a bunch of good technical MTF information online. My favorite is the following URL. Is this really necessary to read? Yes, absolutely, especially if you're a pixel peeping/engineering/math type of person:

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/understanding-series/understanding-mtf.shtml

So going back to the question "I have a 15MP camera, should I get a 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 IS lens to replace my 18-55mm vesion?" Unlike the camera body, we can't simply look at one single MTF value on a lens. What makes lens comparison complicated is that the center resolution will be different than the corner resolution because unlike a uniform sensor/film density, the projected optic quality isn't uniform throughout the area. To make things more complicated, lens resolution varies with aperture as well; subject to the laws of optics engineering and design, the higher the aperture, the higher resolution, and likewise the wider-open the aperture, the lower resolution. So we have two basic things to worry about now: 1) how much resolution in the different areas a lens projects 2) how much resolution using different apertures. In fact to make things even more complicated there are a bunch of other factors to consider (but we won't get into it here): contrast vs. resolution, color, chromatic aberration, vignette, distortion, and bokeh (BTW I hope I've made pixel peepers happy by mentioning all of these other issues).

Unfortunately, most manufacturers have their own MTF values derived from theoretical/calculated results. In fact, they don't make it easy for consumers to access that information. In addition, manufacturers' MTF is a lot lower than the theoretical values due to manufacturing variations, and subject to real world conditions (heat, humidity, calibration, irreproducible lighting levels, etc). Luckily however, there are numerous MTF charts published by independent testers online. Photozone is one very good European company that publishes optical results. Let's look at the MTF for the following two lenses:

18-55mm 55-250mm	18-200mm

Go to both pages, scroll to MTF for 18mm at f/3.5. You'll see that for center MTF value (middle of projection), both lenses resolve almost the same lp/ph. Now, look at border MTF value (edge of projection), and you see while the 18-55mm resolves at 2182 lw/ph, the 18-200mm resolves at an abysmal 1703 lw/ph. Extreme corner is another story to be told. Based on this MTF, one can say that the 18-200mm lens often yields mushy looking images. "This lens at f/3.5 and 18mm isn't very sharp" is what photographers would say. You can look at other apertures and other zoom ranges and see that aperture-for-aperture, zoom-for-zoom, the cheaper 18-55mm lens usually out-performs the much more expensive 18-200mm lens! (see footnote 1)

In short, lens engineering is about trade-offs, and one of the big trade-offs is convenience vs. optical quality. I understand that the 18-200mm lens is much more convenient for shooting pets and kids. It's certainly more convenient than having to switch between 18-55mm and 55-250mm lenses. So if convenience is the primary issue at hand, the 18-200mm is a fine lens. Just don't expect crystal sharp pictures.

If on the other hand optical quality is of importance (portrait, event, wedding, poster, etc), then don't get the 18-200mm. Instead get a better lens that can also resolve just as much resolution as the sensor has. MTF is your friend.

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Footnotes:

1) One can make the argument that you can just close up the aperture to f/5.6 and beyond and both lenses will perform superbly. As good as that sounds, f/5.6 is 1.5 stop lower than f/3.5. That means the lens opening at f/5.6 is roughly 1/3 (1/(2^1.5)) than at f/3.5. Shooting f/5.6 under anything but bright day will yield a lot of disappointments.