Results from a new market study suggest that there are 3.5 billion digital cameras in use across the globe -- and in excess of one trillion personal digital photos stored on PC hard-drives, portable devices and online in the Cloud.
However, during the time between a camera is purchased and the owner buys a photo-finished product or uploads a photo to a social networking website, that active camera usage can be difficult to define and quantify.
Futuresource Consulting conducted a recent market study of photo-sharing habits in the UK, Germany and France. Their study focused on the images that ultimately have a high personal value to the consumer: those that are actively shared, as opposed to the billions that remain dormant on computer hard drives or memory cards.
Survey questions were also included to pinpoint the features that consumers will look for in their next digital camera.
The use case study revealed that people are embracing many new ways to share their personal photos -- printed media continues to play an important role in photo sharing, though digital dominates.
Some of the key trends mirrored the discoveries from previous waves of research, with the vast majority -- around 90 percent -- of respondents across the UK, France and Germany sharing images with their friends and family.
Survey respondents continued to use a wide variety of methods to share their images -- with females more likely to be sharing than males. The main method of sharing for French and German respondents was via laptop or desktop PC, while UK respondents mainly shared using websites and e-mail.
In terms of image capture, approximately a third of respondents in each of the territories used a cameraphone to capture up to a quarter of the images that they then went on to share.
This varies quite considerably with age, with respondents aged 55 or older the least likely to be capturing images with a cameraphone, with over a third using their digital camera for all of their image capture.
Respondents aged 16 to 34 are more likely than any other age group to be capturing 75 to 100 percent of their images with a cameraphone. Notably, a quarter of respondents in each country are capturing all of their images using a digital camera only.
