Was it a fluke? Last year Fujifilm astonished us with an unexpected top-drawer showing, ranking alongside Panasonic as the most reliable camera brand on the market. This year the camera rankings shifted: Fujifilm sank back into the middle of the pack, and traditional category powerhouse Canon returned to the top of the list, where it had been a stalwart in prior years.
This year’s camera maker on the move was Nikon, which jumped from second-to-last in last year’s survey to third place this year, as users cited few problems on arrival and praised the brand’s overall reliability. Though it didn’t match the showings of Canon and Panasonic, Nikon would have come even closer to the top two this year if our survey respondents hadn’t rated its cameras harder than average to use. (This rating isn’t altogether surprising, however, since Nikon sells lots of sophisticated, high-end cameras with inherently more-complicated controls.)
At the bottom of our rankings this year are Kodak and Samsung, both of which received worse-than-average scores for ‘overall satisfaction with reliability’ compared to their peers in the camera market. Kodak owners report high satisfaction levels with their cameras’ ease of use, but report a higher-than-average rate of significant problems. Samsung cameras don’t incur any more actual problems than other brands, according to readers, yet owners of the cameras report lower-than-average satisfaction levels with the general reliability of the cameras.