世論 What Japan Thinks

With the megapixel count in mobile phone cameras getting ever higher and the functions available on the phones ever increasing, goo Research, as reported by japan.internet.com, performed a survey to find out about cell phone camera settings.

Demographics

Between the 24th and 27th of August 2007 1,088 members of goo Research’s online monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.8% of the sample was male, 16.6% in their teens, 17.8% in their twenties, 21.4% in their thirties, 16.4% in their forties, 15.7% in their fifties, and 12.0% aged sixty or older.

I’d love to see more detailed figureson how the awareness and use of the macro mode, or close-up mode corresponds with use of QR Codes. As far as I am aware, many phones have a dedicated normal mode/close-up mode switch, and when one selects QR Code mode, a big message pops up reminding one to switch the camera into the correct mode. I’ve never understood why there has to be a switch for this or why the phone cannot automatically go into close-up mode when reading these barcodes. Perhaps the DoCoMo official specifications explicitly require such a feature, perhaps due to someone having patents they don’t want to licence regarding automation of this feature?

Research results

From the original 1,088 people, 954, or 87.7% currently carried mobile phones with camera functions. From other surveys, about 95% of the population have mobile phones, so perhaps over 92% of all mobile phone users have devices with cameras. Note that one cannot say 92% of all mobile phones in use have cameras as many people (myself included) carry both a basic work cell phone and a fully-featured private-use cell phone.

Q1: Does your cell phone have a macro mode or close-up mode? (Sample size=954)

Yes (to SQ)	56.8%
No	13.9%
Don’t know	21.8%
Don’t know what the feature is	7.4%

Q1SQ: Do you often use your cell phone’s macro mode or close-up mode? (Sample size=542)

Often use it	31.6%
Have used it	54.4%
Never used it	14.0%

Combining the two, we get the following table:

Q1+Q1SQ: Does your cell phone have a macro mode or close-up mode? (Sample size=954)

Yes, and often use it	17.9%
Yes, and have used it	30.9%
Yes, but never used it	8.0%
No	13.9%
Don’t know	21.8%
Don’t know what the feature is	7.4%

Q2: Does your cell phone have scene modes? (Sample size=954)

Yes (to SQ)	40.9%
No	17.6%
Don’t know	28.1%
Don’t know what the feature is	13.4%

Scene mode feature is the ability to select different different photo modes, like night mode, portrait mode, scenery mode, etc.

Q2SQ: Do you often use your cell phone’s scene modes? (Sample size=390)

Often use it	21.8%
Have used it	50.5%
Never used it	27.7%

Combining the two, we get the following table:

Q2+Q2SQ: Does your cell phone have scene modes? (Sample size=954)

Yes, and often use it	8.9%
Yes, and have used it	20.6%
Yes, but never used it	11.3%
No	17.6%
Don’t know	28.1%
Don’t know what the feature is	13.4%