世論 What Japan Thinks

Unfortunately I couldn’t find any suitably silly survey for Sunday, so you’ll have to make do with this one, where japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey conducted by goo Research into the topic of broken digital cameras.

Demographics

Between the 17th and 21st of January 2008 1,092 members of the goo Research monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.2% of the sample was male, 16.2% in their teens, 18.0% in their twenties, 21.7% in their thirties, 16.1% in their forties, 15.8% in their fifties, and 12.2% aged sixty or older.

Picture of a broken Panasonic DMC-FX30 by Jeff Youngstrom

Research results

From the initial sample, 925 people, or 84.7% owned one or more of a digital compact camera, digital SLR camera, or digital video camera. Of this group, 27.5%, or 254 people, had experienced having a broken camera. This sub-group was asked the following questions.

Q1: What caused your camera to break? If more than one cause, or more than one broken camera, choose all that apply. (Sample size=254, multiple answer)

	Votes	Percentage
Dropped and broke it	53	20.9%
Dead straight out of the box	33	13.0%
Banged against wall	11	4.3%
Function problem (broke button, etc)	7	2.8%
Dropped into liquid	4	1.6%
Spilt liquid over it	4	1.6%
Other	20	7.9%
Don’t know what caused it	160	63.0%

Q2: How did you get your camera fixed? Choose all that apply. (Sample size=254, multiple answer)

	Votes	Percentage
Sent it back to the shop for fixing	101	39.8%
Sent it to the maker for fixing	77	30.3%
Didn’t get it fixed	60	23.6%
Threw it out	30	11.8%
Fixed it myself	5	2.0%
Friend, family fixed it for me	2	0.8%
Sent it to a specialist for fixing	0	0.0%
Other	8	3.1%

In addition, 99 people, or 39.0%, researched the cause of the fault or how to deal with it on the internet. They were asked the following question.

Q3: Did you manage to fix your problem after researching it on the internet? (Sample size=254)

Fixed the problem	13.1%
Sometimes fixed, sometimes didn’t	19.2%
Didn’t fix the problem	38.4%
Couldn’t find out how to fix the problem	29.3%