Today I got invited to participate in a survey conducted by a dutch company, Ipsos. It seems that Ipsos is doing the survey for Nikon, both logos appear in the invitation email. The survey should take “only” 25 minutes (which is quite long if you ask me), but being a Nikon fanboy I accepted and started clicking away.

The survey is conducted among randomly chosen D800 users who have registered their camera online. Most of the survey was about the D800 and how much I like the different features. It seems that the survey has been created by someone who is actually not into photography, some parts made me frown/laugh a little.

D800SchematicsFor example, they showed an image of the camera where all buttons and dials are numbered (something like the one you see here) and below it the buttons were described. Now you should tick the box if you thought item XY is not user-friendly. Just tick the box, but you had no chance to explain what exactly is not user-friendly. It could be the placement of a button, the mechanic behavior when you press it, the surface roughness…

Where I had to laugh out loud was when they asked what feature made me buy the camera. You had choices like “Image quality” (ok, makes sense), but also “price” (huh ? Is that a feature ?) and the best option was “power supply”. Yes, the camera’s power supply totally convinced me that I must have this piece of equipment. Another LOL appeared when I realized that a key feature was not listed: Full frame sensor. I reckon there are many people who bought the camera because it has an FX sensor (me for example).

Well, the survey continued forever with many many questions. What equipment I use, do I use it privately or professionally, which genres do I shoot, how do I share my images (what’s that got to do with the D800 ?) and so on. At the end you could give free comments (1000 characters only… :-(), and there I wrote that the megapixel-madness is too much for my taste. I requested they build a D800 with the D4 sensor, perhaps someone at Nikon hears my wish 🙂

To sum it up – It seems that Nikon is evaluating the reception of the camera with the customers, which is a pretty normal thing to do I suppose. I happily filled out the forms (I am German, filling out forms is in my blood !) and hope that the results will serve a higher purpose (D800 with a D4 sensor, you know)…