What do senior Canon product planners think of DSLR video?
EOSHD.com has rounded up a ‘state of the union’ collection of the latest Canon quotes, from the people who make big decisions. These guys decide company strategy and channel customer requests from key markets like the USA to Research & Development back in Japan. Like a true democracy, Canon say that what happens next will depend on what customers ask for.
And it seems most want the DSLR video revolution to keep on going.
Tsunemasa Ohara (above), Senior General Manager of Canon’s Camera R&D centre on Micro 4/3rds and mirrorless cameras –
We think this mirrorless type of camera – SLRs, DSC and other systems in this area – will expand the total camera market. That’s our current opinion.
EOSHD: Canon see it as growth market, which means they will almost certainly enter it.
Tim Smith – did the DSLR video revolution catch Canon by surprise?
Yes. We’ve learnt a lot from what people want and need, and we’ll respond… it has also made us think differently [about the video cameras we make]. Are we looking at doing a video camera with a big chip in it? It’s certainly coming up a lot, we’re having our planning meetings…it will appear…we just need to figure out where we stand in all of this [market post DSLR video]… we will pull all this together eventually.
Tim Smith – will Canon have raw or uncompressed live HDMI out on future DSLRS?
The best way to make this happen is [for customers]to keep pushing us.
Chuck Westfall, on extended manual video controls in the 5D Mark II –
One of the issues is that adding the full range of manual controls on this camera makes it a much more complicated instrument. It’s not necessarily that we’re never going to do it, but it’s generation 1.0. We’d like to get some market feedback, which we’ve already received now, before we start making any serious changes to the overall feature set or design.
EOSHD: Canon added manual controls via a firmware update, but it is clear Canon see a need for balancing complexity with familiarity when it comes to the camera body itself.
Chuck Westfall, when asked whether video is going to be standard in every future DSLR?
We don’t want to guarantee. It is going to depend on the overall market strategy. But at this stage, the image processors we’re using, especially the DIGIC 4, are powerful enough that it really makes it very easy for us to add that feature without increasing the cost.
EOSHD: HD video costs nothing extra in the current hardware to implement.
So the overriding message of what Canon’s guys say here is that product strategy is in the palm of our hands, so lets speak up.
On that surprising cost admission by Chuck Westfall above, well – it should not be taken literally, because the stills side of the camera – sensor, image processor costs a LOT to develop. It is just that it has made a ‘free’ add-on video camera possible. The results are not too bad from a ‘free’ video camera, either.
I think dedicated video mode development in DSLRs will cost much more for Canon to implement in the future. They will need to keep pushing the codec further, and this requires firmware developments as well as better hardware. It is rumoured that DIGIC 5 will be based around a video core, not a stills orientated one. Video requires greater horse power, and stills processing can fit around that. But customers want this, and so Canon will do it.
Right now, HD video on stills cameras has come about partly due to the buzz from customers over HD and partly because it was a relatively cheap and easy feature to add. The CMOS sensors were getting quicker to support better continuous stills shooting rates and the mobile CPU hardware was speeding up as inevitable under Moore’s Law.
The next step from Canon may be very important in determining how they fair – not just in the existing photographic market – but in a whole new one built up around DSLR video and their position in the video camera market. DSLR technology will have a greater and greater role to play in stand-alone video cameras, the beginnings of which we are seeing right now with the Panasonic AF100.
Sources:
http://www.cinema5d.com/news/?p=3176
[url]http://www.photoradar.com/news/story/canon-eos-1d-mark-iv-interview
[url]http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-10213645-39.html
