Ah, the plot thickens, not even a day after Sigma’s CEO said a nothing burger, Canon’s Imaging Chief Executive, Mr. Tokura had other thoughts on the matter. At first, when I was writing this I was pretty excited and then after putting my own words around it to give it all to fine readers, I am left with more questions than answers. My Navi sat down with Canon’s Imaging Division Chief Executive Mr Tokura. With the interview by MyNavi, we can focus a bit on this from their article. When I asked these questions to Mr. Tokura, he immediately replied,…
Author: Richard
Laowa announced the 10mm F2.8 Zero-D FF that supports autofocus for the Sony and Nikon mounts, but not the L or RF mount. At 10mm though, I doubt you need autofocus that much, to be honest. We had previously told you this lens was coming, and now it’s officially out with some prices and timelines. Laowa states that they will start shipping this lens in a little over two weeks from this article around mid-March and ship according to the order number priority. The Canon RF lens is available for $799 (which is even better than we estimated) in either…
In news that I’m sure everyone here knows I’ll not like (but we won’t get into that today). Sigma seems to have stated that the plans for further RF development are quite a bit away. Sigma’s CEO, Mr Yamaki was talking to Mynavi News at CP+ and shared some information about the question that is on all our minds. When are we getting our dirty hands on some Sigma RF mount lenses? Mr Yamaki was vague in his response, as are most Japanese executives, in stating that there has been a lot of feedback from users requesting both RF and Z…
Outside of a few internet resources I can find little about this from actually Kase. I’m going to assume this isn’t generally available but was soft-announced during CP+ 2024, as Kase is there. Kase, who makes some pretty nice filters and sets seems to be setting their sights on lenses (like just about every other company dealing with cameras in China). This isn’t a bad thing, the more the merrier and competition is great. This lens may have limited appeal but it may be interesting for astrophotography as what normally a Catadioptric lens is used for. A toss in the bag…
Canon is showing off its mixed and virtual reality products this year at CP+ and making that a forefront of the show. DCWatch was able to talk to Tsuyoshi Tokura, the senior managing director of Canon’s imaging group, and asked him about Canon’s booth this year. Mr Tokura stated that he would like people to experience the world beyond 2D at this Canon booth. Canon displayed a mockup of APS-C stereoscopic lenses and a 3D 360 / 180-degree camera that appears to be more action camera-related. This was the same as they showed at CES 2024, so no surprises there.…
In this patent application (2024-023099) Canon describes quite a few different full-frame super ultra-wide zoom lenses. Now with Canon just having released the pretty incredible Canon RF 10-20mm f/4 L IS STM, this is probably some of Canon’s prior research that happened with that lens. Canon in their own patent-ish words; An object of the present invention is to provide a zoom lens that is small and has good optical characteristics, and an imaging device and an imaging system including the zoom lens. I think we all want that for every possible zoom lens, Canon. Now to the embodiments. Usually,…
Reading through this patent application (2024-022343) was a “huh, I never thought of that” moment. Canon in this patent is concerned that when some of its high-speed sensors go full out, they draw too much current from the battery causing the voltage to dip. If the voltage dips under certain amounts, there’s not enough voltage to power the voltage regulators for the electronics on board the camera. When that happens, undesirable effects such as freezing and general camera failure may occur. I can’t recall as much as I would like about overall battery performance. Still, at the 10,000-foot level, every…
In this patent application (2024-019961) Canon shows off a high-speed stacked sensor using three substrate layers. As you can imagine, sensor layers are like a house, the more floors you have the more flexibility you have, and the more room. However the cost of manufacturing a house with more and more floors increases as the time required increases, and it gets more expensive from the construction and engineering perspective. Sensors aren’t much different. The more substrates you stack, the greater the chance imperfections are ruining the sensor, the longer it takes to manufacture, and overall a dramatic increase to the…
CIPA recently released its final statistics for December, which allows us to now view 2023 in its entirety. For the most part, the industry has reached a state of equilibrium post-COVID-19. There are some interesting a notable trends though, so let’s dive a bit into the details and more importantly, the last 5 years. Looking at the CIPA numbers I think it’s safe to assume that the customers that disappeared during COVID simply are not coming back. It’s also the year that China has decided to be the top-placing region globally for mirrorless, having nearly 1.2 million units in 2023…
If you recall back in November, I talked about a sensor that Canon was going to show off at IEDM (International Electron Devices Meeting) in December, we haven’t heard much about that until now. When I talked about this twisted sensor back in November, my thoughts on it were that it was a quad-pixel arrangement to support better AF in horizontal and vertical directions. You may tell me, Richard, the title is clickbait. Well, perhaps. New information has recently surfaced about Canon’s presentation and reading the sensor descriptions in the two articles, this is very much an “I don’t know what…