The dirt was a reference to Gladiator. Canon had better not loose the FF Mirrorless fight with Sony.
Understood
If enough press follows AP's lead will Canon continue developing these expensive L lenses? That is my concern.
They unquestionably will. Photo journalism - and the equipment decisions that news agencies make - are
not significant influencers across the photography market at large.
Simply put, many (most?) people will pay no mind to what AP has done here.
To make this point clear: do you know which cameras Reuters uses? Or Bloomberg? Or United Press International?
And so on.
Most people neither know nor care about them, and that applies just as much to AP. They
were using Canon previously - and most people will have been utterly disinterested in that fact, too.
For further context: I found this interview with AP's Director of Photography "interesting" because of how
uninteresting it was:
We spoke to AP's Director of Photography J. David Ake about why the agency has decided to switch to Sony cameras, and what it means for AP staff photographers and videographers.
www.dpreview.com
This is the most interesting part for me:
Up to now, has AP been using a mixture of different platforms, from different manufacturers?
Yes, we have. We used one manufacturer for stills, and a different manufacturer for video. And we’ve been happy with those brands, we’ve used them for years, and they’ve supported us with their equipment. It was really the thought that we wanted to go mirrorless that took us down this path, and then we found that the synergy between video and stills could be really good, and Sony could support both of those at the level that we needed
Clearly Sony got the gig (ignoring the likely financial incentives that will have sweetened the deal for AP) because - at the time it was signed off on - Sony happened to align best with an idea that AP had that it would be a good idea to have equipment uniformity across its stills and video teams, at a time when mirrorless was a draw too.
Not because Sony kit is intrinsically better. AP is clearly being very careful not to suggest that.
As the article also says:
The AP has been thinking about switching to mirrorless on the stills side for a couple of years
If that's also when they started talking seriously to Sony - and these things do take time - I can understand AP's decision, because at the time Sony probably was the obvious choice to satisfy AP's aspirations.
But none this says anything about any inherent superiority in Sony equipment that will drive people away from Canon.
Despite the spin that DPR editor and Sony shill Barnaby Britton - "unbiased DPR" my arse - has tried to put on it when he says this:
it's hard to overstate the PR value for any brand of having its cameras and lenses appear in the hands of pros on the sidelines at events like The Olympic Games, watched by millions of people all over the world.
I'll bet that
nobody ever bought into a camera system simply because they saw it being used at a sporting event on TV..!
Meanwhile:
Roger Cicala is back at it again, measuring flange-back distances of Lensrentals' fleet of stills cameras this time. But he wasn't expecting to find this...
www.dpreview.com