Remember that the RP camera is a great value, but it is nerfed in a few ways. I own three of them for remote wildlife placements. Canon opted to not allow a silent shutter (my biggest frustration); used the old Rebel menu format for customizing settings; employs a sensor that was considered the weak point of the camera in which it was first introduced years prior; and a few other software choices that didn't have anything to do with expense. Again, it's still a great value at 40 percent the cost of the R6.I strongly suspect that better framerates and improved eye-AF come for free with a more modern sensor. Everything seems to point to the slow sensor readout being the bottleneck on the RP.
I sold my RP to get an R5, but I'd love to have something that size next to my R5 again. Just replacing the 6DII sensor with the R6 sensor would improve it a lot. When I compared the dragonfly photos I took with an RP and 1DXIII side by side, the 1DXIII pictures were all more detailed, despite having less megapixels.
Using a full frame sensor that has 2014 full frame quality gives it very roughly the image quality of a current APS-C sensor, yet doesn't require Canon to spend gajillions retooling factories and designing an entirely new set of lenses, thus dividing its economies of scale. So it kind of makes sense to not do APS-C at all. It used to be a big cost difference in sensor production, but that is lessened now due to a much lower percentage of wafers being ruined during production.
So I'm skeptical that the APS-C development work is for the sorts of cameras people on this forum would use. I could see them making a crop sensor version of their Vixia video cameras, whose updates have been pretty lame for the last few years, or definitely some of their security cameras. That all makes sense.
Upvote
0