Is Pixel-Shift coming to the Canon EOS R5?

Michael Clark

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I doubt very much that Canon would introduce pixel-shift only for the R5. My guess is that pixel-shift capability is very much in their software development roadmap. As such, introducing it in R5 would be likely an incremental cost rather than an all-hands-on-deck, high-cost effort to make it work only for the R5. Besides, adding it to the R5 would allow Canon to do an extensive field test of the software before it becomes a mainstay for their higher end cameras (or hopefully, for all bodies with IBIS).

The work has to be done, regardless.
The cost of that work is significantly more than ZERO, which is what the comment to which I responded stated unequivocally in no uncertain terms.
 
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Michael Clark

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Those costs are built-in from the outset.
You pay NOTHING extra for firmware updates, after having bought the camera!
When was the last time you were charged an additional fee to download/install a firmware update?

I didn't buy it, but many paid $100 for Canon Clog to be added to the 5D Mark IV.

Ditto for the memo note feature a few years earlier.
 
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Michael Clark

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Those costs are built-in from the outset.
You pay NOTHING extra for firmware updates, after having bought the camera!
When was the last time you were charged an additional fee to download/install a firmware update?

I'm not talking about the cost to a consumer who has already bought a product.

I'm talking about the cost to Canon that will be absorbed by either:

A reduction in profits

or

An increase in the price of products sold with the technology

or

A combination of both of the above
 
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entoman

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I didn't buy it, but many paid $100 for Canon Clog to be added to the 5D Mark IV.

Ditto for the memo note feature a few years earlier.
Ah yes, but the C'Log update wasn't strictly a firmware update. It couldn't be performed by users.

The 5DMkiv had to be sent to a Canon service centre (presumably either to gain direct access to a component, or to change/add a component).

... and it seems very reasonable for Canon to charge USD 100 to cover admin, servicing and return postage charges.

FWIW, I didn't buy the upgrade either.
 
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entoman

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I'm not talking about the cost to a consumer who has already bought a product.
I'm talking about the cost to Canon that will be absorbed by either:
A reduction in profits
or
An increase in the price of products sold with the technology
or
A combination of both of the above
Well yes of course, the cost of firmware development and production is built-in to the original purchase price. But regardless of whether a camera has one update or twenty of them, there is no *additional* charge, so to all intents and purposes it is "free".
 
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Michael Clark

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Ah yes, but the C'Log update wasn't strictly a firmware update. It couldn't be performed by users.

The 5DMkiv had to be sent to a Canon service centre (presumably either to gain direct access to a component, or to change/add a component).

... and it seems very reasonable for Canon to charge USD 100 to cover admin, servicing and return postage charges.

FWIW, I didn't buy the upgrade either.

It was a firmware/software only update that required software tools that Canon didn't want to release into the wild, because it accessed areas of memory that they do not want consumers to have access to alter. Canon explicitly said that there was no hardware modification involved for either one.

That is no different from corporate policies requiring a member of the IT staff to physically access your work computer to do certain operations so that the non-IT employees do not learn the passwords needed to gain Administrative privileges to the machine and alter specific areas of the registry, BIOS, or root structure. If Canon had released the functionality in a firmware update, the whole world would have the needed code to access areas that Canon doesn't want anyone else to be able to access.
 
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Michael Clark

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Well yes of course, the cost of firmware development and production is built-in to the original purchase price. But regardless of whether a camera has one update or twenty of them, there is no *additional* charge, so to all intents and purposes it is "free".

It's not 'free' to Canon. They have to spend more money to implement it than if they do not implement it. No future expenditure is "built in" to the original purchase price unless the terms of purchase contractually obligate a future action.
 
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Well yes of course, the cost of firmware development and production is built-in to the original purchase price. But regardless of whether a camera has one update or twenty of them, there is no *additional* charge, so to all intents and purposes it is "free".
The cost of the initial firmware and initial upgrades for features that couldn't be implemented for pre-orders would be estimated but not known exactly prior to launch. Development of SW can be notoriously difficult to forecast. Bug fixes/phenomenon would allocated resources based on previously released cameras but the advent of video/hybrid means that this is higher than cameras with only stills.... just more code to manage overall.

Any new features in firmware post-production will be at an incremental cost to Canon. We will never know if the features added to the R5 post-release were originally budgeted for or not. The new features being released for the R5 now instead of with the R5ii may have borrowed budget from the R5ii release.

Definitely not free.
 
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entoman

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The cost of the initial firmware and initial upgrades for features that couldn't be implemented for pre-orders would be estimated but not known exactly prior to launch. Development of SW can be notoriously difficult to forecast. Bug fixes/phenomenon would allocated resources based on previously released cameras but the advent of video/hybrid means that this is higher than cameras with only stills.... just more code to manage overall.

Any new features in firmware post-production will be at an incremental cost to Canon. We will never know if the features added to the R5 post-release were originally budgeted for or not. The new features being released for the R5 now instead of with the R5ii may have borrowed budget from the R5ii release.

Definitely not free.
Depends on your definition of free. Everything you buy has "extra" costs built in, many of which aren't immediately obvious to the consumer. Seems like I'm banging my head against a wall here, but as far as I'm concerned, the money I pay is for the camera and original firmware, plus any necessary bug fixes that may follow later. But extra *features* such as pixel-shift, are a different matter entirely, because I'm getting a "bonus" that I'd never expected, and I don't have to pay more to get it. If you and others feel differently, that's fine, we can agree to differ.
 
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Depends on your definition of free. Everything you buy has "extra" costs built in, many of which aren't immediately obvious to the consumer. Seems like I'm banging my head against a wall here, but as far as I'm concerned, the money I pay is for the camera and original firmware, plus any necessary bug fixes that may follow later. But extra *features* such as pixel-shift, are a different matter entirely, because I'm getting a "bonus" that I'd never expected, and I don't have to pay more to get it. If you and others feel differently, that's fine, we can agree to differ.
I agree that it is a free bonus for users for which I am grateful for of course. There is a cost though.

Apple started to break the model when iOS updates were free (bug fixes and new features) and were downloaded in real time to existing phones. They could do that because they owned the ecosystem. The tricky thing is how to sell new phones when it works the same as your previous one except maybe faster with better cameras/face ID etc.
Android updates were constrained by OEMs needing to test on their existing phones but would prefer to sell a new phone with the new features.

Moving to subscription models (Adobe, cars, Amazon Prime for movie content bundled with freight etc) is encouraging OEMs to add features over time paid by the subscription cost.
Convincing users to fork out a small monthly fee adds up a lot and evens out cash flow.
Costco's biggest revenue earner is their annual fee and it is 100% profit.
 
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But extra *features* such as pixel-shift, are a different matter entirely, because I'm getting a "bonus" that I'd never expected, and I don't have to pay more to get it.
Let's put it this way:

It's not free to Canon. So, it is going to be funded from some Canon income. There are two most obvious potential sources for that income:

1. It is already included into the price of the camera body.

2. It will be included in the prices of the lenses that you would want to buy in order to maximize the utility of this feature to you.

In the latter case, it is possible that the individual prices of these lenses don't need to be raised, as the development of the feature could be paid up from the increased sales volumes.
 
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Michael Clark

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Depends on your definition of free. Everything you buy has "extra" costs built in, many of which aren't immediately obvious to the consumer. Seems like I'm banging my head against a wall here, but as far as I'm concerned, the money I pay is for the camera and original firmware, plus any necessary bug fixes that may follow later. But extra *features* such as pixel-shift, are a different matter entirely, because I'm getting a "bonus" that I'd never expected, and I don't have to pay more to get it. If you and others feel differently, that's fine, we can agree to differ.

What we're banging our head against the wall for is your apparent inability to conceive that just because it is "free" to you does not mean it is "free" to Canon.

You seem to assume the stockholders will gladly accept the full additional cost to Canon as a reduction in profits. But that's not how stockhoders and the boards they elect think. Rather, they will try to recover most, if not all, of that cost by raising the prices of subsequent products. Some of those products may be ones you wish to purchase in the future.

It's no different than when governments raise corporate taxes on manufacturers and the taxpayers/consumers think it doesn't affect their own bottom line because it's the company being taxed, not the taxpayer/consumer. But the company is almost always going to pass that increased cost on to the consumer in the form of higher prices, especially if all of their competitors are also paying the higher tax rates as well.
 
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HMC11

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What we're banging our head against the wall for is your apparent inability to conceive that just because it is "free" to you does not mean it is "free" to Canon.

You seem to assume the stockholders will gladly accept the full additional cost to Canon as a reduction in profits. But that's not how stockhoders and the boards they elect think. Rather, they will try to recover most, if not all, of that cost by raising the prices of subsequent products. Some of those products may be ones you wish to purchase in the future.

It's no different than when governments raise corporate taxes on manufacturers and the taxpayers/consumers think it doesn't affect their own bottom line because it's the company being taxed, not the taxpayer/consumer. But the company is almost always going to pass that increased cost on to the consumer in the form of higher prices, especially if all of their competitors are also paying the higher tax rates as well.
I thought the debate was not about whether there is a cost but the size of the cost? I don't know if additional budget is required to develop this feature (and, if so, how large) or whether it is a 'sunk' cost in the sense that the salary/cost of the software developer/enginner are already part of the overheads. If it is more the latter or that the additional budget is not large, then divided by the number of cameras it goes into, the cost could well be incremental (as David-Sydney seems to think so as well) rather than sizeable, So yes, there is a cost which I believe we already agreed on, but it is likely to be small enough (per unit of camera) that Canon does not feel it worth their while to antagonise customers by charging for it. It is also a good move to gain goodwill. They are probably much more creative in recouping what they spend in other ways.
 
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koenkooi

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I thought the debate was not about whether there is a cost but the size of the cost? I don't know if additional budget is required to develop this feature (and, if so, how large) or whether it is a 'sunk' cost in the sense that the salary/cost of the software developer/enginner are already part of the overheads. If it is more the former or that the additional budget is not large, then divided by the number of cameras it goes into, the cost could will well be incremental (as David-Sydney seems to think so as well) rather than sizeable, So yes, there is a cost which I believe we already agreed on, but it is likely to be small enough (per unit of camera) that Canon does not feel it worth their while to antagonise customers by charging for it. It is also a good move to gain goodwill. They are probably much more creative in recouping what they spend in other ways.
Don't forget there's also a cost in work-hours. Telling the firmware team "This pixel-shift thing you did for the R1 is nice. Stop working on R1 things and make it work on the R5!" won't change the salary overhead, but it does push R1 development back a few weeks.
In interviews Canon has always implied that their single firmware team is small and only works on a single project at a time, like their lens team. If we take that at face value, it explains the seemingly haphazard way firmware updates get done.
 
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entoman

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What we're banging our head against the wall for is your apparent inability to conceive that just because it is "free" to you does not mean it is "free" to Canon.

You seem to assume the stockholders will gladly accept the full additional cost to Canon as a reduction in profits. But that's not how stockhoders and the boards they elect think. Rather, they will try to recover most, if not all, of that cost by raising the prices of subsequent products. Some of those products may be ones you wish to purchase in the future.

It's no different than when governments raise corporate taxes on manufacturers and the taxpayers/consumers think it doesn't affect their own bottom line because it's the company being taxed, not the taxpayer/consumer. But the company is almost always going to pass that increased cost on to the consumer in the form of higher prices, especially if all of their competitors are also paying the higher tax rates as well.
I'll leave you to argue amongst yourselves on this one. Have fun.
 
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