This is the Canon RF lens roadmap

[Rivermist]

I still clearly remember when the only competing formats were 8-tracks and cassettes for audio, and VHS and Beta for video. File formats have taken things to a new, nearly incomprehensible level for most people.

Yes, agreed. For our use as photographers one has to admit that JPEG has been a strong standard and remains relavant for 80% of image consumption. The pity is that JPEG 2000 that was meant to address among other things the need for something better than 8 bits per color channel never caught on. Was it simply too far ahead of its time (digital cameras in 2000 were seldom much better than 8 bits)? If there is consensus that Apple's HEIC - HEIF is the way to go, how long will it take to sort out filename extensions and other minutiae to make it a truly universal standard used across all operating systems, photo software, browsers, etc..?

 

[Exploreshootshare]

Any news about the once rumored

RF 14-28mm F2 and

RF 70-135mm F2?

I'd be in the market for one of these lenses, probably the RF 14-28mm but I'm doubting its actual release more and more...

An F2 trinity would be so amazing! (I'd still only get one out three)

 

[unfocused]

Any news about the once rumored

RF 14-28mm F2 and

RF 70-135mm F2?

I'd be in the market for one of these lenses, probably the RF 14-28mm but I'm doubting its actual release more and more...

An F2 trinity would be so amazing! (I'd still only get one out three)

I don't see either of those lenses on Craig's roadmap. Am I missing something?

 

[Rivermist]

I don't see either of those lenses on Craig's roadmap. Am I missing something?

I definitely recall mentions of the 70-135 f:2, I too would have loved that as a replacement for heavy primes (85, 100, 135) and more versatile in a context of e.g. live music locales. I have since given up (for now) on expensive IBIS cameras and got the 70-200 f:4 lens for compactness and light weight and IS.
The 14-28 sounds attractive, it may have been mentioned but less than the 70-135. The 10-24 is on the list now, not an f:2 of course.
If anyone at Canon is listening, after filling a few obvious gaps for pros (wide angle primes and maybe a TS lens) they should prioritize a mid-range selection of L-grade primes, e.g. 24 1.8, 50 1.4, 85 1.4, 135 2.5 that are excellent optically but not as heavy and bulky as the current super-premium all-1.2 primes costing north of $2,000 each without IS

 

[Exploreshootshare]

I don't see either of those lenses on Craig's roadmap. Am I missing something?

No, you're not missing anything. The RF 14-28mm F2 is just a rumored lense and not on Craigs roadmap. Since Canon execs stated after the release of the 28-70mm F2 that they are considering/ planning more F2 zoom lenses and there are patents for it, I figured it might be about time now. The release of the first f2 zoom dates back over three years and would be great to see another one.

Craig posted the patent back in October 2019:

https://www.canonrumors.com/patent-canon-rf-10-24mm-f-4-and-canon-rf-14-28-f-2-0/

I just thought I asked if somebody had heard anything else, since don't have to the time to follow multiple camera forums.

 

[Blue Zurich]

I look forward to any updates on the rumored the 10-24 f/4L

Peace

 

[SonicStudios]

Not sure, but I think I saw something today that Canon maybe retiring the EF 300 2.8 prime, Maybe something is soon on the horizon for an RF replacement.

 

[Fredster]

What a shame throughout the years I purchased a great deal of Lenses there is no way I can start all over again sell my Lenses and buy all new R. Lenses. Life is too short. I did purchase four or five R Lenses maybe a few more.

 

[asingleredcactus@h]

Ah, yes, I see that. Full disclosure although I pay $10/month to the Adobe empire for PhotoShop and assorted other photo software, I am not a huge fan, and what you have found there is one such reason. A responsible company, seeing the #1 digital camera company adopting a new format for its flagship bodies would work tirelessly at supporting this format, since one can infer that it is mainly professional photographers who have access to these cameras. Why you would support folks using cell phones (yes, I know, some forms of pro imagery use them too) but snub people spending north of $6,000 on the camera alone is baffling to me. I use ON-1 Photo RAW for my RAW and JPG general photo sorting, editing and converting (RAW to JPG), the documentation for ON-1 Photo RAW 2022.1 (December 2021) adds the R3, with only a proviso that the sRAW and mRAW file formats are not fully supported (no access to the "tier 1" engine). In the supported formatted it lists "Apple HEIC" but this does not tell me whether this means "HEIC files as defined by Apple" or "Only HEIC files produced by Apple devices", and I do not have a Canon body that does HEIC so I can't check this feature.

The reason is simple, HEIC/HEIF is owned by Apple, naturally Apple wants THEIR files editable in Photoshop.. The fact that Canon put it in their cameras is just them falling for Apple's trick in trying to get HEIF to be the mainstream replacement for JPG. Probably because some genius decided hey, imagine if we could charge licensing fees for every JPG on earth by replacing JPG with our own made up format!! Wow!! We're gonna be rich!

BTW, most file formats shouldn't even be patentable, they're literally all the same damn thing! They hold RGB data!! What is the damn difference?? TIFF, PNG, HEIF, JPG, all RGB data format. Transparency? It's like patenting a spreadsheet layout. Can you patent your excel spreadsheets? Lets all send our spreadsheets to the patent office and sue anyone who uses our layouts. Sounds like a great idea...

 

[usern4cr]

The reason is simple, HEIC/HEIF is owned by Apple, naturally Apple wants THEIR files editable in Photoshop.. The fact that Canon put it in their cameras is just them falling for Apple's trick in trying to get HEIF to be the mainstream replacement for JPG. Probably because some genius decided hey, imagine if we could charge licensing fees for every JPG on earth by replacing JPG with our own made up format!! Wow!! We're gonna be rich!

BTW, most file formats shouldn't even be patentable, they're literally all the same damn thing! They hold RGB data!! What is the damn difference?? TIFF, PNG, HEIF, JPG, all RGB data format. Transparency? It's like patenting a spreadsheet layout. Can you patent your excel spreadsheets? Lets all send our spreadsheets to the patent office and sue anyone who uses our layouts. Sounds like a great idea...

I take photos in raw format only. I wish DXO PhotoLab would have the option to export files in HEIC/HEIF format as I am tired of exporting, storing and sharing jpg files as they are lower quality and take up more storage than the HEIC/HEIF files would. As sensor resolutions increase through the roof, and the ease of digital photography helps create tens to hundreds of thousands of photos for me, it is more urgent than ever for *any* file format to replace jpg files in the future.

 

[asingleredcactus@h]

I take photos in raw format only. I wish DXO PhotoLab would have the option to export files in HEIC/HEIF format as I am tired of exporting, storing and sharing jpg files as they are lower quality and take up more storage than the HEIC/HEIF files would. As sensor resolutions increase through the roof, and the ease of digital photography helps create tens to hundreds of thousands of photos for me, it is more urgent than ever for *any* file format to replace jpg files in the future.

You can already do that using JPG2000. BTW, show me a comparison where HEIF actually looks better than JPG and is still lower weight. I haven't seen one. For all the claims about formats like WEBP and HEIF they actually seem to be worse than JPG. It's probably shocking to people who don't understand what a bunch of scammers these silicon valley types are.

 

[Rivermist]

You can already do that using JPG2000. BTW, show me a comparison where HEIF actually looks better than JPG and is still lower weight. I haven't seen one. For all the claims about formats like WEBP and HEIF they actually seem to be worse than JPG. It's probably shocking to people who don't understand what a bunch of scammers these silicon valley types are.

There is a reason why a standard is adopted, or not. JPG prevailed because the industry converged on a single 8-bit format, with variable compression, and more than enough for the sensors, screens and most printing systems. JPEG2000 suffered from excessive customization possibilities, 1 to 39 bits per channel, different color encodings, and to the best of my knowledge camera manufacturers never got together to standardize to a specific set of specifications such that any application can read all JPG2000 files from any origin, the way they can with JPG.
Some (me) use RAW as an insurance policy, allowing for exposure correction, color balance, shadows or brights assimilation, etc, but from there we produce jpgs to print of share with others, and now that 10-bit monitors and other facilities are there is makes sense to look for something new. Apple does not create standards if there is a competent one out there, they went along with MP3 until it was no longer satisfactory, now you will find most A/D D/A converters supporting Apple Lossless Audio Codec, which is license- and royalty-free under the Apache 2.0 licensing scheme. For photography Apple adopted HEIF, a format defined by Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) (ISO/IEC 23008-12), and made it popular by integrating it with the iPhone, iOS and MacOS. So it is not really an Apple standard so much as a standard that was dormant until a very influential company adopted it. Canon are smart to follow that trend.
I am interested in HEIF, even if I do not have (yet) a 10 bit monitor, because I would be able to take images from the camera with the possibility to correct + - 1 EV the luminosity, so I may not need to swamp my disk drives with RAW files quite so much.

 

[Dragon]

There is a reason why a standard is adopted, or not. JPG prevailed because the industry converged on a single 8-bit format, with variable compression, and more than enough for the sensors, screens and most printing systems. JPEG2000 suffered from excessive customization possibilities, 1 to 39 bits per channel, different color encodings, and to the best of my knowledge camera manufacturers never got together to standardize to a specific set of specifications such that any application can read all JPG2000 files from any origin, the way they can with JPG.
Some (me) use RAW as an insurance policy, allowing for exposure correction, color balance, shadows or brights assimilation, etc, but from there we produce jpgs to print of share with others, and now that 10-bit monitors and other facilities are there is makes sense to look for something new. Apple does not create standards if there is a competent one out there, they went along with MP3 until it was no longer satisfactory, now you will find most A/D D/A converters supporting Apple Lossless Audio Codec, which is license- and royalty-free under the Apache 2.0 licensing scheme. For photography Apple adopted HEIF, a format defined by Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) (ISO/IEC 23008-12), and made it popular by integrating it with the iPhone, iOS and MacOS. So it is not really an Apple standard so much as a standard that was dormant until a very influential company adopted it. Canon are smart to follow that trend.
I am interested in HEIF, even if I do not have (yet) a 10 bit monitor, because I would be able to take images from the camera with the possibility to correct + - 1 EV the luminosity, so I may not need to swamp my disk drives with RAW files quite so much.

Actually, the standards that tend to get the widest adoption are the ones that have no royalty attached and don't have multiple players trying to extort money out of anybody they can. JPEG had its trials with patent claims, but they came late in the game and were all shot down. Most of the stuff out of the MPEG committee has been very problematic with respect to patent claims and the MPEG video standard only took off after a central licensing administrator was set up to standardize the process. HEIC definitely has a license requirement because you have to activate it to make Canon DPP read the files (not to mention that some AV software sees it as a root kit). Another alternative that may well win the game is JPEG XL https://jpeg.org/jpegxl/index.html . It has similar efficiency to HEIC along with some other neat tricks and also lossless compression mode that many would find interesting.

 

[Rivermist]

Actually, the standards that tend to get the widest adoption are the ones that have no royalty attached and don't have multiple players trying to extort money out of anybody they can. JPEG had its trials with patent claims, but they came late in the game and were all shot down. Most of the stuff out of the MPEG committee has been very problematic with respect to patent claims and the MPEG video standard only took off after a central licensing administrator was set up to standardize the process. HEIC definitely has a license requirement because you have to activate it to make Canon DPP read the files (not to mention that some AV software sees it as a root kit). Another alternative that may well win the game is JPEG XL https://jpeg.org/jpegxl/index.html . It has similar efficiency to HEIC along with some other neat tricks and also lossless compression mode that many would find interesting.

I worked for 4 years in an industry consortium developing data standards for oil & gas data, our standards had no licensing or royalty fees but they did have a license to which companies that used them had to subscribe, essentially committing to certain terms and conditions when using the intellectual property, but the consortium never solicited any payments. A company building products that used the standards could of course charge for the licensing of their software.
HEIC is free on iOS, MacOS, Windows 10, some Android, etc. There seem to be license fees for some derivatives, e.g. the HEVC video extensions on Windows.
Ultimately a standard "wins" when its adoption is transparent to end-users and it is supported by all the major players in the workflow, in the case of photography camera manufacturers, operating systems of the computers on which pictures are stored, the major software vendors of photographic software and the display systems. HEIC seems to be reaching the tipping point at all steps of the workflow except web browsers. As we learnt with examples such as Betamax versus VHS, it is not always technical merit alone that creates the winners, it is the de facto adoption that matters.

 

[dolina]

The 80-100% of the 1st 3 years of RF lens SKUs are the highest volume EF lens SKUs.

No big surprise that these staples came out within the 1st 6 months of the RF system

• Canon RF 15-35mm F2.8L IS USM
• Canon RF 24-70mm F2.8L IS USM
• Canon RF 70-200mm F2.8L IS USM

For a lead on what to expect within the next 4 years only look at the now discontinued and currently selling EF lenses.

 

[meltemi]

I cannot understand, why the
Canon RF 100-500mm f/4.5-7.1 L IS USM (first official information February 12, 2020)
is still missing in the Canon RF Lens Roadmap after more than two years.

 

[Dragon]

I cannot understand, why the
Canon RF 100-500mm f/4.5-7.1 L IS USM (first official information February 12, 2020)
is still missing in the Canon RF Lens Roadmap after more than two years.

I think it was already in the catalog when the roadmap was first generated. None of the earlier lenses are in the roadmap.

 

[meltemi]

I think it was already in the catalog when the roadmap was first generated. None of the earlier lenses are in the roadmap.

I'd wish to have a complete list of RF lenses in the roadmap.

 

[Dragon]

I'd wish to have a complete list of RF lenses in the roadmap.

A roadmap is a prediction of the future. To see what is as well as what might be, you need to concatenate the roadmap with the catalog.

 

[neuroanatomist]

A roadmap is a prediction of the future. To see what is as well as what might be, you need to concatenate the roadmap with the catalog.

I don’t know. The Thomas Guides that I used to use before Google Maps was a thing which showed me where I was going but also where I had been.

Semantics aside, it’s pretty clear that CR guy started the roadmap page at some point, and lenses that existed before he started it were not ever added retroactively. He’s probably missing out on a small amount of affiliate link revenue from that oversight, but it’s his call to make