BillB said:
rjbray01 said:
So overall it looks to me like Canon are struggling from an engineering perspective ... and its just blind or naive optimism that their delivery of 2nd rate products is a bizarre but winning commercial strategy ...
So, Canon has accidentally stumbled on a winning strategy. If that works for you, cool. My take is that dual pixel has been Canon's leading technology for mirrorless and video, and they have been willing to accept the delays in getting serious mirrorless and video to market to wait on it. Now that dual pixel is in place, the next question is whether they will come up with the processing power to rock and roll. Maybe they will or maybe they won't, but we shall see. Don't see any point in guessing.
No, I don't think there is any accident to Canon's winning strategy. It was achieved though both engineering prowess and commercial nouse.
Great products don't come about by accident : they are the result of years of investment in R&D more often than stumbling across solutions.
Whilst I totally "get" the economics of stratification of the market, and that car companies for example don't fit all their top technology into every model, generally large corporations try to "cover" the market.
In this case Canon have found themselves with a huge gaping gap for some considerable period of time ... which doesn't add up commercially.
The dual pixel technology has no doubt served them well ... I have owned an 80D since it was first released and been delighted with it.
But that was a long time ago in terms of product innovation.
What I am suggesting is that a lack of engineering prowess in R&D which started a long time ago is now coming to bear.
Whilst we know that Magic Lantern have been able to eek-out extra features which Canon have decided to withhold for commercial reasons, there are other features which seem distinctly lacking.
Whilst its easy to argue Lens Stabilization over In Body stabilization in the DSLR world as the former has benefits in stabilizing the viewfinder image, the latter has greater benefits in the mirrorless world : not least of which in that it allows lenses to be simpler and hence cheaper and to achieve the sort of resolutions we are seeing from the Sigma Art primes.
My logic goes like this ... Canon had to fit IS to their recent EF 85mm f/1.4 prime because they had no IBIS. To sell at a decent profit margin they had to compromise image quality. Had they been able to dispense with the IS requirement then this might have allowed them to focus both their R&D and manufacturing costs exclusively on the IQ.
Selling cameras without IS may have a short-term gain of locking customers into buying Canon's lenses with IS, but in the long term we have seen what happens to companies who try to lock in their customer base : think IBM PC or Wang word processors ... few anti-competitive behaviours last forever, but make way for more open-minded competitors to enter the market (Compaq, Dell etc ..)
I find it extremely difficult to believe that Canon are deliberately manufacturing their best L primes to a lower standard than they are capable of for a given price point .. if they had IBIS then they could probably compete more effectively with Sigma et al
As you say, they may well have goodies in the pipeline. Or maybe not.
By the way, I've forgotten, is it still OK to speculate on CR or is this rumors site actually for hard facts only ?