A Canon conspiracy?

Chelsea and Tony did a little video debating a Canon conspiracy.  Essentially is that Canon is deliberately holding back technology to deliver a shock and awe release of a fantastic new full frame mirrorless.

It's an interesting argument, however, the answer is most likely in the middle.  People tend to forget, and it's easy to do; that for all purposes Canon has been prototyping and developing mirrorless technology since it put live view on the 1D Mark III and the Canon 40D.  Canon has progressed with contrast detect systems, multiple versions of a hybrid AF sensor to finally dual pixel AF sensors in their DSLR's. The EOS-M line has pretty well been lock-step with those technologies.   I don't think personally that Canon is looking at creating the best mirrorless full frame camera released with its first release but will hold true to the things that we enjoy about Canon. The features will work, colors will be great, and the ergonomics will be what we expect them to be.

Conversely, some aspects of the holding back are going to be true, for simply logistics.  From Canon's whitepapers we know that high end cameras take around 3 years of development before they are released to you and I as products.  If Canon is busy working away on a new system in secret, it will have certainly taken up resources over the past 3 or more years for an entire system to be created.

Canon is clearly by all the patent applications we uncover working on technologies that are used in high end camera systems and can make the entire canon ecosystem clearly better.  Stacked BSI sensors have been identified in patent applications, and canon has applied for a significant number of stacked sensor patents over the past 6 months for it to be simply curiosity and defensive patents.  Could Canon release a full frame mirrorless camera with oversampled 4K, the best dual pixel or even quad pixel auto focus with a stacked sensor that offloads all the AF calculations for blazingly fast AF?  Yes, it's certainly possible.  What's unknown is can they do it right now.

The EOS-M50 has shown signs of progression with an even faster DIGIC, and one that supports internally 4K at a h.264 code recording level. However, it didn't show a 4K video system capable of taking on its competitors, the m43's and Sony A6xxx series camera bodies.  Canon identifiably has some work to do to catch up to the market leaders in terms of video in an ILC form, clearly around 1-3 generations of processors behind the competition in this regard, and even behind Nikon.  Does the DIGIC 8 have enough secret sauce inside of it to do a good h.264 4K? Quite possibly, it already has a higher bitrate than most, coming in at 120Mb/s.  What we don’t know is if Canon will be constrained in its first generation to a crop factor and lacking dual pixel auto focus or were they artificially limited by the cost and market with the EOS M50.  Anything is possible here until we see the first prosumer version of a DIGIC 8 camera.

Only time will tell how close to the mark Chelsea or Tony are to reality, however, it’s an excellent food for thought video, but one that should be taken with some grains of salt.