Interesting interview from a Canon Russia marketing head

There is an interesting review starting to filter around the internet, and it's certainly compelling to take large conclusions from this interview.  But my first thought is that someone that is a what seems to be a marketing department head, isn't going to know the technical reasons why Canon does or doesn't do something.  This interview sounds more like an opinion piece than fact.

The most interesting question and answer has to be this one that I'm sure many will pick up (machine translated);

People who criticize Canon are divided into two types. The first does not like the skinton, form factor or some particular points. The second - do not digest the marketing policy of the company. Why, for example, in one of the new C anon cameras - neither in the flagship, nor the middle or entry level, is it not possible to record 4K video without a crop? The company is technologically unable to carry out this task?

- We did not set such a function intentionally. We have a series of Cinema EOS - movie cameras. Canon separates EOS R and Cinema EOS from each other. This series is aimed at shooting professional video. Camera Canon C700 - there certainly is 4K from the whole frame.

We can put 4K from a full frame in the SLR and mirrorless, but we do not want to "cannibalize" our own video segment.

Many have suggested this, however, logic would also indicate, that yes, the C700 does offer full frame video as one of its sensor options.  But let's consider a few of the facts about the C700;

• It's air vented and cooled to allow waste heat to escape from the video camera
• It required triple DIGIC DV 5 (the video side's equivalent of the stills cameras DIGIC processors)
• It's 167.6mm x 154.9mm x 327.7mm and weighs in at 3.4kg
• It was released pretty recently, March 2018

There's about as much in common with a $33,000 video camera and a $2500 stills camera than a high-performance F1 racing car, and your neighbor's Kia.  As a matter of fact, offering full frame for video so uncommon that not any of Canon's other Cinema EOS cameras offer full-frame sensors, but the Super 35 sized sensors.  Just by the sheer number of processors, and the bulk of this camera, it's pretty obvious that you simply cannot take this Canon technology and easily fit it into a mirrorless camera that is smaller, lighter, and completely sealed in terms of expelling waste heat.  The later is very important, and Canon has mentioned it more than once, that the difficulty in taking video features from the Cinema EOS lineup is what do you do with the waste heat.

Is Canon behind, yes.  I assume that this manager just didn't want to admit that Canon is behind in technology.  They are.  Others have processors that run in sealed camera bodies that can take oversampled video by reducing the size of each frame in software down to 4K video.  These companies also use the full sensor width for their video.  Nikon and Sony also offer high FPS with 42MP of sensor size (9 fps and 10 fps respectively) while Canon will struggle with accomplishing that even with using two DIGIC processors.

Why is the matrix stabilization not developed yet?

- We already have three patents on IBIS - on a mobile matrix and stabilization, 
but we continue to work on them. Canon never uses technology that has not yet been tested. It took us so much time, because the technology itself requires a very detailed study, because the moving matrix is ​​good, on the one hand. On the other hand, go to any service and ask how many cameras they have there with broken moving dies. The stabilization system is a very fragile thing.

Canon is currently developing a matrix stabilization technology - it will be coming soon.Other companies had a huge amount of problems with this. They test it essentially on users. Why do they have stabilization on almost all lenses? Because the matrix is ​​not very effective

This is also a curious question and answer.  To date, we haven't found any patent applications that are applicable to the core operation of IBIS.  That's not the say that we catch all the patents, we even missed a few lens one this week, but we do catch most of them.  A key point is that we catch the patent applications, he mentions that Canon has three patents, which would imply that they are already approved patents.  It can take up to years for an application to become an actual patent.  We have seen one such that is close, but it seems to be describing the improvement of roll shake of an existing IBIS system (one in which is developed by Panasonic), this is patent application 2018-165756. We certainly haven't seen any approved patents from Canon.  The mention of three patents was very specific, and we're going to have to go looking to see if we can find them.

In all, I think we have to take this interview with some grains of salt, there's a lot in there that it doesn't make much sense for a marketing manager of Canon Russia to know about what Canon Japan is actually doing in their R&D labs.

Read the interview here