[Klaus]

Quite decent MTFs there ...

http://www.usa.canon.com/cusa/consumer/p...6_3_is_stm

 

Boring ...

http://www.usa.canon.com/cusa/consumer/p...is_stm_kit

 

[Rover]

I have a feeling that we've already seen this... (the camera)

[Brightcolours]

Looks like an EOS M, with flip screen. In an interview the Canon imagining CEO promised many more EF-M and EF-S lenses, and more interesting EOS M model in the near future. He can't have meant a model under the M3.

[Klaus]

In my other life I am working for a Japanese company - rest assured that nobody in the western world can understand what's going on the island.

[toni-a]

IMHO one of the the best marketing strategies is doing concurrence to yourself, many companies do it deliberately to attract more customers but usually they do it by creating another brand name. Concurrenc between EOS-M and EOS that's not bad at all even I think this is a brilliant idea.

Go check in Europe for instance the case of citroen C1 and  peugeot 107, same car same manufacturer in rude concurrence.

[borisbg]

For some reason both Canon and Nikon are quite reluctant entering the the mirrorless market. M-cameras and Nikon 1 cameras  just regester presens rather than make a statement. I am not sure why. Additional R&D expenses? Production equipment change? As good their market share numbers look, they are not insured of market loss. If they continue to capitalize on existing technology and bore the consumer soemone will rattle their cage for sure. See what happened with Tesla: as of now Tesla is outselling MB S-class and BMW 7 (in US). When they first appeared I would never assume this will happened. Or Black Berry...

[toni-a]

Well Canon have the Kodak example, I am sure they have no intentions to follow. Kodak invented the digital photography however they didn't invest enough there to protect their film industry, you know the rest of the story...

[Brightcolours]

Well Canon have the Kodak example, I am sure they have no intentions to follow. Kodak invented the digital photography however they didn't invest enough there to protect their film industry, you know the rest of the story...

That is reading history a bit wrong.

kodak was the firm which pushed DSLRs to the professional market. They were the 1st to make DSLRs with Nikon F and Canon EOS mount. They lost marketshare once Nikon and Canon came with their own professional DSLR products. Fujifilm tried the same with Nikon F mount DSLRs, by the way.

Then Kodak started to push digital compact cameras. Their product strategy just sucked, it is not that they did not invest, it is that they had bad wrong-marketing based product development. In other words, they came with lots of digital cameras, but the products sucked in looks/style, feature set and IQ compared to the better ones in the industry.

Again, similar to Fujifilm. Only, Fujifilm sometimes had a successful compact camera, because they sometimes had a good product with an outstanding sensor.

Kodak even made medium format digital, it was they who for years supplied firms like Hasselblad, Mamiya and Phase One with MF CCD sensors. Until others made better products.

 

It was not the protection of film, which brought down Kodak. It was just that their products were less attractive than those of other manufacturers. And in their DSLR business it really hurt them that they were not a real SLR company with their own lens line. That meant that they could not compete on price, and had no glass profits to feed their R&D.

 

Like Blackberry. They lost because their products/product strategy sucked. Not because they were focussing on something else than smartphones.

[popo]

The car example earlier is hard to apply to the camera industry. There are many car manufacturers who group together and sell essentially the same car, but they aren't the same. The core mechanics might be, but the cosmetics are different and do create some differentiation. For example, my car is currently a VW Up! The same car as the Skoda CitiGo and Seat Mii. But their external styling is different, as are the interiors. I actually preferred the Mii over the Up!, but the dealer was much further away and it wasn't a big enough deal for me to make the effort. The VW group example may not be the best, but certainly between the French and Japanese manufacturers there is more sharing going around these days.

Try applying that to cameras? Reskinning cameras just hasn't worked. Like the Leica/Panasonics, and someone save us from the Hasselblad/Sonys. The differentiation potential isn't really there. Cosmetic differences aren't important to most buyers, and under the skin they are still the same, so you pick the cheapest.

Back to Canon, I can kinda see their strategy, but it has a similar problem to Nikon. Price. Compared to both the mirrorless competition, and also to themselves in lower end DSLRs, I don't think the value proposition is there when new. Give it a year or two for the old ones to go on fire sale and they get much more interesting. I actually really like Nikon 1 on paper, but the pricing and overall marketing of it has been pretty bad.

Supposing they did come up with a "pro" mirrorless camera. It would still be a tough sell without the native lenses and would for most purposes still not be as good equivalent DSLRs.

I have to wonder if they have a twist in the long term game up their sleeves. Something that makes the mirrorless vs. DSLR argument seem pointless?

[Brightcolours]

Apparently the new management of Hasselblad has saved us from the Sonybling.