Canon targets photo enthusiasts at Photokina
With a relatively inexpensive full-frame model, revisions to its advanced compacts, and a couple of new photo printers, Canon's spending Photokina courting photo enthusiasts.
Headlining Canon's barrage of cameras at the show: the EOS 6D. While the company has had the cheapest full-frame camera available since the 5D Mark III shipped and it dropped the price of the 5D Mark II, the latter (while still an excellent camera) has an old autofocus system and needed some performance updating. Especially if it were going to stand up to Nikon's recently announced D600. But Canon took away some of the features of the 5DM2 for the6D, such as the 100 percent coverage viewfinder, substituting Wi-Fi and GPS. It's got a new sensor, so it'll be interesting to see how it compares in image quality. However, the 5D Mark II is still available and looks like it will continue to be the cheapest full-frame around -- street prices of new models have dropped as low as $1,760, and there are lots of used models up for grabs.
While less exciting from a photography-geek perspective, Canon's latest enthusiast and megazoom compact camera introductions mean more to people just looking to buy a nice camera. The company's replacing its ultracompact PowerShot S100 with the S110, which adds Wi-Fi and boosts performance, but keeps the slow lens.
On the other hand, the replacement for the PowerShot G12, the G15, finally gets a fast f1.8-2.8 version of the same 28-140mm lens -- yay! -- but only in exchange for dropping the beloved flip-and-twist LCD. Boo! Sometimes you just can't win.
And those of you keeping track of the megazoom lens-length race, well, Canon's just won this lap with the first 50x zoom, for a 1,200mm equivalent at its telephoto end on its PowerShot SX50 HS. It doesn't seem to matter how difficult it is to use these cameras when zoomed out, or how low quality the images get, or that at f6.5 you pretty much have to be photographing the sun to get enough light, the lenses just keep getting longer. Sigh.
Let's not forget printers, either. After three years, Canon's finally replacing its Pixma Pro9000 Mark II and Pro9500 Mark IIs with redesigned models along the lines of its Pixma Pro-1. The Super B-size Pixma Pro-10 (pigment) and Pixma Pro-100 (dye) get Wi-Fi and Ethernet connectivity, some reformulated inks and reconfigured inksets, updated color-matching capabilities, and of course the sleek look of the Pro-1.