PREDICTION: The Canon 1DX II Successor Will be a Pellicle Mirror Global Shutter Camera
The latest news is that a Canon ambassador has been found talking about an upcoming camera that can shoot at 30fps:
People are commenting that the camera must be designed to shoot at 30fps in the mirror up position, which is totally absurd. That is like saying that the mirror is a redundant piece of equipment that needs to be locked up and forced to get out of the way for the camera to function properly. It is much more likely that the 1DX Mark II successor will have no mechanical reflex mirror but that it will instead have a pellicle mirror. That way, the mirror does not need to be moved out of the way for it to function and contributes positively to the accuracy of the autofocus.
Some may wonder if Canon has found a way to get the reflex mirror to move fast enough to achieve a 30fps frame rate, but that is unlikely. At some point, Canon have NO CHOICE but to eliminate this mechanical moving part if frame rates are to be increased well beyond what the 1DX Mark II can currently achieve while getting the images in focus. It is hardly a question of whether Canon want to reintroduce the pellicle mirror or not, there is simply no other option. Necessity is the mother of invention. Anyone who says that Canon are going to blindly ape Sony's example with the A mount and abandon their EF line of DSLR system and force its users over to the mirrorless-EVF RF mount system is simply not credible. Both Canon and its DSLR users have too much invested in the EF mount system. The only way forwards with the EF mount is a pellicle mirror-EVF system.
Next, NO! Canon are NOT going to make mirrorless EF mount cameras i.e. a 1DX EF mount with the mirror removed as a rival Canon version of the Sony A9. There would no point in having a DSLR mount with room for the mirror box in the optical pathway that served no useful purpose. And NO! Canon are NOT going to make a 35mm format camera that shoots 30fps in crop mode with the mirror in lock up position. That is not what professional sports photographers have spent tens of thousands on 35mm format super telephoto lenses for.
I predicted years ago that Canon would reintroduce the pellicle mirror, and repeated this prediction more recently:
https://photonicshunkan.blogspot.com/2019/05/prediction-canon-will-reintroduce.html
I thought it would take another product cycle of the 1D line for this to happen given Canon's conservatism, hence my prediction that it will take another 4-8 years, but it may be happening sooner than thought. It might even materialise before the 2020 Olympics.
It makes sense to introduce cutting edge technology to showcase for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Tokyo would also be a perfect opportunity to eliminate the last two moving mechanical elements left in the 1DX Mark II: the mechanical reflex mirror AND the mechanical shutter. It makes sense to eliminate shutter shock and mirror shock at the same time on a flagship model. It equally makes sense to put cutting edge technology in the flagship model.
That is to say, I am going to predict that in the lead up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, Canon will bring out a digital version of the 1N RS with both a pellicle mirror and a global shutter. That means the successor to the 1D X Mark II will probably not be called the 1D X Mark III at all, and it will likely mark the beginnings of a new succession line.
Canon have left a patent trail relating to a digital pellicle mirror design going back years and given the number of pellicle mirror patents Canon have accumulated over the decades, the surprise is that they did not reintroduce it sooner. Canon have also made official announcements about the development of a global shutter going back many years:
https://global.canon/en/news/2016/20160831.html
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.7567/1347-4065/ab00f3
Canon have already had a global shutter in the $30K USD Super 35mm format Canon EOS C700 GS PL video camera since 2016, and it had always been only a matter of time before this would trickle down into a stills photography camera.
It usually takes at least several years for this sort of innovation to enter into cost-effective large scale production and the 1D flagship line is the ideal place to introduce it into a stills photography camera. Canon, Panasonic, and Sony have been in a race to get to market first with a stills photography global shutter camera, with Canon arguably having been making more official public announcements in this area than Sony or Panasonic, as well as having already succeeded in manufacturing end-products like the C700 GS featuring a global shutter. Canon may well manage to go match Sony (with their upcoming a9II expected to have a global shutter) in getting this stills photography engineering innovation to market in time for the Tokyo Olympics.
CONCLUDING PREDICTIONS
The successor to the Canon EOS-1D X Mark III will be whole new lineage of high-end mirror camera. It will be the first Canon camera in 25 years since the introduction of the EOS-1N RS to have a pellicle mirror. This will eliminate one of the last mechanical components in the form of the moving reflex mirror as a source of imaging degrading shock. But Canon will probably go further and also eliminate the mechanical shutter as a source of shock by replacing it with a global shutter, thus removing the final vestige of a key mechanical component still found in the DSLR camera. The optical viewfinder DSLR is dead, long live the digital pellicle mirror EVF camera.
ADDIT!
It turns out Andy Rouse isn't field-testing the replacement to the Canon 1DX Mark II at all. He is shooting with an Olympus OM-D E-1MX. That's funny.
A lot of sports and wildlife shooters are getting sick of carrying around heavy 35mm format telephoto lenses on international flights. It's a continuation of this story:
But what does it mean to our prediction that Canon will update its flagship model to an electronic global shutter with a pellicle mirror in the next update to the 1D lineage rather in the product cycle after that? It remains possible that Canon might yet be able to pull that off in time for the 2020 Olympics. If Canon (and Nikon) simply have a mechanical focal plane shutter with a mechanical reflex mirror given a minor incremental speed bump before being replaced with a pellicle mirror around 2024, then there is going to be trouble for CaNikon. More and more sports and wildlife photographers will jump ship to M4/3 options, the Fuji X System, or to the Sony a9 line. CaNikon will bleed market share at an accelerated pace. I am not sure Canon will sit back and allow that to happen, so that means it remains highly plausible that we will yet see a global shutter version of a 1N RS. Perhaps we should nickname it the 1DN RS.
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