Canon 1DX Mark III is Sticking to Convention


It looks like my predictions are off as Canon has announced the development of the 1DX Mark III:

https://photonicshunkan.blogspot.com/2019/06/prediction-canon-will-put-pellicle.html

https://photonicshunkan.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-canon-1dx-ii-successor-will-be.html

That's OK—since I originally predicted that the move to a pellicle mirror would take another product cycle after the 1DX Mark III. You have to make predictions bold even when you know there is always going to be a chance of being wrong. I wrote:

"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."

There were false rumours about the Mark III having an extraordinarily fast frame rate, which were little more than rumours, and which made me hope that Canon would ditch its conservatism and move at a faster rate (in retrospect quite foolish). The other reason for Canon's conservatism is that EVF lag remains an issue for professional sports and wildlife photographers. Another reason for Canon's conservatism in pouring R&D funds into the EF mount is that they are possibly withdrawing from that mount and putting more funds into the development of the RF mount instead. It's also just that Canon are conservative and they are probably not even going to add IBIS to the 1DX Mark III.

The other question is why Sony has abandoned development of the pellicle mirror line of cameras. Possibilities:

1. To concentrate R&D funds on their more lucrative mirrorless line
2. Because they predict that a mirrorless can eventually be made to shoot almost as fast without the assistance of an off-imaging focal-plane AF sensor.
3. They want to focus their advertising funds on the mirrorless line without the buyer being distracted by a rival line from the same maker
4. Because having a DSLT line of cameras risk prolonging the lifespan of SLR mount systems and they prefer to economically rationalise by killing it off earlier to force users to buy into a new camera system

The question is whether the rest of the industry also regards pellicle mirror designs to be a marketing failure—irrespective of what engineering merits it may retain. The original format war was the Betamax vs VHS in videotape, where VHS won due to marketing reasons, even though Betamax was considered technically superior. I suspect that with R&D funding that the extra off-focal plane AF sensor can be put to excellent use, to make it faster than a mirrorless. However, this would be a very niche camera for sports/wildlife shooters and not really that good for the mass market. I suspect that marketing issues are driving the reluctance to go down the pellicle mirror pathway and not engineering issues.

And NO, I don't hold out hopes that the Canon 1DX Mark III will be a pellicle mirror model. If it were, it wouldn't be called the Mark III, would it? It remains possible that Canon will do what they did with past pellicle mirror models and come up with both a reflex mirror model and a pellicle mirror variant, which is what happened when Canon brought out the reflex mirror Canon 1N in 1994 followed by the pellicle mirror Canon 1N RS variant in 1995. But a repetition of that in the digital era seems a remote possibility at this stage.


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