Canon: My Crystal Ball

People have been asking me lately:

• What about the new Canon 1Dx?
• When is the 5DMk3 coming?
• What about the 7DMk2?
• …

So I took my crystal ball out from storage, removed some of the dust and polished it. Here's Canon's future:

1. There will be no announcement of another full-frame until Canon starts delivering the 1Dx. Why? To develop a camera like the 1Dx costs between 100 and 200 million dollars. That's between 15,000 and 30,000 cameras that have to be sold to break even, let alone make a profit. That doesn't account for the marketing, manufacturing, inventory, shipping…

   They currently have a whole slew of free advertising and “mind share”, they would be stupid to waste it. After shipping they can start to announce the next batch of cameras.

2. No new announcement of anything in the near future. This is due to the situation in Thailand. The floods are getting worst and have stopped almost all industrial production in Thailand. Nikon has over 20% of its production in Thailand, Canon a little bit less. Everything has stopped.

   Have you noticed that there are no new sale on computers and laptops. 80% of the world production of hard drives is located in Thailand. 90% of Western Digital and 60% of Seagate (the last 2 hard drive manufacturers, Samsung doesn't count and Fuji only does a few 2½”) of their hard drives are manufactured in Thailand. A 2 Tb hard drive that used to be $70 in September is now in November $189 (Canadian.)

3. No new Canon 7DMk2 until at least mid/late 2012. Canon has a product cycle of 3+ years for their single digit models. Nikon still has not released a camera that competes directly with the Canon 7D. And no, the Nikon D7000 is not the direct competition of the 7D, it competes with the 60D.

4. Canon, Panasonic and Sony will be paying huge licensing fees over the next few years. Kodak just sold its Image Sensor Division to Platinum Equity, an investment pool based in California. Kodak sensors are used by Pentax, Leica, Phase One, Leaf…

   Platinum Equity has no, zero, expertise in manufacturing or running businesses. What these guys understand and recognize value is IP: Intellectual Property, aka patents. Kodak owns hundreds of patents on the manufacturing of sensors and on the digital conversions from the photosites (each sensing point on the sensor) to pixels. In other words, Kodak owns many patents on the basic physics of the CCD and the CMOS sensors¹.