(It has been a while since I’ve written a “morning musings” post, but since I’ve been “musing” about Canon and mirrorless cameras over the past few days and learning a few things about the subject, it seems like time for another such post.)
Unless you’ve been under a rock for the past few years you are aware of the introduction of so-called mirrorless cameras by several manufacturers and of the increasing sophistication of these cameras. Their features typically include:
- smaller and lighter bodies that may be reminiscent of older rangefinder film cameras.
- the ability to allow use of smaller lens designs, due to the shorter distance between the lens mount and the sensor.
- electronic viewfinders (EVFs) that can incorporate additional useful tools and information into the viewfinder display and which have advantages in low light.
- designs and features that increasingly appeal to serious photographers.
There are still issues with these cameras, and while much progress has been made and will continue, they still lag behind DSLRs is some areas:
- battery consumption rates tend to be quite high by comparison to DSLRs.
- AF performance is uneven and in some cases quite slow.
- EVFs have latency issues.
- Not everyone is fond of looking at an EVF monitor instead of the “real” image on focusing screen.
- With some systems (notably Sony) using a wide range of lenses will likely require the use of third-party adapters.
I’ve been using a Fujifilm X-trans mirrorless system for my travel and street photography for nearly three years. (Mine is a discontinued model, but if I were buying today I would get the Fujifilm XT1 or perhaps the Fujifilm XT10.) Virtually all of my street/travel photographs of the past two years were made with my Fujifilm camera and lenses. For this photography, the small size and excellent quality of the system compensates for the slower AF speeds and the battery consumption issues.
More recently the Sony A7r and A7rII cameras have gotten a lot of attention. When first introduced, the A7r came with the highest MP full frame sensor then available. The cameras can use (with varying degrees of compatibility and functionality) a wide range of non-Sony lenses, and they have a number of the other pluses associated with mirrorless designs. Several landscape photographer friends use the A7r and A7rII bodies for their tripod-based, manual focus photography, and I know several street/travel photographers who like the system a lot.
Sony and Fujifilm are not the only companies moving in this direction. For example, Olympus and others produce some very fine small mirrorless cameras.
All of which leads to the question: “Where is Canon’s mirrorless offering?” (Or, “Is the EOS-M the best Canon can do?”)
So far the answer has been unimpressive. Although Canon has produced mirrorless cameras for a long time, they have mostly been consumer-level cameras or have seemed like experiments. (My first “serious” digital camera, over a decade ago, was the Canon Powershot Pro 1, a very innovative mirrorless camera at the time. I just pulled it off the shelf, and it is sitting on my desk as I write this!) Some photographers wonder if Canon “gets” the whole mirrorless thing, or whether Canon is unable to innovate and move beyond DSLRs.
I have a different theory. Companies like Sony and Fujifilm were very smart to introduce excellent and innovative mirrorless cameras and to do so quickly, even at the expense of having to fix a few rough edges after introduction. Canon and Nikon own the DSLR market, and a new company trying to break in by producing break-out DSLR cameras is likely to fail. Even a better-than-Canon-and-Nikon DSLR isn’t likely to make much of a dent in the market share of those companies. However, companies like Sony and Fujifilm, with little or nothing to lose in the DSLR market, saw an opportunity and exploited it brilliantly: they produced something that the Big Companies don’t have, they did so in innovative and effective ways, and they likely gained market share by moving quickly and aggressively rather than moving slowly and cautiously.
Canon (and Nikon) cannot and should not move as quickly. The reasons are too complicated to fully explain here, but suffice it to say that bringing out a mirrorless system with the AF challenges that Sony or Fujifilm users are willing to deal with would be a fail for Canon, even though it worked for Sony and Fujifilm. (I may eventually expand on this in another article.)
Canon (and Nikon), when they do introduce serious mirrorless systems, must bring out more fully developed, reliable, and mature first products. They have to solve certain lens issues (what mount do they use, and how does it fit with their existing mounts?) and they must have either a solid path forward for a completely new system or be able to guarantee compatibility with existing equipment (for example, AF must work reliably and quickly with all lenses).
My thinking has been that Canon is working on a high end mirrorless camera system, and that their apparent slowness is not due to their inability to design cameras as functional as the current Sony and Fujifilm alternatives, but due to the necessity of having a more fully integrated and perfected system at the time of introduction.
This week I saw two hints about where this could be heading — and perhaps both hints have been in plain sight all along.
First, I saw an innocuous little post at the Canon Rumors site: Full Frame Mirrorless In The Works. The short post more or less confirms —subject to the vagaries of rumor sites, of course — that Canon almost certainly is working on a high-end full frame mirrorless system and has been for some time. That shouldn’t surprise anyone, but the public acknowledgement is probably significant. I’m quite sure that somewhere in Canon-land there is a test bench with a “mule” body that is mirrorless and which sports a full frame sensor, and that a plan exists for bringing cameras based on it to market.
Second, this past week several things caused me to take another look at the EFM mount used on those humble little Canon EOS-M cameras. (The small, cropped sensor EOS-M cameras don’t have an integrated viewfinder, instead relying on the rear display — perfect for family vacation photos. To be fair, they can produce excellent image files.) We’ve assumed that the EFM mount was designed for cropped sensor systems — probably because it was introduced on these little low-end EOS-M cameras. But the interesting thing I discovered is that the specifications are essentially the same as those used on the Sony mount system which accommodates lenses providing a full frame image circle. The “flange distance” (distance from sensor to mount) and the “throat diameter” (the size of the opening) both appear to be fully capable of supporting lenses that could project a full frame image on the sensor.
Kind of makes you wonder, right? If Canon really had no plans for a high-end mirrorless system (or, as some suggest, is incapable of producing one), why would they introduce a new lens mount standard that seems designed to support full frame mirrorless camera lenses?
My hunch is pretty simple. I suspect that the little EOS-M camera is mostly a test bed for evolving a Canon mirrorless system that meets their standards for quality and compatibility, and that the fact that its EFM mount seems designed to work with full frame lenses on a mirrorless body is no accident at all. In any case, it just became a lot more interesting to speculate about this!
What do you think?
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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