Surprisingly Unsurprising (Part 2)
January 24th, 2008 by Jerry
I am equally unamazed at Canon’s early 2008 announcements, although I’m probably a bit less indignant than I am with Apple. I’m sure the shiny new Rebel XSi is a fantastic camera, but it goes in the “not compelling at all” category for me. It looks like the improvements are only marginal over the XTi it’s replacing. 12MP sensor (1.6x crop), LiveView (perhaps the most useless feature that’s distracting Canon from bringing back eye-controlled focus), Digic III (with no apparent performance improvements), and a slightly bigger chimp screen. Oh, they also added something resembling a spot meter. 4% of viewfinder? That’s a big spot, but still an improvement I guess. And to cap it all off, it now uses SD cards instead of Compact Flash. That kind of seals it as a dead-end entry-level camera. Nobody should be switching to it from any other Canon DSLR unless they feel like buying all new memory cards.
They also announced a couple lenses that I’ll never own.
Overall, this announcement means that any 5D improvements won’t be announced until Photokina in September, which probably means nothing new will be available until the very end of 2008. This also means that Canon has no real answer to Nikon’s D300 + D3 launch (except the ridiculously expensive 1D(s) Mark III that no mere mortal could ever own). Disappointing, Canon. In the chess game between Canon and Nikon, this announcement is something like castling. Hope their strategy pays off.
And I had such high hopes for 2008.