TC

Fantastic news if true.  Note to Canon: you can't turn the clock back to summer 2008.  Even if your cameras weren't crippled, your competition would be trouncing you.  Yet you still persist in crippling them. 

Well, perhaps we should not get too worked up, given this is just speculation, but Canon seems to be hell-bent on alienating all their customers.

5d3 - crippled: deliberately soft video; omission of video specific and easy to implement firmware features such as focus peaking and zebra stripes; no clean HDMI out.  Owners and potential buyers disappointed.

Canon C300 - released with a very hefty price tag, yet a cheaper 4k camera may be announced while C300 pre-orders are still being fulfilled.  Owners potentially very, very annoyed.

4k camera - that this will be in an DSLR form factor seems bizarre.  4k is still currently a rather high-end format, requiring a lot of compute power in post.  A dedicated video form factor would make a lot more sense.

And what's with the staggered announcements?  1DX announced in October, but not yet shipping.  C300 announced in November, just shipping.  5D3 announced in March, shipping in March.  And now we learn of yet another announcement scheduled for April.  It just creates confusion. 

This would make more sense: uncrippled 5d3 at current price (target audience - the one-man-band hybrid photo/videographer).  C300 introduced at $8,000 (target audience - broadcast television professionals).  4k "C100" at $16,000 (target audience - cinematographers).  And everything announced at the same time and presented as a coherent range of cameras complementing each other.

[quote author=cameraboy link=topic=469.msg3044#msg3044 date=1332840766]
im afraid that panasonic will decide to go same route as canon ... cripple gh3 with low bitrates  and bad hdmi ...
[/quote]

I have the same concern.  That is why I think the industry needs some new players to shake things up.  At the moment it is a cartel.  And they all want to set the clock back to 2007.

Red have mixed things up at the high end, there has to be room for a new player in the consumer space. 

Maybe we have it all wrong. As others have pointed out Canon is a business.  They could well make more money by crippling their entire range of market leading SLRs for the niche digital cinema market they have just entered. Let's compare with the world's most successful corporation and perhaps all will become clear.

Canon: putting video on a stills camera is not good.  We won't sell any video cameras.
Apple: putting a computer in a phone or a tablet is not good.  We won't sell any computers.

Canon: we will make more money selling a small number of cinema cameras with a high margin, than we will selling a large number of DSLRs with a smaller margin.
Apple: we will make more money selling a small number of computers with a high margin than we will by selling a large number of consumer devices such as phones or mp3 players with a smaller margin.

Hold on a minute... This isn't working.  The more I think about the I am convinced that the people in charge of Canon do not have the slightest idea of what they are doing. 

Good blog post.  It is pretty clear what Canon's decision is.  Canon considers putting high quality video in DSLRs to have been a mistake.  But that makes it easy for us to make a decision too.  Three of my Canon cameras will be going on the market very soon.  Fortunately I have been using old Nikon manual focus lenses for video, so switching to another mount is easy.  First up as a replacement will be a GH2.

[quote author=cameraboy link=topic=456.msg2957#msg2957 date=1332688223]

i dont try to defender  canon  ....
its just reality of video industry...
[/quote]

Yes, you are quite right, it is the reality of the industry, unfortunately.  But I don't think it should be.  The reason that we are stuck with this reality is that the industry is dominated by three or four large corporations.  To make it worse, they are all based in the same country.  This is not good for healthy competition.  I would love to see BlackMagic or AJA find a chip supplier and release a camera.  They already have the know-how for the image processing hardware, it is their core business. 

[quote author=cameraboy link=topic=456.msg2957#msg2957 date=1332688223]
even panasonic  cripple gh2 hdmi (if u remember preproduction gh2 send to Philip Bloom had clean progresive 24P)
i dont own canon dslr  and i dont need that DOF porn from FF but i need true 1080p...
[/quote]

I knew the GH2 was crippled, but I didn't know that the pre-production GH2 had clean HDMI out.  Very interesting.  One thing has also been puzzling me - the video 'Eye of the Mind' was released by Canon France at 1080p on youtube [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCRMu2rLf_Y#ws]Canon EOS 5D Mark III : Eye of the mind (Official demo)[/url].  To me it looks pretty sharp.  Could it be that it was shot on a non-crippled pre-production camera?

Of course Canon is a business.  But they are abusing their dominant market position and I think we in the photographic community need to challenge them more strongly in this, rather than just accepting it.  We need some solutions to the cartel of manufacturers which persistently withhold technology in order to maintain artificially high prices.  Panasonic have shown with the GH2 that sharp HD video can be obtained from a large sensor for $700.  Yet Canon want to charge us $16,000 for this.  That is more than 20 times more expensive. 

This unjustified price premium of $15,000 leaves a lot of room for a new entrant to come into the market and give us the camera we all want for a reasonable price. 

Open a still image from the 5d3 in Photoshop.  Change the canvas size to 5,760x3,240 pixels.  That is 3x HD.  Then apply the filter -> pixellate -> mosaic.  Set the cell size to be 3 square.  View the full image on a HD capable monitor.  That is the level of sharpness the 5d3 is capable of in video mode.  Averaging the RGB values of 9 pixels is computationally trivial.  You wouldn't even need to de-bayer.  The fact that the actual video output is significantly softer than this tells us all we need to know - Canon have written the firmware to deliberately blur the image.

We need to stop saying that it is a limitation of the current state of the hardware.  It isn't.  It is a deliberate decision on Canon's part.