Canon reveals interesting range of near-future product plans

Canon’s corporate strategy for the next several years has recently emerged (PDF) and it paints a picture of where the best-selling camera brand wants to go.

The company’s plans for the near future of its camera and lens manufacturing business include several key strategies that fans of Canon devices might want to know about. Canon also unveiled more specific plans (PDF) for its imaging group section.

Among these are the following main takeaways, though most of them are pretty obvious strategic choices, and even blandly predictable:

For starters, Canon claims that it wants to leverage its large, stable camera/lens market share and its good reputation among photographers to keep developing strong new products.

One would hardly expect any major technology brand to want anything less, so while this isn’t a surprise, we can at least consider it a promise of building high-quality products for serious users.

Secondly, Canon wants to continue keeping the top spot in the interchangeable lens and camera market while becoming the world’s number one maker of mirrorless cameras.

This is a more interesting strategic choice. In part, it’s the same as the point above, a promise of continuing to innovate for high quality and performance.

On the other hand, it also means that we can probably look forward to many more Canon cameras and lens releases in the next few years.

Canon is a bit of a late-comer to mirrorless camera manufacturing compared to brands like Sony and Fujifilm, but it’s catching up quickly. Basically, it’s using its general camera market domination to overtake the competition as quickly as possible.

Again, this will almost certainly mean more mirrorless camera innovation and some interesting near-future camera releases.

Canon’s third major strategic aim is to increase sales of EOS R-format devices by expanding its selection of both EOS R cameras and lenses to meet all customer demands, including video creators.

Canon’s top-selling R50 mirrorless camera

Again, this plays into the first two strategic points above by strongly indicating that Canon will release many more lenses, and cameras for all budget ranges in the next couple of years.

In other words, photographers who have already bought into Canon’s EOS R format for their photography can probably look forward to a wider range of cameras and lenses.

Many of these will replace the Canon selections available during the brand’s DSLR days. These will also be available for a wider range of budgets.

Video creators, who until now haven’t been as strongly served by Canon as by other camera brands, can now also expect better recording technology from new Canon devices and new firmware updates to existing cameras.

In addition to these planned innovations for video, Canon also wants to move deeper into VR recording with its devices.  

For both video and VR, Canon states the following in its strategy roadmap:

“Moreover, in recent years, the demographic of video-oriented users, such as video creators, media users, and SNS users, is thick and growing. We aim to expand the scale of the R system by including functions and performance that respond to user requests not only for still images but also for videos.

Also, the world of imaging is changing from 2 D to 3 D to XR In anticipation of these future demands, we will also focus on the deployment of EOS VR systems and work to expand awareness of VR, improve the usability of apps and software, and create an environment where users can enjoy VR images.”

So far, despite a few product release setbacks, we’ve seen some excellent new cameras from Canon, and the quality of their mirrorless offerings has become wonderful.

It would be good to see the corporate-speak in the company’s strategic declaration result in concrete hardware that continues to impress.

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