Roll the clock back 20 years, and Nikon was the pro camera. Canon had a very strong reputation in the consumer market, but for pro cameras, Nikon was it.

Then technology started creeping in. First it was autofocus, Canon was more aggressive than Nikon, and some pros started to switch. Then came Image Stabilization – again Canon got their first with a usable implementation, more pros moved over. Then came digital sensors, and by the time you got to the 2004 Olympics in Athens, virtually every pro you saw there was shooting Canon.

Nikon always fires back, and a couple of years later Nikon always comes out with technology that equals or beats the current Canons, and the game of leapfrog continues – you only need to look at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing to see that suddenly there were as many pros shooting D3’s as there were 1D Mark III’s. Indeed, with the Nikon D3’s low light abilities and autofocus system, the D3 has been the pro camera to have for the last couple of years.

This week saw the release of the Canon 1D Mark IV, which on paper matches the new Nikon D3s’s ISO 102,400, while offering 10 fps at 16 mp (vs 9 fps at 12 mp for the Nikon), and with a shiny new autofocus system that Canon insiders believe will set the standard for years to come… About 2 years in our estimation, until the Nikon D4, which will probably then be surpassed by the Canon 1D Mark V a year or so later, and so the game continues.

Out of the big 3 DSLR players currently (Canon, Nikon and Sony), Canon is the clear leader in the latest DSLR trend – video. While many purist shun video on DSLR’s, the fact remains the role of the traditional newspaper photographer is changing – newspapers are downsizing or closing, and the focus is switching to other mediums to deliver news – the internet, iPhone etc. Which means being able to send out your photographer to get video clips as well as still pictures is becoming increasingly important – indeed if DSLR’s don’t add video, media outlets could well switch to using video cameras and pulling still frames out of the video – how many web pages or iPhone apps actually display images larger than a megapixel? On the consumer end, being able to have a single camera that can produce high quality prints as well as make videos of your kids at Disneyworld is compelling too.

When it comes to video on a DSLR Canon is the clear leader. Nikon actually got there first, with the manual focus 720p implementation on the Nikon D90 mere days before Canon introduced its superior 1080p solution on the 5D Mark II. In the year or so since, both companies have continued to evolve their video solution – both systems are clearly capable of producing professional results in the right hands, but Nikon is still stuck on a more crude 720p implementation.

Sony on the other hand, has a tremendous amount of experience when it comes to video cameras, and has yet to put video on a DSLR – various comments from company executives have indicated they believe they will have to, and you can be sure when they do finally introduce it, they will do it right.

So far in 2009 Canon has introduced on 3 new DSLR bodies – the 1D Mark IV, 7D and 500D (T1i) – fewer than either Nikon or Sony.

However these three Canons out-spec their equivalent Nikon’s in all the important areas. Because two of these are brand new, how they perform in the real world remains to be seen, but since they are newer technology than the Nikons, they should perform very well indeed.

While Nikon this year has mainly been introducing “updates” in the form of “s” models to existing cameras, Canons offerings have represented major steps forward, and we expect this to start to reverse the losses in market share than Canon has given up to Nikon over the past couple of years.

Canon has also lost significant market share to Sony on the consumer DSLR end recently – unless Canon starts aggressively launching consumer models to go head to head with Sony, this is a trend we may see continue.

In 2009 so far Canon has released 5 new lenses – a couple of low volume tilt & shift lenses, a new 100mm macro, and a pair of consumer EF-S lenses:

Going forward, a Canon 1Ds Mark IV being released within the next six months or so is pretty much a given – almost certainly in the 30 megapixel plus range, to unseat the Nikon D3x. For the next 18 months to two years, we expect Canon to have a slight advantage in the pro/prosumer DLSR market over Nikon, an advantage Nikon has enjoyed for the last couple of years, and probably won’t enjoy again until the release of the D4/D400. It’s a constant game of leapfrog, and has been as long as I can remember.

To halt the overall slide in Canons market share, what they really need to do is bring the fight to Sony and firm up their entry level offerings – the XS and XSi are getting old, and Sony is aggressively targeting the consumer – Canon execs have to be taking notice.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 10:16 am and is filed under Canon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.