Canon 5d mark III

The Canon EOS 5D Mark III saw a price spike over the first few months of Magic Lantern’s RAW video exploit, but now it seems the prices are starting to settle out.  Sites like B&H are selling the 5d mark III for $2699 with free shipping and even the somewhat infamous Bigvalueinc on ebay is only offering a $61 savings ($2638 with free shipping). Now that the honeymoon period of ML RAW on the 5dmkIII is over, what’s next?

Canon 7d (2 of 6)

There are rumors that the 7d will not have a mark II released in 2014, instead Canon will be focusing on lenses next year. However with the price of the 6d falling and stabilizing at around $1400 and the 5d mark III starting to settle out at around $2600, it feels like Canon is preparing for a new camera body release.

Canon’s cinema line of cameras has filled out the $10,000 and above market, but the c100 is really all they have going for them below that price point. Will the next “cinema” camera simply be a rebranded APS-C body with a headphone jack? If so, is that really enough to move people into a camera body upgrade? If that’s all it takes you can already pick up cameras like the Nikon d600 for around $1300 with a headphone jack included. The Nikon d600 even offers up clean HDMI output (with audio) in that same $1300 body.

I’m guessing that a headphone jack and clean HDMI output might be all the innovation we’ll see from Canon in it’s APS-C lineup in 2014 if we’re lucky. After all, they haven’t really done anything with the APS-C sensor in the past 3 or 4 years. Even the 70d’s “new” 20.2 megapixel sensor only gives you “Approx. 19.0 megapixels” which is exactly the same as the 7d before it. Those extra pixels are simply for focusing and end up reducing the photo site by 0.2  µm square. Innovations might be happening fast but as usual Canon’s moving slow.

It’ll at least be interesting to see what Nikon has to offer next year as they try to cram every feature possible into their newer DSLR lineup. They don’t have a video camera market to defend, so they’ve been a lot more open to the idea of providing new features. If we’re lucky it’ll force Canon to do the same.

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