Canon Camera

Canon has the credit of introducing the world’s first 35mm camera with focal plane shutters in 1936 and the company has been keeping pace with technological changes in the making of cameras ever since. Canon is now a 38 billion dollar company employing over 100,000 worldwide.

Canon offers a wide choice of cameras and accessories ranging from film cameras, video cameras, digital cameras,movie cameras, compact cameras, SLR cameras, rangefinder cameras, video camcorders, flash guns, film projectors, lenses, filters, etc. Canon established standards for lens mounts including FD, FL, EF, FX, R etc. The mounts basically provide electrical and mechanical interface for fixing the lens on to the camera body.

In terms of technology Canon cameras provide state of the art technologies ranging film based ones to  cameras usinganalogue technology to the latest digital technology.

The film based cameras are slowly being phased out by Canon due to shrinking market just like its competitors, Kodak, Nikon, Konica etc. Canon digital cameras are available with both CCD (Charge Coupled Devices) and CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductors) sensors.

These tiny pixels (picture elements) produce electrical impulses on being excited by light. A typical digital camera may contain 3 to 10 million pixels. The higher the no. of pixels, the sharper is the image. Individual signals are then converted from analogue to digital form by analogue to digital converter. Of course these cameras use high speed image processing LSI chips to process the electronic signals and produce high quality images.

The Canon EOS (Electro Optical System) camera first introduced in 1987 is the standard that Canon follows even today for making SLR cameras. Its primarily characteristic is the EF lens mount which was a new standard then (replacing the george earlier FD mounts).

The motor for controlling the aperture and focus is in the lens itself. It has the up to 45 auto focus points compared to its competitors which means it can take sharper pictures of fast moving objects. Over the period Canon has released over 40 models in the EO series.

A mid level digital cameras from the Canon stable is the Canon Power Shot series and is a very popular range. At the lower end it has the lightweight point and shoot compact variety and at the higher end it has the fixed lens high resolution (over 8 mega pixels CCD sensors) cameras.

These bridge the gap between the compact and the SLR varieties and are for the more demanding consumers. The prices of these cameras vary from under £50 to over $3,200 (£1,600)

The Canon Sure Shot series are a line of entry level film cameras that are easy to use and are compact and light in weight. They are auto focus and are fitted with zoom lens of various capacities. They are also light on pocket with the cost varying from $80 (£40) to $160 (£80)

Editor
Canon and Camera