Look along the sidelines of any professional sports game, and the array of big, white Canon lenses attached to Canon digital SLRs will speak volumes of Canon's presence and reputation in the world of professional photography. If you ask experienced photographers what the Canon name means to them, many would suggest that they associate the name with innovation, the company having brought such technological advances as Eye-Controlled Focusing (Canon EOS 5, 1992) and the USM ultrasonic motors used in the more recent Canon EF lenses, which are extremely quiet and very fast.
Canon film cameras cover the full range from models such as the Canon SLRs targeted at professionals (the EOS 1 and 1N for example, and more recently the EOS 1V, to those aimed toward the consumer (such as the tiny ELPH series or the EOS Rebel cameras). Back at the Spring 2000 PMA show, Canon announced the EOS-D30, their first digital SLR, in the process turning the Digital SLR market on its ear with its excellent features and image quality and surprisingly aggressive price. Since then, they've continued to up the ante, introducing the six-megapixel D60, followed surprisingly quickly by the 10D, each time packing in more features at lower cost.
Now though, they've really turned the digicam world on its ear, creating the new Digital Rebel, a six-megapixel digital SLR that sells with a lens for less than $1000 US! This not only challenges Nikon, Olympus, and Fuji in the D-SLR business, but promises to cut drastically into the all-in-one "prosumer" market... [read more]