<$1500
I can understand being behind for perhaps a year or two as a result of allocating R&D money unevenly like that, but inasmuch as we're talking about the development of the sensor and it apparently has seen no real progress to speak of for five years, why should we conclude anything other than that Canon has essentially abandoned the still photography market for at least a five year period of time?
Not really.
Canon has worked on the banding issues, since we did complain about banding in the 5D2.
But let's say they did wait some years before starting to do something about more dynamic range - remember that there wasn't any big competition for high DR when the 5D2 or 7D was released - then lead times really are important. So most probably, Canon did not spend any real time working on the next big step in dynamic range for quite some time after the 5D2 and 7D was released. While at the same time we know they have been working with sensors of way past 100 MP.
Sensors like the following wasn't worked on because Canon has abandoned the stills market:
http://www.canon.com/news/2010/aug24e.html
But when talking about larger sensor changes, i.e. not just minor tweaks, you really do have lead times in multiple ways here. On one hand, each spin of a sensor takes time to produce and evaluate because you don't just press "print" on the design and then pick up the new sensor. It takes quite some time to create the masks and then produce a couple of wafers of the prototype - and similar is seen when microprocessors are designed and then require the silicon to be revised multiple times.
And if needing to replace the factory equipment, you require an even larger time scale. It isn't unreasonable with 9-18 months - assuming that we just talk about replacing equipment and not needing to build a new fab.
And it can take quite some time time calibrate a fab if breaking ground with some new process. And that isn't unlikely, since Canon isn't just making their own sensors. They are also developing, producing and selling some of the equipment used by the factories to make sensors.
You can only mark lead time and rate of progress independent if you assume many small, concurrent, projects running, and do not measure the time from start to end of each individual project but just looks at the emitted rsults. But that is a very unlikely scenario except for the smaller refinements you can see in 5D3 or 6D. Look at a specific project, and that specific project will have a quite significant lead time from started until the market sees a released product. That lead time will be significant even for smaller refinements. And it will be extremely significant if the project requires Canon to go for a fully new process, assuming they can't just ship off and produce at any existing fab that has a compatible process already available.
Canon most certainly hasn't stopped funding sensor development. But they have missed the ball when it comes to the work with large DR. Most probably because they didn't expect the competitors to be as competitive as they have been. Just that when the Exmor sensor had already proven itself to take market shares and create lots of rave, it's a bit late for Canon management to push the button to try to develop a competing sensor. If Canon did plan maybe 75MP sensors with the current DR and the customers did expect 40MP with several stops better DR, then that's a big oops. But an oops that takes a serious time to do something about. In the end, it's a question of guessing/predicting exactly what will be the most profitable route to go. And companies regularly guesses wrong, since they don't have any crystal balls. Small companies may die from it. Larger companies often has enough agility and economic strength to be able to get away with just a black eye and some ugly bumps in their economic graphs.
I find it extremely unlikely that Canon will not have been running full-speed on developing sensor technology with more DR for quite some while. To not do so when the evidence of the competition is available would mean incompetence. There is a big difference between failing the crystal ball predictions and failing to spot actual, ongoing, competition.
Yes, the conclusion is that Canon is behind (at least in what has been released) when it comes to sensors for high-end cameras for stills. Not because they haven't been doing any R&D, but because their R&D hasn't been aimed in the direction we customers have wanted/expected. Or maybe Canon R&D has been run in the correct direction, but have suffered unexpected delays forcing Canon to ship cameras with just minor improvements while waiting for a next-generation sensor to be finally ready.
In the end, we can just speculate on what technology Canon has - we can only see what Canon has released. And in that aspect, Canon is behind.
But at the same time, Canon has managed to make quite a lot of money during these years. So if a new sensor can show up within a reasonable time frame, it will be hard to say that Canon has made the wrong decisions from a business perspective.
No - except that the sensor technology do affect the boundaries for what we can capture. And the Exmor sensor do allow for greater boundaries, giving the owners a significant advantage in some fields of photography.
these would be very minimal improvements
