Last month marked 30 years of Canon EOS cameras, but the celebrations are set to continue throughout the year. The iconic camera series was launched on 1 March 1987 with the EOS 650, featuring a new mount called the Canon EF to replace the old FD mount.
It heralded a new dawn in photography, with SLRs offering a new breed of lens that featured an unparalleled exposure metering along with groundbreaking autofocus.
As part of the ’30 years of EOS’ celebrations it looks like Canon could be about to re-introduce its flagship manual focus F-1.
The image above was emailed to us anonymously and the logos clearly show that it’s a Canon F-1D. What’s more, the lens also appears to be styled along the same lines as the FD fit 50mm f/1.8 (or maybe it is an old FD lens).
Although we cannot confirm the specification of this new camera, we can speculate that the EOS F-1D will be a full-frame manual focus offering.
While this move would come as a surprise in some respects, the rise of mirrorless system cameras, especially those with retro styling from the likes of Fuji, Olympus and Sony has challenged the dominance of the SLR – Canon’s traditional stronghold.
Perhaps Canon is planning to fight fire with fire and go full-on retro?
By the look and position of the dials on the top-plate, it seems that the camera will have full manual control, with a traditional-style shutter speed dial and aperture control through a lens ring. It’s hard to tell from this image, but it looks like there’s another tall dial over where the film rewind mechanism would sit on the film version of the camera.
Perhaps this will enable sensitivity and/or white balance adjustment; although it’s possible that ISO control could be a secondary feature of the shutter speed dial like on the original Canon F-1 and the Fuji X-Pro2.
Our hunch is that there’s also a tradition screw-thread type remote release socket and self-timer switch around the shutter release.
What we’d really like to know is whether the viewfinder is optical or electronic and whether the F-1D is a DSLR or a mirrorless model. Our hunch is that Canon would want to combine the best modern technology with the old and use an electronic viewfinder (EVF) with a magnified view and/or focus peaking to speed-up focusing.
It’s possible that this is just a concept camera as part of Canon’s EOS 30 celebrations, but we reckon that there could be quite a bit of interest in such an old-school full-framer.
Keep tuned to camerajabber.com for the latest news and information on the Canon F-1D.
UPDATE: as you may have guessed, this was a fun April Fool that we wrote. Sadly, there is no Canon F-1D on the horizon that we’re aware of. But we can hope!