Canon Announces B&W-Only Camera...With Nikon F-Mount

Hmm, you'd think we knew these things were coming.

Canon has announced a camera with a 15-megapixel monochrome APS-C sensor.

The camera also features a Nikon lens mount.

Huh?

Canon M15P-CL

Well, things are not quite as they seem. The Canon M15P-CL is a camera for the so-called "industrial" market, meaning it's for security and for product inspection in manufacturing processes. It's for tethered use, and it uses a Nikon F lens mount because that's what's standard in the industrial camera market and prospective buyers aren't likely to want to buy new lenses.

The interesting part of this newsy tidbit, of course, is that Canon has a 15-megapixel APS-C black and white sensor. Would it be that hard to put one in a stripper Rebel T5i body for photography students? C'mon, Canon, think outside the box!

Mike
(Thanks to Eric Rose and Hugh Crawford)

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

David: "Not sure which was better, your suggestion or the pun; assuming the pun was intentional."

Mike replies: As I might say, a little joke. And my brother Scott would reply: very little!

Mike Farley: "Canikon?"

Soeren Engelbrecht: "And let's not forget that the very first Canon cameras actually came bundled with Nikkor lenses :-) .

Comments

[Moose]

"Canon has a 15-megapixel APS-C black and white sensor."

Or they are converting color to B&W.

No Assumptions Moose

[No, I'm sure it's a monochrome sensor, as many industrial cameras are. --Mike]

[Josh Hawkins]

Student market? I think canon might be surprised at the market size. When people ask me what one camera I want today I tell them the M8 monochrome. It makes no sense from a business perspective but it makes me happy (I'm guessing it would) from a personal perspective. I have no interest in an aps-c body...until you put that sensor in. I'd find $500 somewhere. (FYI - I've been shooting for a living for over a decade. I'm not the target market but I'd be part of the market.)

[Torsten Bronger]

I still don't see the point in B&W sensors ... okay, you don't have the absorption of the Bayer filter. Is that it? And for this, you sacrifice all that beautiful colour information that could be used to get a great B&W photo eventually?

[Here is the link again: http://tinyurl.com/3n8nw4q
--Mike]

[Matt Kerr]

Yeah, Do it Canon! I will buy one!

[Ben]

So this is real and not, in the spirit of recent product launches, an "announcement" leaked a week in advance?

[Bernie]

You got me there... I first thought that you were a week early for the annual April 1 posting...

[john crowley]

For a minute there I thought I lost a few days of my life!

[Dop]

I saw the headline and thought "But April Fools Day isn't until next week!"

[Soeren Engelbrecht]

I would love to see that sensor in a Rebel - as long as they kept it F-mount :-)

[Arg]

More importantly, why didn't Leica make one first?

[Dan Rosenthal]

Mike, I think they are trying and succeeding to torture you.

[tex andrews]

Not hard, and really difficult at the same time. Technically, you'd think it was an easy swap. At the manufacturing level, though----the Rebel line is maybe the least easily disruptable, maybe---it's about the volume. Messing with that manufacturing line might actually be difficult.

Then you've got the mindset problems on the part of Canon management. Based on current behavior and reading the tea leaves from a recent interview DPR did, it does not seem likely that Canon is too interested in this sort of stuff.

[Kevin Sutton]

Hi Mike, You had me checking my calendar to make sure it wasn't April the 1st! Canon body with a Nikon lens mount???

[Steve Pritchard]

Never mind the students, Canon. Hand it over!

[Karel Kravik]

There already is the astrophotography oriented 60Da, probably even more niche camera than a hypothetical 60Dm would be. Got me thinking how much harder to implement (in terms of hardware&firmware) the monochrome would be when comparing to the 'a' version.

[Boglev]

Interesting. Veeeery interesting !!!!

[Michel]

had to check the date when I saw this. Is it April 1st in Japan?

[Mark]

The problem with the wonderful idea like a major manufacturer offering a very niche product like a monochrome DSLR would be the simple economy of scale. While many of us claim that we would love a product of this sort and would gladly plunk down say $700 for a monochrome digital Rebel the costs to develop this product will be significant. Which means that you need to sell tens of thousands of them before you could get the price down that low. But since you will only sell a few thousand at best you wind up with a niche camera that has the features of a $600 DSLR but costs $1500. So now you are ticking people off that they are spending that much money for such a "lame and featureless" camera. Not to mention the fact that big box stores won't bother carrying it because you can already hear their salespeople saying to customers "Oh you don't want that it only shoots in black and white!" Now you have further reduced customer exposure to the product and killed even more sales. And the final insult to injury is that you have to sell through the inventory of these niche cameras before their technology becomes old hat and you can't give them away.

[MartinP]

I also think/thought that this is a week early . . . but if someone can produce a usable body with these sensors then can it also be missing the on-sensor IR filter please? That way we get the maximum play value, as it were.

[Karel Kravik]

Or, maybe another way to think about this announcement is "OK, I need some Nikon glass and a shutter button". The (probably) absent display only makes it more film-like, doesn't it :-)?

[Lynn]

Forget the Canon bw sensor. I want this sensor in an Xpan: 150Mp bw panoramic full frame sensor, anyone?
http://www.gpixelinc.com/en/Newsinfo.aspx?m=20140313105347500252

[Ed]

Ah, nice for 3D scanners. If you use SLS (Structured Light Scanning) the resolution is more then welcome (no Bayer) and with the right amount of red,green en blue light from a beamer no need for color anyway (software takes care of that).

Greets, Ed.

[christian]

Well, I am a 'dyed in the wool' b&w photographer and have been for about sixty years. However I totally agree with Torsten Bronger's post and absolutely don't see the point of having a digital b&w camera.

[Trecento]

Interesting. I wonder what other industrial cameras exist, and if any are adaptable to fine art uses.

[Richard]

Kinda like the old hot-rod guys rebuilding Fords with Chevy drivetrains.

[hugh crawford]

Finally a Canon that isn't as ugly as a steaming pile of ****.

The sensor in this camera is very different from the sensors in Canon's cameras for photographers. Since there is no mechanical shutter you can sync the electronic shutter to an external shutter or strobe , much like genlocking a video camera. It also features programmable independent horizontal and vertical pixel binning.

What is the most interesting to me is feature in their press release as translated by robots at google

"Brightness level conversion function
- Adding an offset to the brightness level, can change the contrast enhancement function the brightness magnification
-Line density conversion function of increasing the gain of the low-luminance side without changing the saturation level
The power of a low-contrast image is so improved, and is useful for detection of flaws thin glass

I think what they are saying is that you can program the camera to manipulate the response curve in the analog domain before it is digitized, so that the image can have a broad dynamic range yet have high local contrast without posterization or resorting to dithering which would be a bad thing for machine vision applications.

This feature alone would be huge in terms of allowing a film like "H&D curve" by addressing the linearity of response that I think is one of the weak points in the whole digital photography paradigm.

As the saying goes , more is less , so I expect that removing color , focussing , mechanical shutter, on camera memory, any sort of LCD or user interface whatsoever leaving literally a box with a sensor at one end and a hole in the other will push the price up to the new KIA used Mercedes Benz range.

Plus it looks a lot like the new Phase One, which is probably even more expensive

[Stephen Scharf]

Canon think outside of the box???

Impossible. Or, at best, improbable.

I guess the bottom line is that they really don't think they need to (although I think they are mistaken).

I went to the beautiful Filoli Gardens in Woodside, CA for some photography this last Sunday. Needless to say, I took the X-T1 and X-Pro1 (mounted with the 23 and 14mm primes, respectively).

There were many, many other photographers there as you might expect, and not counting the folks using cell phones as cameras, only two other photographer besides myself was using a mirrorless camera, one an Oly Pen and the other a Sony A7.

Virtually all camera users were using Canikon DSLRs.

I've noticed a clear trend in the roughly 1.5 years I've been using mirroless cameras....the only folks I personally know that are seriously interested in these cameras are working professionals; there seems to be no interest from amateurs or "prosumers". This data is perfectly concordant with all the photographers I saw when I was up in the Grand Tetons area last fall, as well.

[Hugh Crawford]

I think that Canon is the box.
Canon is identified with big film SLRs and then DSLRs the way Graflex a really long run with 4x5 and 5x7 SLRs and then 4x5 press cameras. When roll film and then 35mm became dominant they just couldn't compete , even with innovations like 35mm cameras with compressed air motor drives.

I also think that Sony and it's sensor customers pretty much have everything outside the box covered, and are buying the lot next door to the box to park their new space zeppelins and fusion powered all weather skateboards while the come up with next big thing.

[Dan Khong]

The combo makes me think of Romeo and Juliet. Even amongst warring factions can sometimes emerge a matching pair and a fine love story.