Why autofocus on the 5D Mark II wasn’t improved
For those of you who have been living in a cave for the past several weeks, there is a new camera coming out that replaces the current Canon 5D. Although the new camera introduces a number of improvements over the old one, a lot of people have been voicing strong concerns that the autofocus wasn’t improved at all over the one from the original 5D. In a recent interview a Canon exec stated that the reason is due to size. He stated that it is not possible to fit a newer AF in the 5D without expanding the size of the body. For some reason, though, Nikon engineers managed to figure out a solution to the same problem. In my opinion, and in the opinions of pretty much everyone else out there, his answer was complete BS. However, I disagree that the reason why the 5D Mark II does not have an improved is because Canon doesn’t want to reduce sales in their 1D line.
First though, I do think that for the majority of uses the AF on the 5D isn’t so bad. I took the picture below recently in poor lighting and with AI servo.
A lot of people have the conception that Canon has different teams. One team works on the 5D, another the 1D, another the 50D and so on. When they finish with one camera, they start work on the next. The reality is certainly not that simple. Most large products have multiple teams. These teams can be divided into roughly two types.
- Feature teams. These are teams that work on a specific feature that often spans multiple products.
- Shipping teams. These are the actual products that we think of.
In terms of size, far more individuals work on the feature teams than work on the shipping teams. The shipping teams themselves are quite small and most of their work consists of determining what features will be included in their product and combining these different features into a complete working product. Despite their small size, the shipping teams are extremely important. If a particular feature has too many issues, the shipping team will boot it from their product. The feature teams depend on shipping teams and the pay and performance of the leads of the feature teams is heavily weighted on the inclusion and success of the feature in the shipping product. For each feature team, the products that their feature ships in are called the “ship vehicles”.
Where I’m getting in all of this is that within Canon, there likely exists an autofocus feature team. This feature team has limited resources and, in my opinion, was faced with a standard gut wrenching decision that many feature teams constantly face.
“Should we put all of our resources into the next version of the feature, or should we put some of them into an incremental update of the existing version?”
Completely new versions of features are often expensive to develop. Changes in infrastructure are often expensive and major portions of the feature must be redesigned. In my opinion, the decision faced by the Canon AF feature team was how much resources to put towards a completely new type of AF and how many to put towards improving the AF in the 5D Mark II.
From a business perspective, a new AF for all cameras would be a big seller. The 1D has had some issues with the AF and for a marketing sake a next generation AF certainly makes sense. However, redesigning and properly testing a new AF system is very expensive, and there was no way they could get it in time for the 5D. Since putting resources on improving the AF in the 5D would delay the ship date for the new AF, they likely made the decision to keep the old AF in the new 5D. So far this decision seems to be working for them, as the 5D Mark II is expected to be sold out almost everywhere when it ships.
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Tags: 5d, 5D Mark II, AF, autofocus, canon, opinion, photography, reason, release, shipping