Hasta La Gadget!

Canon has sold 40 million EOS SLRs. That’s a pretty good run, but the most amazing thing is that half of those are digital.

The EOS range was launched in 1987 with the EOS 650, a round-edged auto-focus camera that – at the time – looked like something from the future. I was there at the launch, a perk for me as I was a kid with a Saturday job in a camera store.

This first EOS was genuinely revolutionary. Up until then, autofocus SLRs were slow, with either big motors and spindles in the body trying to shift what were essentially modified manual-focus lenses, or they used special AF lenses with big plastic wedges on the sides which contains the motors. Canon had invented an ultrasonic motor (USM) which fit inside the new EF-mount lenses and was fast and quiet. Patents meant that Canon kept this lead for years.

In 2000, Canon introduced its first home-made digital SLR (previous models used Kodak internals), the EOS D30 (3 megapixels, $3,000), By 2003, 20 million EOS cameras had been made, 13 years after the first model launched. It only took seven more years to double that number, and an astonishing 10 million of those were sold in the last two years and four months.

Canon may not have been the first to make a digital SLR, but with the manual focus T90 (my Dad still uses one) and then the AF EOS range, it arguably invented the modern ergonomic SLR shape and the all-electronic button and dial user interface. Congratulations, Canon.

Canon celebrates production of 40 millionth EOS-series SLR camera [Canon]

Canon History Hall [Canon]

Image credit: Canon Japan

Canon EOS-D30 Review, October 2000 [DP Review]

Amazon’s experiment of replacing textbooks with Kindle DXs in classrooms already took a pretty hefty blow from Princeton’s feedback — which described the jumbo e-reader as “a poor excuse” for an academic tool — but here comes some more punishment courtesy of the trialists at Darden. The Business School describes the DX as clunky and too slow to keep up with the pace of teaching, with up to 80 percent of users saying they wouldn’t recommend it for academic use. There is a silver lining to this cloud of hate however, as up to 95 percent of all project participants would be happy to recommend the Kindle DX as a personal reading device. That meshes rather well with the high satisfaction and sales figures e-readers are enjoying, but it does show that the hardware has a long way to go before it convinces us to ditch our paperbacks.

[Thanks, Miles B]

Kindle DX trial at Darden concludes it’s academically woeful, personally enjoyable originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 May 2010 08:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Panasonic’s TC-PG20/25 series offers a highly tempting mix of features, value, and initial picture quality, but long-term black-level performance is still an open question.

Four balls appear to roll uphill in an uncanny creation by Japanese researcher Kokichi Sugihara. The prize-winning illusion is one of many examples of what Sugihara calls “impossible motion.”

If you’re reading Engadget today (and let’s be honest, you’re reading it right now), then you might have noticed that Adobe has launched a pretty full-force campaign to call out Apple on its anti-Flash mission. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, it’s the advertisements that start with “We [heart] Apple.” Along with the web ads, the company has also snagged a full page in today’s Washington Post to address the battle in which the two companies have been engaged. All of this links back to a new statement from Adobe, as well as an open letter from founders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock (“Our thoughts on open markets”), addressing Apple’s recent spate of clear and direct attacks against the company and its products. Most of the reading should sound familiar to those of us who’ve been following the saga, but here are a few choice quotes from the duo:

We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs. No company – no matter how big or how creative – should dictate what you can create, how you create it, or what you can experience on the web.

When markets are open, anyone with a great idea has a chance to drive innovation and find new customers. Adobe’s business philosophy is based on a premise that, in an open market, the best products will win in the end – and the best way to compete is to create the best technology and innovate faster than your competitors.

We believe that Apple, by taking the opposite approach, has taken a step that could undermine this next chapter of the web – the chapter in which mobile devices outnumber computers, any individual can be a publisher, and content is accessed anywhere and at any time.

In the end, we believe the question is really this: Who controls the World Wide Web? And we believe the answer is: nobody – and everybody, but certainly not a single company.

So, it’s clear this issue isn’t going to die out any time soon, and it’s also clear that Adobe is going to go to great lengths to defend and protect its cash-cow. Of course, if they really want this message to hit home to the core iPad and iPhone users out there, they’re going to need to run that ad in HTML5.

Note: As you should know, the ad sales and editorial teams at Engadget are separate entities, so this campaign was as much a surprise to us as it probably is to you!

Adobe targets Apple in ad campaign launched today, publishes open letter from founders originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 May 2010 07:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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