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]
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