Canon is apparently thinking about APS-C on the RF mount
According to the latest rumors from CanonRumors, Canon is giving some thought about APS-C on the RF mount, and is doing market research, talking to select professionals about their thoughts and needs for a crop sensor camera on the RF mount. I find this rumor curious, considering about a month ago 3 APS-C cameras were supposedly coming soon. While I do think when there's this much smoke there's bound to be fire, Canon's APS-C plans still remain very much unknown at this time.
The rumor again, re-iterates that there are no RF APS-C lenses (coined RF-S for sake of brevity) and that this camera will either use adapted EF-S lenses or full frame RF lenses.
There's confusion over this and what RF-S means when we write these rumors. It doesn't mean that Canon is going to create a new mount in the vein of EF-S and EF. There isn't a need. EF-S was created because Canon wanted to inset the rear elements deeper into the mirrorbox of DSLR's. This caused the rear element of these lenses to hit the mirror on full frame cameras. This is obviously not an issue with mirrorless since it doesn't have a mirrorbox assembly. What we mean when we talk about RF-S is simply cropped lenses for the full frame RF mount. That's all anyone means about this. People seem to be taking the wrong idea about what we mean by stating RF-S. I guess in reality we should actually call it RF-M but it's a little late for that.
My main takeaway from this rumor is that Canon doesn't want to do APS-C on the RF mount. Let's face facts, if they wanted to do it, they would have done it by now.
Canon already has an APS-C mirrorless ecosystem, that without a significant amount of investment in resources, could be simply ported to the RF mount, and the EOS-M lenses re-named to RF-M. They wouldn't have to think about this, they'd just do it. This is actually what I would love Canon to do. Take what they have already done on the EOS-M and simply change the mount, and re-issue everything under the RF mount. If they want to make the pain a little less, offer trade-ins on existing EOS-M gear. Will they? They certainly haven't to date, and by the looks of this rumor, they certainly don't want to. Again, this would take very little re-design for Canon. The only re-design would be adding RF protocols into the newly minted "RF-M" camera bodies and making RF-M200, RF-M50 II, and RF-M6 II slightly bigger cameras than their EOS-M brothers.
As I mentioned before, without any crop lenses for the RF mount, and sort of ecosystem of RF APS-C is doomed for failure, and I don't think Canon is that shortsighted. Canon is a company that worries about 10g's on a camera weight and 3mm on a camera body size. They aren't simply going to toss full frame RF lenses onto a low cost APS-C kit and call it good when Sony, Fuji and Nikon sport APS-C optimized kit lenses and kits.
Much of these rumors don't make much sense to me. We'll wait and see, but if you are waiting for an RF APS-C, I'd suggest starting to save up for an R3 or an R5.
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