[Gear] Canon Thinking About Powered Lenses For Videography

Canon is looking into building power zoom lenses to use for video use. In an interview given to techradar, Mr. David Parry from Canon UK said that «Power zoom would be very good to have for video, we’re looking into it – that would be quite intriguing». “power”, here, doesn’t mean a super zoom lens, but a zoom lens where the zooming movement is powered (by a motor). Not trivial, since in videography manually adjusting the zoom may introduce shaking and noise. Other features a power zoom could have, is to be able to zoom in or out after given time intervals. In other terms: the zooming operations could be programmed to be executed in an automatic fashion. Canon is actually not producing such lenses, nor do other big brands for their DSLRs. Panasonic and Olympus build such lenses for their mirrorless system cameras.

It’s not surprising that Canon has about powered zooms, given the fact that the EOS 5D Mark IIbefore, and the EOS 5D Mark III now, revolutionized/are revolutionizing the way of making films. It’s well known, for instance, that an episodes of House MD was shot using an EOS 5D Mark II.