Canon Brings Production Back Home (because of the Yen)

 

Canon (Reuters) – Canon Inc is shifting capacity back to Japan in an apparent vindication of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s yen-weakening policies, which have made it more profitable for some Japanese manufacturers to produce and export from home.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the world’s largest camera maker was caught out by its reliance on domestic production by a soaring yen – which devalued its overseas earnings and increased labor costs – forcing the company to produce more overseas.

It is now set to reverse that shift, boosting jobs and factory operations in Japan in a move that will delight proponents of Abe’s economic policies and erode the competitive advantage enjoyed by rivals such as Nikon Corp, which has long made the majority of its cameras overseas.

Canon will raise the proportion of products made in Japan to 50 percent within the next three years from 42 percent now, Chief Executive Fujio Mitarai told Reuters in an interview on Thursday, after saying he was “looking forward” to a further slide in the yen.

Read the rest at Reuters ->

Canon Powershot SX60 HS HS Due In Summer 2014?

Canon Powershot SX50 HS

 

A somewhat vague rumor surfaced on the web stating that the successor of the Powershot SX50 HS may be announced sometime in spring and be available for shipping in the summer 2014. The camera will most probably be named SX60 HS. No specs or other information. Speculation goes to the point that the SX60 HS could feature a 100x zoom. A pertinent patent appeared some time ago, though I do not think the SX60 HS will have such a crazy zoom range.

The Powershot SX50 HS is a popular bridge camera, and indeed it is due for replacement.

[via CR]

This Lightroom Setting May Save Your Live

 

Lightroom

As fstoppers puts it: it’s the most important setting you should care about in Lightroom, and it is turned off by default. This setting comes to help in the case your [shoplink 13714]Lightroom[/shoplink] catalog gets corrupted. The setting we are talking about is “Automatically write changes into XMP”. The XMP files are so-called “sidecar files” and they contain all settings you applied to a picture. If the setting is on, Lightroom will constantly save all the changes you made into an XMP file. Should your catalog disappear the changes you made to your precious pics are still there. Not bad, uh? There is a drawback though: this setting could slow down Lightroom a bit.

You can turn it on in the Catalog Settings of Lightroom

  • Mac OSX > Lightroom > Catalog Settings > Metadata
  • Windows > Edit > Catalog Settings > Metadata

An XMP file will be created only if you work with CR2 files. If you work with DNG, JPEG, TIFF, or PNG files all the XMP data will be written directly inside these files. Another drawback is that there is no history of your edits that will be saved with XMP data.

An alternative to this setting, if you want to stay on the safe side, is a smart backup strategy, which, among other things, means that you should backup your LR catalog to different places.

[via fstoppers]

So What Got Announced Today By Canon in Hong Kong?

Image credit: Canon

Source: wyswig

We reported a rumor stating that Canon will have an announcement today, January, 9, in Hong Kong, It turned out just printers where announced, these:

SELPHY CP910, CP820, PIXMA iP8770, iX6870, iX6770, MX537, MX477 and iP2870.

These printers have already been announced for CES 2014, so nothing new here. But at least we have some pics to show after the break.

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