‘Speed it up’ says Canon’s Masaya Maeda (CP+ interview)

The folks at DPReview posted an interview with Canon, taken at the last CP+ show in Yokohama. They interviewed Mr. Masaya Maeda, Managing Director and Chief Executive, Image Communication Products Operations at Canon. An excerpt (emphasis mine):

Question: Canon offered a maximum pixel count of ~22MP for seven years before the launch of the EOS 5DS and 5DS R. Why did it take that long to increase resolution?

Answer: I wasn’t actually aware that it had been seven years! The biggest reason it took this long to get to 50MP is the targets we set for pixel-level quality. Every year we sit down with photojournalists, and listen to their demands – what they need to do their job – and the biggest demand was that even if pixel count increased, actual pixel-level image quality would not decrease.

Obviously at the same time as we were seeing demand for increased pixel-level quality we were also being asked for increased pixel-count. The reason the time finally came for us to release the EOS 5DS and 5DS R this year was that we found a means of satisfying the demand for increased pixel count without sacrificing quality. It took us that long to reach this level.

I like this part of the interview. When pointed to the criticism that Canon is somewhat slow when it comes to innovation, Mr Maeda answered:

Personally, I think we’re slow as well. Every day I’m saying ‘speed up, make it faster!’. One of our themes now as a company is upon developing a new technology, to shorten the time between development and when that technology is introduced into a product. We need to shorten that time. That’s our goal.

Keep it rolling Canon! Read the interview at DPReview –>