A Look at Canon’s Crazy 8K Camera Prototype

by Sebastian WöberSeptember 22^nd, 2016

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Canon is displaying their prototype of 8K camera at Photokina 2016. This crazy setup shows a complete working 8K solution from start to finish.

The Canon 8K Cinema EOS camera presented here is part of Canon’s complete demonstration of their vision of an 8K future. The camera is hooked up to a prototype 10″ 4K on-camera display and an 8K monitor as well as an 8K printing solution for stills.

The camera body of this 8K prototype is actually a slightly modified C300 mark II body with an 8K super35mm sensor developed by Canon. It is connected to a prototype debayering box that distributes 4K signals to 4 Convergent Design Odyssey recorders for high quality recording.

Canon 8K Camera Prototype at Photokina 2016

Compared to the RED Helium solution, Canon’s current setup is huge and will most definitely not look like that as a final product. As cameras get smaller and smaller, we might see all that technology packed into a camera body similar in size to the Canon C300 or recent Canon C700 we talked about during IBC. At this moment, the Canon 8K camera prototype has no internal recording.

The current recording format is 8K RAW 60fps. This results in over 10TB of data for every hour of footage. Surely this is not the end of development, but rather the beginning of what lies ahead in the 8K area for Canon cameras. Like many other companies, they have recently been focusing on providing solutions instead of products, and we’re curious to see where exactly will Canon be taking this technology 4 years down the road.

Do we need 8K? Certainly not (yet). But as technology progresses further and we see storage and speeds of systems increase by the month, we might see a working 8K workflow in the not too distant future that can certainly open up greater possibilities in post production, flexibility in live boradcast and more, even though as an end format we might not need that 8K too soon. Companies are certainly pushing in that direction. The question is: will they convince us to go along?