Canon PR Shop Suspiciously Quiet

Canon’s press relations people aren’t known for sparing our email boxes, so it’s with some interest that tomorrow will mark the two-week mark for their press release holiday. Releases are normally stacked up to be excreted out of headquarters on roughly an every two to three day cadence. Most are about matters on which even desperate, fawning publications like us wouldn’t bother reporting, such as an executive promotion, or the fact that the New York HQ for Canon USA sponsored a baseball team. Or something about cinema line stuff. Anyway, this may indicate that the marcom department is running around, arms waving, with hair afire regarding the expected R3 launch.

With real-life samples seen in the wild as of a couple weeks ago, press relations staff will be expected to babysit photographers and reporters, placing restrictions on their ability to sneak away with RAW files and generally preventing from doing the nefarious things that press staff believe are in the nature of photographers. If this speculation is near the mark, test units will be in the hands of a few community members under embargo.

It wouldn’t be a waste of time for Camnostic readers in Brighton might pay special attention to Gordon Laing as he loiters on the beach, accosting seagulls for his autofocus tests. Known for eschewing integrated grips, an R3 would be easy to spot on him. Heck, it might finally be time to buy him that damn coffee he’s been hinting about for the past few years.

DPReview will probably have shunted a test copy to one of the executive staff, where it will sit until all the other publications have put out their review. If that is indeed coming to pass, some of the more useful reviewers will be publishing speculation even as their betters trim their eyebrows for better pupil-detected AF point selection and prepare questions for the Canon PR flaks – remember, the ones who are not at the moment ginning up press releases – about deep learning and very significant significance of software to the future photography.

That, or tomorrow the PR sausage factory will restart, releasing another item about a vice president receiving a publication mention for the ninth consecutive year, or something about copiers or a cine lens, and prospects of a pre-Olympics release will look more dim.