Canon USA’s brand-new Long Island headquarters doesn’t just house boardrooms, cubicles, and water coolers. It’s also where the venerable camera company maintains its giant showroom, in which every current Canon product — plus a plethora of other imaging technology tidbits — is on prominent display. We took a trip out there last week; here’s a taste of what we found.
Probably our favourite display was Canon’s collection of cameras throughout the ages, spanning from the 1934 Kwanon from Japan, to the 5D Mark II from 2008.
Among the more iconic cameras on display were oddballs like this 1986 RC-701, a precursor to digital, which stored images as analogue scan lines — basically video frames — onto floppy disks.
This giant polygon sculpture employs eight digital projectors to create moving light patterns on the surface.
Who doesn’t wish they had a giant state-of-the-art digital printer to liberate their photos from computer screens?
A whole lotta glass…
We got to tinker with a Canon 1DC, the 4k video-shooting DSLR, along with the monstrous $US5,000 85mm Cine-Prime T1.3 L lens.
Mixed-Reality goggles that blend virtual objects with your actual environment for a mind-bending augmented experience.
Let’s not forget that medical imaging is a huge industry for many of the companies that make our digital cameras. This is a retinal imaging machine for optometry — that you can can plug your DSLR right into.
And last but not least, a gentle reminder that calculators are still alive and kicking. Well, sort of.
