At Broadcast India Show, Canon India used its stage time to spotlight a compact cinema camera aimed squarely at filmmakers and the fast-growing creator economy. “This time we launched a new product which is EOS C50,” said Toshiaki Nomura, President and CEO, Canon India. He pitched it as a production-grade powerhouse that fits a broad set of use cases, from film and OTT to broadcast and what he called the serious content creator. Alongside it, Canon showed the R50 V, a small APS-C model designed for vertical and horizontal shooting, with presets and connectivity built in.
SurveyNomura framed the EOS C50 as compact yet fully professional, positioned for crews who want cinema tools without the bulk. “This is the best quality of compact but production grade of the powerhouses,” he said. On the stills and hybrid side, the R50 V targets creators who want to leave the phone behind. “Many of the content creators are currently using the smartphone,” he noted, calling it a huge opportunity. The path Canon has in mind is straightforward, begin with R50 V to “scale up their image expression,” then step into full-frame as needs evolve.
Nomura was candid about the buzz around machine learning. “AI is a catchy one, everybody talks about AI, but don’t know how it is applied,” he said. Canon is already deploying it for tracking subjects even when they briefly disappear behind obstacles. “AI can understand deep learning, so if you’re tracking a subject behind an object, it can keep focussing on the subject even though it’s obscured.” On computational image clean-up, Canon’s stance is to start by capturing cleaner data. As his team added, “We don’t capture noise at all, in the first place, our sensors are so good in low-light performance.” The philosophical line from Canon and its global partners is that “enabler feature is very, very important,” not wholesale replacement.
For creators who value speed and minimal friction, Canon is leaning into out-of-camera looks and quick publishing. “Now the presets and the LUTs, I think that was one thing where a lot of development has happened,” Nomura’s team said, pointing to “15 plus presets” on entry models like R50V. Wireless and platform hooks are standard. Cameras are “ready with Wi-Fi, ready for streaming, and ready for quick YouTube connectivity.” Asked to summarise, they offered a two-word pitch, “It’s super easy,” then added a provocation to phone-first shooters, “Cinema grade quality at half the price of a premium smartphone.”
Battery life improvements are ongoing across the line. “We always have the new generations of battery coming up,” Nomura said, claiming that runtimes have moved from about an hour to “over 2 or 3 hours now.” On guided composition and baseline quality checks, Canon prefers to preserve the artist’s role while giving safety nets. “Aesthetics is still the pride of every artist,” he said. Practical aids like safe framing are already present, so “they are not cropping in the wrong way.” To hasten delivery, Canon is enabling filters and skin tuning at capture, “even the filters, skin textures and soft skin, that has been enabled.”
Canon sees the purchase journey starting online for specification comparisons and research, then moving into touch and try for professionals. “Online is the gateway for everybody to see and comparing the specifications,” Nomura said, but workshops and hands-on events remain central. Store strategy is evolving rather than shrinking. “We are seeing a gradual expansion,” he said, with larger, more specialised outlets. Walk in with a niche request and “he will instantly hand it over to you,” he added, describing the depth he expects from retail partners.
Third-party lenses have grown in popularity, but Nomura drew a line on longevity. “Canon focusses on the cost of ownership,” he said. Many buyers keep native lenses for “over 10–15 years,” so a “bit of premium today” is justified by long-term reliability. He was blunt about the comparison. “I am honestly yet to see a person who says, I have a non-native lens and I have been using it for over a decade now.”
On new formats, Canon is not waiting on the sidelines. “We already have it, we have VR lenses, we were the first one to get VR lenses,” Nomura said. While he stopped short of future roadmaps, he stressed that sensors capable of supporting these workflows have been shipping “as of a couple of years ago.”
Nomura expects Indian buyers to move quickly on new gear. “You launch anything anywhere and the customer wants it the next day,” he said, pointing to the EOS C50 as proof. “All the stocks that we are getting are already sold to consumer without seeing or touching the product.” Higher capture resolutions are not just for pixel peeping, he argued. With 7K or 8K sensors, final delivery at 4K gains flexibility. “I have 6 shots in my one shot,” he said, citing wildlife buyers and broadcasters. “In the wildlife space already 8K, even in India, it’s mandated with buyers like BBC, they all have asked to have archives to be shot in 8K.”
Looking ahead, the company’s pitch balances pragmatism and ambition: capture the cleanest image at source, keep creators moving with simple workflows, and let long-lived native glass underpin the system. If Canon can keep the C50 momentum while nudging phone-first shooters toward dedicated bodies like the R50 V, the gap between creator convenience and cinema-grade output could narrow quickly in India.
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Mithun Mohandas
Mithun Mohandas is an Indian technology journalist with 14 years of experience covering consumer technology. He is currently employed at Digit in the capacity of a Managing Editor. Mithun has a background in Computer Engineering and was an active member of the IEEE during his college days. He has a penchant for digging deep into unravelling what makes a device tick. If there's a transistor in it, Mithun's probably going to rip it apart till he finds it. At Digit, he covers processors, graphics cards, storage media, displays and networking devices aside from anything developer related. As an avid PC gamer, he prefers RTS and FPS titles, and can be quite competitive in a race to the finish line. He only gets consoles for the exclusives. He can be seen playing Valorant, World of Tanks, HITMAN and the occasional Age of Empires or being the voice behind hundreds of Digit videos. View Full Profile
