Canon unveils fast-shooting EOS camera

By Kuriko Miyake

(IDG) -- With its latest EOS camera, Canon claims to have the fastest shooting speed in the world of digital still imaging.

Canon unveiled the EOS 1-D camera on Tuesday in Tokyo. Designed for professional users, the 4.15 megapixel camera is a single lens reflex digital still camera with interchangeable lenses. Most significant, the EOS 1-D allows photographers to shoot eight frames per second for up to 21 consecutive frames at the highest resolution, large/fine mode.

In comparison, its predecessor the EOS-D2000 had a continuous shooting speed of just 3.5 frames per second, says Jun Misumi, a Canon spokesperson.

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While a digital still camera takes longer to release a shutter than a film camera does, the new EOS model gets closer to the performance of a film SLR camera by narrowing the shutter release lag time to 0.55 seconds. It also has a blackout time, the time nothing can be seen through the viewfinder while the picture is being taken, of 0.87 seconds, the company said in a statement.

Images are captured on a 4.15 million-pixel CCD and stored in JPEG format. In the highest-resolution mode, the images are 2464 by 1648 pixels and are 2.4MB in size. A 128MB Compact Flash card can hold up to 53 images at this mode, according to a company statement.

The camera is equipped with an IEEE 1394 (FireWire) interface to download images quickly to a PC.

Canon will roll out the EOS-1D in mid-December in Japan for the equivalent of about $6379, and worldwide around the same time, Misumi says. With such a high price tag, the camera is not for the faint at heart photographer.