Will Canon allow EF lenses to work on future RF bodies?

antonio-salieri wrote:

Kharan wrote:

...

Canon have now orphaned yet another mount without recourse,

"Orphaned," you say, when the EF/EF-S lenses all work on the RF system. Unless you mean EF-M, which was (to be honest) a flawed design, reportedly led by the PowerShot team, before the EOS team took mirrorless seriously.

I think whoever reported that was wrong.  The original EOS M was basically a mirrorless EOS 650D with a 2012 era EOS menu system. The M2 added wireless connectivity, which was pretty bold considering the capabilities of affordable smartphones in 2013.  I think the Powershot team took over EOS M when smartphones ate their main business. The main flaw in the design of the M was that it was slow, nearly as slow as a 650D in Live View.  I think it was a good design for the original purpose, a small companion for Canon DSLRs and a small system for people who couldn't be bothered with DSLRs but wanted something better than a Powershot, but it was too expensive to catch on right at the start and was never intended to be the all-inclusive system people are demanding.

have hamstrung speedlight compatibility in their cheaper bodies,

Which is a matter of including hardware components on the cheapest body; even then, there is an adapter that will handle any old speedlight.

And, thanks to warranty registrations, Canon have a good idea of how many people buy speedlites for their bottom-of-the-range cameras with built in flashes.

Problem is, there’s a cutoff point at which this becomes a tempting proposition. This might be reached a few years from now, or in decades. Just ask Nikon - people with AF-D lenses were left by the wayside in the transition to mirrorless,

Yeah, because of the motor thing.

and the rest of the F-mount catalog could well be discarded a few years from now.

Considering that the FTZ adapter is an active adapter (translating from F to Z in the adapter), I don't see how, unless you suggest Nikon will lock out their own adapter manually.

And of course, this won’t happen all across the range at once - if you invest in an R3/Z9 successor, it’s very likely that you’ll see continued support for many, many years to come. But if you only get an R8/Z5 successor, who knows when they’ll hang you to dry?

The top-line Nikon DSLRs had better support because the non-motorized lenses required further hardware components in the camera. You're talking about adding software to artificially block EF lenses.

Thing is, people with broad lens catalogs tend to own and value more expensive bodies, whereas newcomers usually settle for the economy models, and they’ll be especially tempted to adapt cheaper lenses. This should be seen as a net positive, but modern capitalism doesn’t reward long-term loyalty and attachment, it just pushes for more short-term profits relentlessly. I.e. “force new users to purchase new lenses”.

Lol, I'm sure that they'll increase short-term profits by selling cameras that are less useful than their predecessors.

Yeah, which is why Canon rewarded them with an official FD adapter for RF /sarcasm.

Well, I mean, FD lenses work perfectly on RF, so... you're point. Of course, they're full-manual lenses, but still, they work just fine. FD to EF was a bad comparison as discussed before (because film cameras were different, as the film itself determined the characteristics of the image, not the camera, and switching from full-manual to electronic would not have resulted in direct advantages on a new body; EF's new design was meant to focus on greater forward-compatibility, unlike Nikon — and look at that, it did)

They don’t give a damn. They’re going to drop EF as well, and if they can earn 0.1% more profit by excluding most future bodies from access to it, they’ll do it in an instant.

You assume facts not in evidence.

Canon's history with lenses and bodies over the past 60 years is that they continue to try to sell their previous products for a year or so after people stop buying it and try to support them with spare parts for seven years after discontinuing them.  Obviously Canon can't sell EF if nobody buys it, but they would lose far more than they might possibly gain by disabling EF lenses with future bodies.