Canon EXPO 2016: Past, Present, and Future

Canon has recently concluded the Canon EXPO 2016 – the largest comprehensive corporate exhibition from Canon Group held every five years. Previous expos were held in New York, Paris and Tokyo, with Shanghai as its final leg. Here, the company has showcased its past, present, and future products, and introduced its future five-year development strategies.

Canon is mostly known for its imaging and lens technologies as well as sensors. While most of the attention is in its consumer offerings like cameras and printers, Canon is also involved in other technologies that are crucial for consumers and businesses in the near future.

The expo is divided into 13 exhibition zones, starting with Canon’s history and their first products which include the Kwanon camera – Japan’s first 35mm focal-plane-shutter camera in 1934.

Another example of Canon’s early venture into imaging systems aimed at healthcare and research is the CX-35 – Japan’s first 35mm indirect X-ray camera in 1941. From there, Canon displayed its current lineup of products for home use like its Digital SLR cameras, compact system cameras, Inkjet printers, scanners, photo printers, and lenses.

For professional use, we have digital video camcorders, DSLRs, and cinema cameras. Canon also has camera systems designed for producing 8K content as well as a projector system that can output 8K resolution images, as well as high-resolution displays and professional photo inkjet printers.

Canon also displayed its EOS camera concept model that packs a whopping 120 megapixel high-resolution sensor that can clearly capture the texture of very small subjects.

There’s also a desktop 3D printer called the MARV that can be used for producing educational tools for kids, personal use, as well as for research and industrial design. In addition, Canon has also showcased its Super Creative Printing technologies that can print images with color, elevation and gloss. Prints made this way display a certain depth and are more realistic compared to ordinary flat prints.

Canon’s professional equipment doesn’t end there though. The company also produces broadcast equipment, ophthalmic equipment for diagnosing health problems through the eye, digital radiography systems, breast CT, and photo-acoustic mammography, to name a few.

For office use, Canon also has its wide-range of multi-function printers, scanners, and multimedia projectors. For the industry there’s the industrial cameras, high-speed printers, digital production printing systems, Mixed Reality (MR) systems, 3D Machine Vision Systems, as well as network cameras for security purposes.

Speaking of security, Canon also develops networked cameras for surveillance. These systems use sophisticated hardware and software to do a variety of tasks – estimate the gender and age of a person, display position and height in 3D, track people movement in a room in 3D, as well as provide monitoring and privacy at the same time.

With the Canon EXPO 2016, the company wants to show that there’s more to them than just consumer cameras and printers. Its imaging technologies allow it to get involved in different industries like healthcare and security as well as the Internet of Things. Its products for the Home, Office, Professional, and Industrial use will certainly help it grow and become a $10 billion Group by 2020.