Q&A: Canon's camera tech guru Chuck Westfall

LAS VEGAS--Two's company, three's a crowd, and Canon's Chuck Westfall is a lot less lonely these days.

Canon once was the sole camera company offering a digital SLR whose sensor is the size of a full frame of 35mm film, a technology that can increase the performance advantage and price penalty that SLR cameras already have compared with compact cameras. In November, though, Nikon began selling its full-frame rival, the D3, and last week Sony said it will launch its own full-frame competitor by the end of 2008.

Westfall is a camera tech guru and the technical adviser for Canon USA's professional products marketing division. In his 25 years at Canon, he's amassed an encyclopedic knowledge not only of official camera specs but also deeply buried engineering details.

Westfall shared his opinions about the full-frame market and other camera trends during the Photo Marketing Association trade show here. He also discussed fuel cells to replace batteries, flash memory technology, OLED displays, and geotagging.

Talking tech might sound like fun if you represent the company that leads market share both for compact cameras and in the higher-end SLRs, but Westfall also has had to deal with unpleasant autofocus trouble that's afflicted the company's $4,500 photojournalist-oriented EOS-1D Mark III during some shooting conditions. A quality and reputation problem is the last thing a camera maker wants for a model aimed squarely at the professional photographer market that Canon dominates but that Nikon is aggressively courting.

Though Canon is repairing affected 1D Mark III models and has issued a firmware update, the issue still hasn't gone away: Rob Galbraith, the photographer and consultant whose tests brought the problem to light, still believes the 1D Mark III's predecessor has better autofocus, and he reported Monday that Canon is working on yet another fix.

Read on for Westfall's response to the autofocus issue and other thoughts.

Stephen Shankland

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