That's officially it for PMA

Since Canon stated that 1D mkIII is the only announcement on PMA, the Canon rumours blog could be closed. But I've decided to keep it online and to post some new speculations from time to time. After all it still has a lot of visitors and people will be able to check it in the future to see what the speculations were like (like in the pre-announcment PMA time, people were also writing what the pre-Photokina speculations were), which were true, which were far off etc. And I'll also keep it, so that I can continue with rumours posting before the next PMA.

So now we know, that the only new camera is 1D mkIII, we can speculate on what will Canon announce in (or before) the fall. Since their flagship camera 1Ds mkIII wasn't announced, as well as 40D which most people expected, especially because it has some stiff competition and because its sales went down. Besides that 30D was only a minor evolution of 20D, in my opinion it should be designated as 20D mkII. I admit, that Canon surprised me, by announcing 1D mkIII. It's the one camera that needed to be replaced the least. After all Canon was the king of PJ class with Canon 1D mkII N. Besides that we all expected more announcements form Canon, because of its double anniversary. I expected 6D to be realeased only simultaneously with 1Ds mkIII (which is already 30 months old), because a 16 mpix (or so) 6D would kill the 1Ds mkII sales. So I think we can expect 40D and 1Ds mkIII in the fall. I wonder when will 6D be announced. Because 3 announcements at the same time may be too much even for Canon.

Here's a short summary of possible announcements (probably just 2 of those):
-40D (I hope the specifications will be a bit better that those rumored for PMA announcements). If Canon wanted to bump up the resolution higher than the competition, than moving to APS-H sensor (1,3x crop) would be a reasonable decision. The sensor size would be doubled, resolution of 12-14 mpix easily achieved, while the camera could gain in dynamic range and high ISO performance (because pixels would still be larger even though the resolution would be 12-14 mpix). In that case 6D would have to be announced, because it would kill the sales of 5D (which are poor anyway, at least in Europe).
-1Ds mkIII, 22 mpix, much smaller and lighter body (1v sized).
-6D, 16-17 mpix, weather sealed body, improved AF, and some minor adjustments (larger buffer, better LCD, a bit larger VF magnification)

But maybe time has come for all the companies to gain more profit, to get back all the billions of dollars that were spent for R&D since the beginning of the digital era. Who knows, but it seems that pace is dropping (except for entry level DSLRs). I still hope that the competition will be stiff and that it will announce some killer cameras (like Nikon D3H, Pentax k1d in the fall etc), so that also Canon will be forced into higher pace. Only that brings greater technological advancements and dropping of prices.