A discussion on a different forum brought up the question of who assembles Canon (or any brand for that matter) cameras. I know Canon develops and has their own technology but do they actually assemble their own cameras?
As far as I know, yes. They are also among the few Japanese companies to have bucked the outsourcing trend, electing instead to keep their manufacturing and R&D facilities on the home islands (Japan), instead of send manufacturing overseas to Southeast Asia. They claim that this arrangement gives the company more flexiblity and interplay between development and manufacturing, since the divisions are so close together.
The Asian market equivalent of the KISS digital/Digital Rebel, the 300D, has been made both from Taiwan as well as Japan, as evidenced by the sticker on the bottom of the camera.
As far as I know, the 75-300mm MKIII is made in Malaysia. The same lens might be made elsewhere too, though.
I am pretty sure all the shutter mechanisms for Canon, Nikon, Konica/Minolta, etc are now made by Voightlander (Cosina) in Japan for the consumer cameras. They have managed to drop the price of the shutter units to the point where it's no longer feasable to make them in house for the consumer cameras there was an article with Mr. K (I think that's his first initial) on this topic a while back printed somewhere on the net.
I don't know about the 1 and 3 series camera shutters however.
Looks like my EFS 10-22mm lens was manufactured in Taiwan. As an avid cyclist, I know, generally speaking, components manufactured in Japan are preferable to parts made in Taiwan. That seems to be true for camera lenses as well(the 10-22mm was returned to Canon after less than 100 photos).
I had noticed last week when it arrived, My 500 F4 IS is made in Japan, but the rear lens cap was made in Taiwan. It made me shake my head a little bit. The rear cap that came on my 300 2.8 IS the week before was still a made in Japan cap.
The 500 was dated July 04' while the 300 was dated march 04'.
It was just something wierd i happened to notice, and it made me wonder what other parts in the lens were manufactured where.
Bear in mind that the county of origin is the country of final assembly. The rear cap may be the tip of the iceberg. For example, look inside an "American" made computer and count the foreign subassemblies. I'm sure this is true of cameras too.
I read somewhere (CPS Europe maybe) that all 1 series cameras were assembled in Japan. I think the same article said that all super telephotos were assembled by hand in Japan.
Note the "assembled" does not necessarily mean that every part was manufactured in Japan.
hvr_oosterzele wrote:
Does it really matter? I'd rather have a lens made in China that is sharp then one made in Japan that is soft.
Well that's not really where I was going with the question... What made me think about this is I was looking around on line for a cheap digital point and shoot and found one made by Vupoint. I had never heard of the brand but the camera looked exactly like a high end Sony digital point and shoot. It made me wonder if maybe they were the same camera manufactured by some company and then rebranded under the Sony name.
