Canon D413 (1984)

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The Canon D413. Progress in work since 1981. Ten months before the '84 Summer Olympics japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun asked Canon to participate in image transmission experiments. After initial field tests, trainings and preparations, 5 months had passed. Still Canon did not have a transmitter or recorder. These had to be designed, built and tested within the remaining 5 months.

After everything was completed and finished, Mr. Masaya Maeda, now Managing Director and CEO of Image Communications, and others went to Los Angeles with the electronic still video camera (after all Canon was the official camera of the Olympic Games). The prototype series codename was D413. For broadcasting the images a car telephone was attached to the transmitter. This worked well until the broadcast of the men's marathon when the phone failed to work. The engineers quickly had to switch to a public line in order to continue broadcasting.

According to Mr. Maeda some 50 color electronic files were transmitted back to Japan. Mr. Kazuro Yamamoto, Chief of the 'Yomiuri' press group, claimed that it took six minutes for black and white stills and twentyfour minutes for color pictures. A few hours later the images were received, reviewed and printed.

Canon's success of 1984 led to the further development of the RC-701 which was later publically announced in 1986 at the Photokina and advertised as the Canon SVS which stands for 'Canon Still Video System'. Information about the camera itself are very rare. Some sources state that the CCD was developed jointly between Texas Instruments and Canon. Other sources say that the camera used three CCD's. Which in retrospect could be true as color pictures were made with the camera.