Imitating the Great Liar

That infamous master of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, remarked that if you tell a big enough lie and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

Generations of politicians, lawyers and marketers (many of these know all about lying, of course) have taken that to heart, none more than Canon in their advertisement for their latest consumer grade DSLR. This sells for $750. Doubtless a competent and effective tool and you can see their slick ad here.

But that’s not the point. Clearly the TV ad is advertising their inexpensive mass market camera body.

No. What gets my goat is that there’s another video wherein Canon prides itself on explaining just how the ad was made – the second one of the choices on the right. A minute or so into it and we are told that no fewer than ten Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III cameras were used by the pros to take the snaps in the ad video. Last I checked those run $7,800 a pop or some ten times the cost of the featured product.

So how, pray, do pictures taken on a $7,800 camera end up misrepresented as having been taken on a consumer DSLR one tenth of the cost? And why, if the new cheap model is so good, was it not used to take the snaps in the ad? Never mind the carefully chosen words in the above (“….real photographs taken by Canon digital SLR cameras….”) the opening shot of the ad shows Mrs. Housewife clearly using the consumer DSLR, immediately cutting to the snaps taken by pros using the top of the line $8k honker. Not that you would know, of course. Anyone watching the ad would conclude exactly what Canon and its sleazy US management and lawyers intend – that all the pictures you see were taken on the camera shown.

Shame on you, Canon.