CANON LENSES AND SERVICE SCORE AGAIN IN WORLD CUP 2006

The World Cup, Germany, 2006. Football’s greatest tournament, contested by the world’s great footballing nations. Vast crowds filled the superb German stadiums: but their numbers were miniscule by comparison to the millions watching at a distance - whether on big screens in city centres everywhere, in bars throughout the world, or simply in the millions of homes tuned in to every game. And this is where Canon Lenses made a big World Cup difference.

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The Canon lenses at the Cup

Host Broadcast Services, HBS, produced the television and radio signals for the 2006 FIFA World Cup. They contracted 6 Outside broadcast  companies who all together deployed  7 OB vans to cover the outside broadcasts over  12 venues. These included two trucks from UK company Visions and one from the French company VCF, who used for the most part Canon HD zoom lenses XJ86x9.3. 
Apart from this many individual broadcasters contracted additional facility companies to add enriched pictures to the HBS feed, including the Dutch Outside Broadcast, the German TVN and many more, all of whom make much use of Canon lenses. The end result: of the lenses used in the World Cup the majority – well over 200 – came from Canon.

What came to Germany with the Canon lenses was a unique standard of service. To make sure the lenses performed superbly every time and got all those special shots, Canon deployed two dedicated German service centres to give advice, maintain hard-worked lenses and solve problems.

The service shop was open from 9am to 6pm every day: even more importantly a team of 5 Canon technicians drove up and down Germany to ensure that 2 were present at every match, and offering a 24-hour emergency service back-up. We reckon they did more miles than most of the football teams – on and off the pitch included!

One unique difference Canon helped to make to this World Cup was to capture the stunningly smooth slow-motion shots, which were replayed immediately during the broadcasts, often exposing trickery that even the referees failed to spot. They were shot with the new  ‘Hi-Motion’ high speed camera from NAC, provided by ARRI, an HD camera that can shoot 1920x1080 in 300 f/ps. The camera uses B4 broadcast lenses and was equipped with an XJ86x zoom lens. “We tested the Canon XJ100x and the XJ86x on this camera before the Cup, and were satisfied that this was the high quality lens we needed to zoom into the action - or foul play - on the field” – Andy Hayford - Digital High-Speed Project Manager. 

HBS asked TVN to equip 14 teams of HBS camera staff with cameras and Canon lenses to travel through Germany and shoot images of the people and activities around the stadiums - and the beauties of each host city. 24 Canon lenses were used, mostly the J17ex7.7, but also the J11ex4.5 for the wide-angle shots, and the J22ex7.6 for shooting more telecine.

TVN also had their OB trucks shooting the matches for German and Japanese TV in both SD and HD. Again, they used 100% Canon lenses: the big box lenses XJ25 and XJ86x were the main choice in the stadiums.

So Canon proved once again at the World Cup, just as they had at the Turin Winter Olympics, at Athens 2004 and at many other major world sporting events, that the winning technology and service comes from Canon.