Canon has today announced the introduction of the HJ18ex7.6B, a new HDTV portable zoom lens, successor to the HJ17ex7.6B. The new Canon HJ18ex7.6B was developed to satisfy a wide range of shooting situations, including press conferences and other news-coverage applications as well as indoor and outdoor location shooting for program production. Maintaining a compact, lightweight body design, the new lens achieves a zoom ratio and resolving power. Equipped with a newly developed drive unit, the lens realises greater utility efficiency to satisfy the advanced on-location production needs for broadcast content creation. Capitalising on the optical technologies Canon has developed over the decades, the HJ18ex7.6B delivers high-resolution, high-contrast imaging performance from the centre to the peripheral areas of the image field across a broad area spanning from close range to long range. The HJ18ex7.6B achieves a minimum object distance of 0.56 m, the shortest in its class for a standard HDTV lens, and a 18x zoom ratio with a focal length range from 7.6 mm at the wide end to 137 mm at the telephoto end. As a result, the lens supports shooting in a diverse range of situations, from outdoor settings to confined indoor locations. The HJ18ex7.6B’s newly developed drive unit employs a Canon encoder that ensures the accurate detection of zoom, focusing and iris information to enable the highly detailed display of positioning information. Once power is supplied to the lens, it provides support for broadcast camera’s aberration-correction functions without the need for initialising. This drive unit will also be incorporated in principal models of Canon’s current portable HDTV zoom lens lineup. The Canon HJ18ex7.6B (IRSE S) and HJ18ex7.6B (IASE S) will go on sale in Australia in late July 2014.