The road to Photokina 2014 is getting shorter and shorter, but new speculations and rumors are coming every day concerning what the 7D’s successor will be like. And according to CanonWatch, the company may put the next generation of Dual Pixel AF into the camera. Dual Pixel AF is what the company uses in its 70D camera to give it excellent autofocusing abilities in the video and live view modes. Indeed, it is quite effective–though it isn’t as fast as the fastest Olympus, Panasonic, Samsung and Sony offerings. It’s quite seamless though for videographers that need to autofocus. At this stage in the game though, many videographers will still only manually focus lest focus pullers and lens operators get out of a job.

Though Canon Watch gives the report some credit, we’re not totally sure that Canon would make such a move. For starters, they don’t like cannibalizing their own product lineups and are a very conservative company when it comes to making decisions like this. However, they made that move with the 5D Mk II when it came out and it changed the way that videographers work on set. So with that said, it may be a bit too early to introduce the next generation of Dual AF for the company. It would also mean that the 7D successor would in some ways be better than the 5D Mk III. This happened originally when the 7D came out–everyone wasn’t sure if it was higher or lower in the tiers than the Mk II. Indeed, it was lower.

But the folks that would love to use technology like this may be professional bird photographers when used in conjunction with the faster motors in Canon’s super high end L glass. Adding video to their skillset could be a nice way to help them market themselves more to editors and magazines looking for new and compelling content.

We’re going to have wait until Photokina 2014 to see what’s coming for sure.