Canon Professional Services (CPS) is a membership program available to professional users of Canon equipment. In order to qualify for CPS a member must have a certain amount of products which Canon deems “professional” this includes lenses, cameras, and other Canon equipment. For each item that you have you receive a certain amount of CPS points which qualifies you for one of three different levels of CPS membership.
Canon USA announced this week that they are making some changes to the CPS program that we thought were notable. The first thing that really jumps out to us is that the Canon 60D and Canon 70D will no longer qualify for CPS points. This means that if you currently use a Canon 60D or 70D as part of your CPS point total after these changes are rolled out you will lose those points.
In an effort to concentrate our efforts on our core professional members, we will no longer include the EOS 60D camera and future successor model cameras as qualifying equipment for any level.
Another pretty big change is in the service discount and how often that you can use it. The repair discount available to Platinum members is being changed to %30 and the discount available to Gold members is being changed to %20. The other piece to that is that now there is a limit to the number of times that you can use that discount to get service done in a calendar year.
According to Canon platinum level memberships will be limited to 15 repairs that can be discounted via the service discount, while Gold member ships will be limited to 10 repairs in a calendar year. This is a pretty big change from the unlimited repairs that you could apply the discount to previously.
These changes were announced via email to current CPS members as well as posted on the Canon USA CPS website. If you are curious about learning more about CPS and the changes that they are making to the service you can do so via the Canon website here.
My Thoughts On the CPS Changes
I feel bad for anyone who barely qualified for CPS who currently owns a 60D or 70D camera. After these changes are made you will no longer qualify for CPS membership, unless you upgrade or purchase cameras that get you back over the hump.
At the same time I also see this from Canon’s perspective, more and more people are buying higher end prosumer models like the 60D and 70D, so in an effort to better focus on true professionals (as CPS is meant to) they must eliminate the gear that the majority of true professionals would not use as a primary camera.
Then there is the introduction of the new Cinema membership classification for professional filmmakers. This is a neat addition to CPS that will be enacted in 2014, while it is something that I will not be personally qualifying for I can definitely see the benefit to Canon based filmmakers.
What are your thoughts on these CPS changes? Do you think that they are fair or do you think that Canon is being unfair in the changes that they have announced? Let us know in a comment below.
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