Canon have traditionally benefitted heavily as a company from their CMOS tech, in cameras, printers , scanners, copiers, and everything electronic. I'd be very surprised if they ditched the sensor part - it would be a major slap in the face for them, and de facto an indication that they have lost the ability to do R&D in their core business.
Edmund
Qualcomm has relied heavily on custom ARM designs in their products. Now they are (temporarily?) switching to a standard ARM implementation in their top-of-the-line product. That has got to hurt, but I guess it is a matter of getting the right set of features out at the right time (possibly being late to the 64-bit party):
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7925/qualcomms-snapdragon-808810-20nm-highend-64bit-socs-with-lte-category-67-support-in-2015I guess there are many possible twists on Canon + Sony sharing patents, sharing technology, purchasing manufacture capability or simply purchasing ready-made sensors. It has been claimed that Canon has a couple of image sensor manufacturing plants (unlike everyone else) that use "stone-age" process technology, even for image sensors. Perhaps they see declining sales and need different process tech in order to satisfy DR/MP expectations of their customers? Perhaps Canon thinks that sensors are becoming a "commodity", while they can differentiate on things like ergonomy, flash control, lens selection, etc? Perhaps the image sensor industry is changing, and having a potent cellphone-camera-sensor division is necessary in order to do the R&D needed in larger sensors?
I think it is great if Canon makes a camera that is optimized for slow-moving still-photography with high resolution, high (?) DR at low ISO, great colors. It would be an interesting complimentary model to more generic "low-light + action-photo + 4k video" models. If that means dealing with Sony for sensor tech, then it just means that they are being pragmatic.
Or all of this could just be a rumor (even the cameras are not confirmed yet), based on the expectations of camera enthusiasts that make our a large portion of the internet posts about cameras, but a small portion of total camera sales...
-h