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ABOUT 10 YEARS AGO THE THEN-new DV video format and digital transmission protocol FireWire/iLink/IEEE1394 set the video community on its ear with high-quality equipment at an affordable price. Since then, all the major camcorder manufacturers have been battling to win the market by offering the most features for the least amount of money. For consumers looking for three-chip MiniDV format cameras priced around $2,500, choices were limited. Not anymore! The new Canon GL2 offers the three most important features in a professional-level DV video camera: flexibility, superior optics, and digital computability. In fact, the camera should be called the GL3 since its features come in threes: three CCDs, three recording modes, three major audio modes, three exposure modes, and three main interface options (DV tape, FireWire, and SVHS).
In 1998, Canon joined the fray with its flagship XL1, and then in 2002 came out with the more moderately priced GL1, which also was a standard DV camcorder model with flip-out screen and hand-carry bar. When I first heard that Canon had upgraded its popular GL1 camcorder, I was about as excited as I am when I'm watching my camera batteries recharge. But the new incarnation offers variable-speed zoom control, manual audio, 2 1/2in. color flip-out LCD screen, automatic SMPTE color-bar generation, high-res digital still capture, and 16:9 letterbox recording. The improvements are substantial, and, aside from the prosumer form factor, the GL2 is a professional tool for video, audio, and still acquisition.
One of the interesting things about the GL2 is Canon's Pixel Shift technology. The imaging technology splits incoming light into the standard three separate color components. Each of the three 1/4in. CCDs handles one of the three primary colors - red, green, blue. Since the green component of the spectrum carries approximately 60% of the information for picture detail in the video, the green CCD is shifted 1/2 pixel from the red and blue CCDs, and then is sampled twice as often to get the maximum detail from the video signal. I'm not much for manufacturer hype, but in comparison with two other three-chip cameras, I found that Canon's claims about Pixel Shift were substantiated, provided the scene was well lit. In areas of low light, the GL2 video images exhibited grain...