Content area
Full Text
When it comes to HD camcorders, Canon is an anomaly. Panasonic, Sony, and JVC have all made broadcast cameras for years, while Canon - which got its start in the 1930s creating a Japanese Leica - has hewn closer to its roots, never straying far from optics and still cameras. Oh yes - and those lucrative scanners, copiers, and printers too.
This puts Canon in the unique position of being the only optics company that also makes HD camcorders. Carl Zeiss, Leica Camera, Schneider Optics, Fujinon - they don't make camcorders on the side like Canon does. On the other hand, Panasonic, Sony, and JVC don't make state-of-the-art broadcast lenses either.
So you'd expect an advanced marriage of optics and camera design from Canon, and that's what Canon gave us with the introduction of the XL H1 in September 2005: lens interchangeability; a 20X optical zoom with optical-image stabilization (which JVC's interchangeable-lens GY-HD100U couldn't provide); the first use of 24p HDV native progressive format recording (newly featured in Sony's HVR-Z7U) for the XL H1's unique 24F mode; HD-SDI, genlock, and timecode in/out (all firsts in a 1/4in. tape HD camcorder); and four channels of audio with independent level controls.
Then there's the XL H1's distinctive "chainsaw" profile, now appearing in other designs such as Sony's PMW-EX3 XDCAM EX - which traces back to Canon's MiniDV XL1 and XL2 series from 1997. (Which, in turn, traces back to Canon's interchangeable-lens L1 and L2 Hi8 camcorders, which were popular among embedded journalists in the first Gulf War.)
In fact, most of the controls and layout of the original XL H1 are virtually identical to those of the MiniDV XL2. If you sense a pattern in all this, a Canon modus operandi , you're right. Canon is never first in the marketplace with a new-format camcorder - it usually follows the leaders by a year or so - but when the company does introduce a new design, it makes a virtue of sticking to what worked best the last time around. It refines instead of replacing. Improvements are aggressively incremental at best: the L1 becomes the L2; the XL1, the XL2.
Which brings us to the XL H1S. The DNA is so intact, you have to use...