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The Canon GL1 is Canon's latest addition to their lineup of DV camcorders. It features serious Canon optics and a load of features that will prove very appealing to a wide range of videographers. It's inexpensive enough for the prosumer and even the high end of the consumer market, with features that will also appeal to professionals. Professionals that already have more expensive DV cameras, including Canon's XL1 series cameras, may find that the GLl has the characteristics they want in a second camera.
L-Series Fluorite Lens
By far, to me anyway, the outstanding feature of this camera is the lens. Canon is among the best and most experienced providers of lenses for photography and video. Their broadcast lenses are superb. The XL1 was the first low-cost DV camera with interchangeable lenses and is generally considered to be one of the top DV cameras in its price range. Canon is aware of the importance of high-quality lenses and the GLI is no exception.
According to Canon, fluorite, the material incorporated into the GL1's lens, provides improved resolution, contrast, and color reproduction over lenses using only conventional optical glass. It defeats the color aberration found in many low-cost, high-magnification, lightweight lenses.
The lens has a 20X optical zoom and a digital zoom that extends to 100X. Like all digital zooms, the farther out you go, the more pixelated the picture becomes. This camera, however, does better than most, partially due to the general optical quality of what's coming in through the lens. I would consider the digital zoom useful for most purposes out to about 40X in good lighting.
Pixel Shift
Another part of the camera design that contributes to the picture quality is what Canon calls "Pixel Shift" technology. The GL1 has three CCDs with 270,000 pixels each. There are denser CCDs in some camcorders, some with 410,000 pixels or more. The higher the pixel count, the higher the resolution that a CCD is capable of. However, the trade-off is that with a higher pixel count on the CCD, each pixel is smaller and therefore gathers less light. Higher density CCDs are also more expensive.
With a 3-CCD camera, as with all video, the green component provides over half of the picture information. The Pixel...