so i'm looking at the gl-2 stats and it said it had more "effective" pixels than the xl-1s. sadly i can't look it up right now and type it here for you to see.

i bet there is something i'm not seeing and you are. what is it?

The XL1 has bigger CCDs. 1/3 against 1/4. Pixel count isn't a really accurate way of determining the performance of a CCD.

That's correct. The newer GL2 has 3 1/4" CCD's with 380,000 effective pixels. The XL1s has 1/3" CCD's with 250,000 effective pixels.

As Adrian notes, this difference is bigger in numbers than in your eye. I match XL1s and GL2 footage quite nicely with little adjustment.