Ok guys shoot me down but I do not see any difference in footage from the c100 to the 60d or 5d iii for that matter,
I am ready to pull the trigger on the c100 and have spent all day looking at footage.
I want to justify paying £4k for a camera/camcorder that gives me a better look than a mere 60d. or even a xa-10/hfg25..
Some videos I have seen seem to have a soft edge look like a dreamy look?? what's that look?
Vimeo c100 forum there are quite a lot of examples and I dint see anything outstanding.
Even the best Joe Simon with his latest, the picture looks flat uninteresting...
Pretty much weddings I do I want the colours to pop an be really top dog like Ray romans examples...
Is it me? Enlighten me you guys!!!

The C-100 is one of the sharpest 1920 cameras you can get, and the files give you great flexibility for grading, you can make them pop as much or as little as you want. Two of my favorites:

Canon c100 Low Light Test on Vimeo

Canon c100 Tests on Vimeo

Is your monitor able to show the differences between files from the cameras you mentioned? Also the ND filters, push AF, AF on some Canon lenses, incredible image quality at high ISO, and other features make it more like a potent camcorder than the DSLRs. The camera itself is a basic kit for event work.

Pat

From videos I have watch the C-100 has look better. I thing they show more detail. Wish I had the money to buy one.

Comparison: Canon C100 to 5D Mark 3 - YouTube

I think what you might be missing is a couple of things that make it better than a DSLR and how its more natural and 'grown up' look gives a more professional finish.

I have the 5D3 as well as the C100 (and I had a 5D2 and 7D before that) and although you can easily get that punchy look using those cameras, it's a little more tricky to get that nice natural look, that has lots of latitude, is detailed rather than sharp and brittle looking, and holds the highlights well.

As mentioned above you CAN get the punchy look in post with a C100 by just pushing your contrast etc. but it's a better way of achieving that look by getting a beautifully detailed image with lots of tones and than working from there, rather than getting that 'baked-in' look that you end up fighting when you're colour grading.

That's what I've found anyway, when I was doing the research before buying the C100. Now I've got one, I've used it on a few commercial jobs and wouldn't give it back if you held a gun to my head. The 5D3 only gets used for stills now.

Hope this opinion helps.


Wayne

Same here. I do still use the 5D3 for timelapse, but that is also capturing stills to be processed into movies.

Thanks for your replies guys. I think the answer lies in whether the c100 is worth that extra £2000 than the 5diii, I do love the shallow depth of field the 5d iii gives you and I understand the c100 is easier to use , but you still have to go full manual I presume on the c100, still have to manually focus, still use the same lens, still need a view finder so it all lies down to the dynamic range and this is where you guys are saying it outshines the 5d iii. For weddings I need good colours good focus good picture quality, and both cameras gives me this. I understand great dynamic range for guys shooting corporates and TV but for weddings and other smaller stuff maybe I should just get the 5d iii. More views would be welcome..

The 5dIII is no slouch, and you get a pro stills camera in the bargain. In the end it all boils down to your skills, craft and vision anyway. Good luck with your decision, there are so many choices now we all end up going through this way too often.

Cheers

Rent the C100 & do a full day shoot with it, personally I won't touch a DSLR again after dropping my 60D's for two C100's.

Steady Steve, don't get caught in the hype ;) I'll do some real world comparisons this week ;)

Cheers Pat, Michael. Bob, Nicholas, Wayne, your replies are excellent, and I will wait for Dave who is kindly testing the c100 soon for me. Cheers Dave....

personally I won't touch a DSLR again after dropping my 60D's for two C100's.

That's easy to say :) the c100 is 9 times the price of a 60d so I"d expect a lot better quality, with a 11k euro budget (the price of two c100's excl lens here) I"d rather get me all the quality glass I need and a cheaper body, like a 5dIII and a 6d which give you full frame, high iso handling and raw capability. The c100 is no doubt a better camera in functionality though and from the looks of it it produces much sharper footage.

You really cant see any difference? wow

I own both C100 and 60D and i see major difference in picture quality.

That's good James... Will wait for Dave's results because like Noa says it is expensive...

Steve. I've told this story a number of times, but at the c300 launch (different camera, same image), canon made the gutsy move of projecting the demo films on a 90 foot screen at the Paramount Theatre on the studio lot of the same name. Now if you saw the guest list to this event it would boggle your mind... And I saw many of those names walk right up to the screen -- pixel peeping at its finest. Well, even at that size the image was superb and I saw a lot of people walk away smiling, shaking their heads.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, I was asked to shoot a performance and I decided to have a go at a multicamera set-up... Cinema eos in the center with a 5d and a 7d at the sides. It was a challenging situation. Lots of contrast, tinted, low light levels in an old ballroom. I had lots of confidence in what the c300 could do in this situation, but frankly I'd forgotten how bad the dslr's could look under those conditions. In the end I just went with the center camera, quietly depositing the dslr footage in the proverbial dustbin. When you get used to the footage from the c300/c100, you'll have a hard time even looking at what comes off of those other cameras you named.

I saw a lot of people walk away smiling, shaking their heads.

Weird, most of my clients do that after they have seen my film and I don't even have a c300? :)

But you are right that whatever camera you choose to make sure any other b-cam is up to the task as well, Canon dslr's are not exactly known for their pinsharp images, something to consider when buying 2 different camera's.

When you get used to the footage from the c300/c100, you'll have a hard time even looking at what comes off of those other cameras you named.

TBH - this is what I'm afraid of, mixing of C100 and DSLR footage together in the same scenes.

Mixing them on different scenes shouldn't be too much of a problem, but that's a decision I'll be able to make this coming week when the C100 arrives and I do my own testing. It's great to see what other people do, but there's really no substitute for doing your own tests.

I recall doing a similar test between the XF300 and DSLRs and was amazed at the extra detail the XF300 had, so much so that it required adding a small gaussian blur in post to make them match!

The other thing I'm looking to test is the real low light capability vs 5D3. It's going to be an interesting week.

In many ways, even my XL-h1 is a better match to the c300 than my dslrs... Except in lowlight situations where you don't even get an image. I had high hopes for the bmpcc as a b-camera, but I'm not sure the raw workflow is worth it, as the color response is so bad in prores mode. I'm thinking the rx10 might be an option, but if not the c100 really is a bargain especially when paired with a ninja.

If you have to mix C100 and DSLR, you'll be grading the C100 back to only the best that the DSLR can achieve - lower detail, blacks that fall off a cliff, and you may have to do some 'skin detail reduction' on the C100 to approach what the Canon DSLRs do on skin.

Dave nailed it regarding the C100's passing similarity to the XF305 - the imager is the same as the C300, it's basically a 4K sensor downsampling to 1920x1080 on a 2:1 ratio: every pixel has two greens, a red and a blue, so it's absolutely on par with 3 chip cameras (unlike other single-sensor cameras).

The C100 has oodles more detail, far better tonality, a wide dynamic range, faultless audio, superb exposure and focus tools, and is so far beyond the DSLR look (if your clients like sharp, colourful video) that comparisons are a little strained.

The DSLRs had a 'film look' based on a *lack* of detail, a certain grain structure (!), a sort of Super16 look.

You're also going to work a lot harder with DSLRs to get what you want. In good hands and with a narrative setup, yes - it's great so long as you have control. For a low profile reportage look, yes - it knocks your socks off. But C100 is still a better image, especially for Corporate & Event, which is where it's aimed. I mostly mix my C100 'hero' footage with Sony EX1/3 B-Roll.

It was definitely worth it for me.

Besides the amazing image quality, ease of focus, use & long battery life the main reason I invested into the C100 is for it's low light sensitivity, oh and the built in ND filters pay for themselves. It's literally insane how good the C100 is in low light as a wedding/event shooter this trumps all other features for me. I sold my Arrilite 750 Plus lights & now only use small LEDs when it gets really dark.

The C100 is 5x more expensive than say a 70D & no the image quality is not 5x better but having spent the money (which I didn't have) on C100's I don't regret it one bit. Remember the C100 is not a magic pill if you suck on a 60D you will suck on a C100 & yes you do need lenses. The C100 simply offers professional redundant reliability for paying jobs. Lastly I'll also add that I have booked a few big corporate clients simply because they loved the "look" the C100 offers (aka quality). I still have my 60D's in my bag as back-up bodies but when I use them for cut away shots it's really hard to think that I ever used them as my main cams.

If you still cant see the difference, i dont know.

Canon C100 vs Your Old DSLR on Vimeo

You might also want to search Jonathan Yi c300. He did an insightful and humorous comparison of that camera versus the 5d mark2 when it first came out that was one of the best arguments against dslr's that I've seen.

A comparison I did when I first got my C100

Camera comparison Canon 550D and Canon C100 on Vimeo

I can't even stand to use my 550D anymore for video it's that much better.
And as people stated before, battery life, ND filters, XLR input, ergonomics, low light, I could go on and on.
Yes, if you use it for a living, it's worth it very much.
And as someone else stated, one reason I don't like to use my DSLR as B Cam as you have to grade your C100 footage to look crappy like the DSLR.

This video was shot with the C100 ( wide shots ) and 550 on the closeups.

The Cattle In The Cane - Full Concert & St. Luke's Chapel, Charleston SC 10/15/2013 on Vimeo

You can see the detail in the wide shots, and the soft DSLR look when you get close.
I WISH I could afford two C100s.

I've just started my week long evaluation of a C100, but as usual the weather here in the UK is cold, damp and miserable, so I've only done internal shots so far. Tomorrow will hopefully be different.

Either way, I'm noticing the C100 is substantially sharper than then 5D3, even when the 5D3 is sharpened in post. I'm not yet convinced that the C100 is substantially less noisy though. Still playing with Wide DR and Log and we'll see where that all goes.

What I do know is that it's both sharper and less noisy than my XF cameras!

You may not find the c100 to be less noisy. The 5d has a ton of noise reduction applied, which is one of the reasons the image is so soft. But the character of the noise in the c100 image should be finer and less prone to the blocky compressed noise that you see on your 5d. One looks more like film. The other more like " digital".

And as someone else stated, one reason I don't like to use my DSLR as B Cam as you have to grade your C100 footage to look crappy like the DSLR.

I wouldn't use "dslr" as a term for everything that looks crappy, here's a video of a dslr rivaling the c100 sharpness:
Little Dreamer on Vimeo
and here is one that shows how good it can look:
Zenmuse Z15 GH3 {Sunrise to Sunset} on Vimeo
or here
iFLYsolo: 100% aerial wedding film on Vimeo

It's not because you have used a crappy "dslr" that all dslr's are like this, it just means you didn't use the right one :)

But it needs to be said that the c100 does tick many boxes but it comes at a premium price, like we are used from Canon. They start with very expensive camera's that have it all (like a c300 or 1dc and then start crippling everything down the line where the cheapest ones get crippled most, preferably in image quality.

But then again you have people with crappy 550d's with one crappy 30mm lens making something like below, something many c100/300 owners will never manage to achieve and that hasn't anything to do with the camera.

Behind the move on Vimeo

You may not find the c100 to be less noisy. The 5d has a ton of noise reduction applied, which is one of the reasons the image is so soft. But the character of the noise in the c100 image should be finer and less prone to the blocky compressed noise that you see on your 5d. One looks more like film. The other more like " digital".

You are of course correct, though recording both a Ninja 2 as well as internally gives me a chance to see both of them without their internal codecs.

The things that stand out so far are:

1) The C100 is without doubt a lot sharper than the 5D3.

2) The C100 is still 'as noisy' as the 5D3 at higher ISO settings, but it's a more even noise whereas at ISO8000 this 5D3 exhibits some pattern noise. I haven't checked the other 5D3 I have here but I suspect it will be similar. While the noise from the C100 is much more even (no patterns that I've seen yet), there is quite a bit of chroma noise, not just luma noise. I'm playing with Neat Video to see how well it cleans up and I'm having some mixed results. No matter, I have a few more days of playing before it has to go back and I have three paid shoots this week that I may get chance to try it in real world situations.

3) Clearly both cameras do some de-noising when using their internal codecs

4) At high ISO, both Wide DR and c-log seems to get really noisy. I suppose that's to be expected as there's no free lunch for the extra DR, but it's still disappointing :(

I have no experience with the C100. I do, however, recommend the review of the C100 by the StillMotion folks in Filmmaker Magazine, and the related "Pulse" video and the related BTS video. While it is true that Canon sponsored the shoot, the Still Motion folks seem like straight-up folks that would not tarnish their reputations by saying things they did not believe. Who else had the NFL hire them based on a wedding video?

They explain why the C100 has more appeal to them and their style of shooting than the C300.

It's not because you have used a crappy "dslr" that all dslr's are like this, it just means you didn't use the right one :)



I guess I should have phrased it better, as I loved my 550D for video before I had the C100.
Maybe crappy could have been replaced with - muddy or punchy next to the C100.
Actually my best film to date ( I think ) was done with the 550D and Sigma 30mm


Smuggler - Vanessa Vixon - Custom Fetish Video - Damsel In Distress - White Slavery Ring on Vimeo

Could it have been better with the C100? Probably. Would any of my customers, or my wife, be able to tell the difference? Probably not. But the process of making the film would have been better for me, the camera man, and me, the editor due to the ease of C100 of filming over the 550D, and ease of editing the codec.
Although my wife hates the "flat" look of C-Log and loves the punchy muddy 550D. *Sigh*

From a purely ease-of-use aspect, here are my musings as a run-and-gunner of weddings;

Weddings are always on the move - from inside dark places to outside in the sun. C100 = built in NDs which negate the need to fumble in my bag, fish out an ND, screw it on the front and miss a couple shots in the meantime. Same for the reverse of having to take it off. Small thing? Maybe, but I can't stand having to work at NDs as everything moves back and forth from setting to setting, and light intensity to light intensity.

Weddings are way too dark sometimes. C100 = low light stress pretty much gone.

Not sure about the 60D (if it has a time limit for recording), but coming from the 5D...C100 = no recording limit so I don't have to worry about stopping and starting in the middle of a ceremony or speeches.

Weddings, most of the time, means I can't control light as much as I'd like so I've always had to deal with contrasty scenes which always ticked me off when I had to try and work post-magic on footage. C100 = much greater dynamic range allowing me to capture more of what my mind/creative musings are looking for in an image without having to worry so much about all the different light sources nailing my scenes.

Sound at weddings? C100 = lots of input options, headphones, sound levels.

5D vs. C100 footage...yeah clients, my wife and others may not notice or care about the difference (which is real), but I see it and I notice and I care. The C100 gets me a lot closer to what I think I should be delivering and makes me more comfortable in my work and finished product.

C100 = Dual recording which means peace of mind as I shoot my clients' once-in-lifetime (hopefully) event.

Far more manual controls right in my hand that make using the camera a breeze. Better ergonomics. Able to use my already purchased lenses with the camera.

Caveat; I've only used the camera in corporate settings thus far, but absolutely cannot wait to use it once weddings start up again for me here. All the headaches (as far as cameras go) that I experience shooting weddings are really going to be diminished.

Ease of use, controls, low light ability, incredible dynamic range which is still blowing me away, small footprint, crisper image, dual recording....all, without a doubt, make the cost worth it for me.

Hello. Here is my comparision between 60d and c100. In my opinion the different is huge in all of terms: sharpness, noise, dynamic range (especially in low light)
canon 60d dslr vs canon c100 cinema on Vimeo

As I believe Edgar's comparison illustrates, the C100 has better video quality than the crop-sensor Canon DSLRs. But as the cost is roughly 10 times more than the DSLRs, shouldn't the question be: is the C100's picture 10 times better? Certainly not. They look pretty similar to the layman, and I think up until ISO 400, they inter-cut very well.

Once you get to the 6D or the 5D3, the high-iso quality is certainly competitive with the C100.

Now, as stated, the C100 has a lot of professional features that DSLRs lack (dual slot recording, built-in ND, peaking, waveform, etc). Are THOSE worth an extra $5000? Maybe. I think they are to me.

as the cost is roughly 10 times more than the DSLRs, shouldn't the question be: is the C100's picture 10 times better?

BOGGLE!

Now, I have a T2i/550D which is, truth be told, a tenth of the cost NOW of the C100. But in its $450 state, it's unable to do sound, it can't really do proper focus without a Z-Finder or other substitute, and has all the multitude of DSLR defects that stack up so quickly.

So please - hang on a moment. The C100 image may or may not be 10x better for 10x the cost of the raw unit, but let us temper justice with mercy. Add a good loupe/magnifier, some hardware to make it usable, the cost of an audio solution. 10x? Not any more.

And actually, my clients (okay, they're agencies) DO see a difference. Thank goodness. Even this morning I had a client emphasise that they don't want a DSLR shooter, they want better than that. Like the difference between a Z1 shooter and an EX1 shooter. LOL!

My biggest issue is with multi-camera - DSLR shooters are bringing 3 bodies to a 1 camera job. They crop the two unmanned cameras, or accept their problems with being unmanned. I think the results - whilst dynamic - are amateurish, with out of focus cutaways, bad framing and so on. But the perception from the client is 'value'. 3 not-quite-in-focus shots with low resolution and peculiar framing, vs shooting one really nice shot, and a sequence of cutaways and noddies. The agencies are pushing 'value' rather than 'quality' - 'twas ever thus.

Are you planning on mixing with DSLR footage?

If so then the 5x cost for a 2x image improvement becomes an even worse ratio as you will need to downgrade your c100 footage to match your DSLR.

I personally feel it's better to keep your entire fleet of cameras at the same level to keep your footage consistent than trying to mix and match.

Your investment could be moot and give you no better footage to show off. But hey, no more overheating or 12 minute limit.

BOGGLE!

Now, I have a T2i/550D which is, truth be told, a tenth of the cost NOW of the C100. But in its $450 state, it's unable to do sound, it can't really do proper focus without a Z-Finder or other substitute, and has all the multitude of DSLR defects that stack up so quickly.

So please - hang on a moment. The C100 image may or may not be 10x better for 10x the cost of the raw unit, but let us temper justice with mercy. Add a good loupe/magnifier, some hardware to make it usable, the cost of an audio solution. 10x? Not any more.

And actually, my clients (okay, they're agencies) DO see a difference. Thank goodness. Even this morning I had a client emphasise that they don't want a DSLR shooter, they want better than that. Like the difference between a Z1 shooter and an EX1 shooter. LOL!

My biggest issue is with multi-camera - DSLR shooters are bringing 3 bodies to a 1 camera job. They crop the two unmanned cameras, or accept their problems with being unmanned. I think the results - whilst dynamic - are amateurish, with out of focus cutaways, bad framing and so on. But the perception from the client is 'value'. 3 not-quite-in-focus shots with low resolution and peculiar framing, vs shooting one really nice shot, and a sequence of cutaways and noddies. The agencies are pushing 'value' rather than 'quality' - 'twas ever thus.

I believe you're making my point for me, Matt. As I said, yes, the C100 is "better" than a DSLR, as it should be at 10x the cost. Is the picture alone worth the 10x more cost? No. All things considered, including the professional features that DSLR's lack, is it still worth 10x more? Maybe. YMMV.

Of course this is a matter of opinion, but for me and perhaps many of those who own the C-100, the picture quality is absolutely worth the cost of the camera. A good smart phone will get you 50% to 75% of what you want in terms of 1080p image quality from a DSLR or the C-100. There is not a linear relationship between cost and image quality in this context. You are always going to pay a premium for increasingly smaller increments in image quality as you advance up the camera food chain.

Having said that, the footage shot with my DSLRs does not come close, in my opinion, to that of the C-100. Whether it is it worth it for an individual shooter really depends on their requirements.

Is the image quality of the $80K Sony F900R a 100 times better than a DSLR? I don't think this is a reasonable way to frame a comparison.