Right Noa, but you introduced the comparison, it's not really fair to have it both ways. The XF is twice the price of the XH where I live and worth every penny.

Aren't you the one who said the XF300 and the XH-A1 had comparable video images?

And there is no XF200. Since the camera doesn't exist, it's hard to put a price tag on it. Unless you were referring to the upcoming XF100/105. The price hasn't been announced yet.

No I did not say it has comparable images...On vimeo compressed, yes, to me it looks like xh-a1 footage, a frame directly from the camera however shows much better quality, thats what i said (not going to repeat it again :)

And reg price, I paid 3000 euro for my xh-a1, the xf300 is between 7500 and 8500, I'd expect it to be better then.

Wow that price is insane.

Have you ever been to the Southern Hemisphere Noa? The flight to New Zealand is a little onerous from Belgium but survivable (my brother lived in Gent for a time).

You can fly down, take a two week break to check out the Southern Alps and try out your new camera, fly home and you'll still have money to spare.

I bought the XF300 for equivalent of E4850 with full Canon warranty from my local camera shop. It's cheaper than the EX1 here, and of course the media is much cheaper, so this made the Canon more compelling. The XHA1S sells for E3800 at the same shop, or 78%. Go figure?

A sony ex3 is 8200 euro here...so the xf300 is just a bit less, not so sure which of the 2 i'd choose :)

The raw is 50Mbps... and then I compressed to 10Mbps WMV... and then vimeo compresses it once more...

So well... the vimeo video is only an idea of what the camera can do. That's why I explicitly made a comment in my impressions that the image "looks very clean and detailed when view in post and any artifacts are largely due to the WMV compression".

But the colours you see from vimeo is very close to the raw so that gives a rather accurate idea.

For some unclear reason, I find WMV (using flip4mac) to be more accurate in colours than using H.264 encoder in compressor. Otherwise H.264 has less artifacts.

me too.

Sometimes I not fully pushed the CF eject button back down after ejecting a card and before putting a new one in. Then the button sticks out and can cause a problem. Could that be your issue?

Does that include sales tax? Normally you can reclaim sales tax (VAT, TVA or whatever your local flavour is called) when you leave the country.

What about mail order? Even with shipping plus 20% VAT & 5.9% customs duty on camcorders it would still be a lot cheaper than the price here in Europe.