anybody know? i'm curious if Canon is 'listening'...

back in September I finally stepped up from my Sony HC1 and got a Canon XH-A1. Unfortunately, we had a fire at my house last month and my Xh-a1 was exposed badly to the heat and smoke. I had sent my xh-a1 to the canon factory service center and they just determined it "Beyond Economic Repair" from all the smoke damage. Now i need to decide if i want to get another used xh-a1 or perhaps get a new xh-a1s. I feel a lot more comfortable spending sub-$3k because of the level of my work with this cam, but i really like the ability to record to the hard drive also. I never want to go tapeless because i like the ease of archiving that tapes provide. This is a tough decision.

On a unrelated note, i also would like to replace my hc1 which also died in the fire. I'm thinking an HV20/HV30, but again, would love something that i could record to tape and also something like a hard drive or some sort of removable media, but i'm not sure if there's anything like this out there.

My next Canon HD camera will be the 5D Mark II DSLR..I can't wait to shoot some video with my 300mm 2.8L, 85mm 1.8, and 24-70mm 2.8L

Your wish is my command:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/canon-xh-...-vs-xh-g1.html

As long as Canon does not offer a solid state based camera, help yourself and attach Sony's MRC1K to the Canons' firewire ports.

According to the A1s manual I recently downloaded from Canon, OIS on/off CAN be assigned to custom button 1 or 2.

See page 73 in the US/English manual.

If that is the case I can only hope Canon will provide such an option through a firmware update for xh-a1 users.

I guess that's for the new S model only, right? Too bad we can't download something to do that on the original model.

Awesome! That's great news, which I had not expected. Thanks
for reporting this, as I haven't seen the manual yet. Good to know,

That is good to hear!

Although I will not be updating my current A1 for a while, when I do I will likely go to the A1s.