For me, there is not much more to add than this.
I think it's clear that in the light of the other companies evolving very quickly to higher features, Canon is a bit behind now...

Behind, yes.

But they still have the best HDV quality of all companies. And that has not changed. Not for the old XL-H1, XH-A1, XH-G1 and these new camcorders. Canon has a three year product release cycle and the XL-H1 has only been out there for two years. So I am confident we can expect an XL-H1 successor somewhere in 2009. And believe me, it will be much improved. They might even manage to pull a trick to use their DSLR photo lenses.

Everyone is calling for CMOS, tapeless and 1/2" chips but all these things need to be developed further. CMOS is not perfect yet and has some shortcomings, 1/2" is possible but requires (I suppose) other lenses. Is this desirable? And for tapeless -- that is just getting started and also needs development. SxS and P2 cards are very expensive. I hope that Canon goes Compact Flash card as those are very cheap, well made and are successfully used in photography for many years by professionals. The Convergent Design XDR flash recorder also uses normal CompactFlash cards.

I hope Canon or another company will shortly come with a Compact Flash recorder for under $2,000 and so we will have both tape and tapeless in one camera for a reasonable price. The best of both worlds. I shoot documentary and also events and for that purpose, tapeless is not suited. Unless you buy for like $5,000 in SxS or P2 cards. I can wait a while.

I think people are always looking for the next big thing but in the meantime we should enjoy the gear that we already have. The XL-H1 has shortcomings but is very nice camera with very good image quality. Most people deliver things in SD or on the web and people will hardly notice if it was shot on an EX-1 or XL-H1. I myself can also be blamed for this.

I think my next camera will be a 2/3" camera because they have good ergonomics and there is plenty of choice. Also, the investment in lenses is heavy but you can use them much longer and on multiple cameras. But for now, I have decided to enjoy my XL-H1 for all its goodness.

Is the new manual lens still the free spinning type? I didn't see the words "repeatable focus" or "focus marks", and the lens barrel looks like the former model - no markings - nada...

I hope I just missed it in the techno speak and it is a real lens like the EX1!

Lonnie

Don't think so. It may be an improvement over the XLh1 lens but it is still the same servo design. If there is any hope for it, it is the fact that you can supposedly customize the response time when you spin it. So you might be able to make it a little quicker or a little slower depending on your tastes.....but I don't think you will be able to make it have hard stops.

Not trying to change the subjet, but what would you guys think if Canon would do something like Sony has done with the HVR-Z7U, and pair it with a memory card recorder like the HVR-MRC1. I would be lining up for one in a second.

Lonnie, you have repeatable focus and distance readouts, but they're in the viewfinder, not on the lens. Same thing basically.

hi all,

I think Reason for Canon made small incerements over H1 is they are working on new camera has AVHC codec for tapeless recording option. now they are gaining time with this upgrade.

Alkim

The cost of tapeless archiving point mentioned a few post prior makes no sense to me. Harddrives are so cheap now that they are actually less expensive to store on than high quality mini DV tapes. And yes, harddrives fail, but tapes break as well. In truth, I've had tapes break, but can't recall *knock on wood* ever having a harddrive fail.

As for the Red costing $40K to $80K, that's also misleading to me. I think a lot of Red users don't pimp out their Red and get great results. They even post on the Red forum, if this statement is doubted.

Well, I had XL1 to XL H1 cameras and now a RED, so feel able to comment this. First of all, I would say the real cost of RED comparable to XL H1 package is about $23.000 -$25.000 including the Birger EF-adapter (which starts to ship in the near future) BUT without any lens. However, if one has Canon EF-lenses, the Birger EF-adapter should be a fine solution.

In my case starting to shoot with RED was easier than with the XL H1. Still, other people may have found it the other way around. When I got the XL H1, I spent a lot of time --several days-- fine tuning the CPs to get neutral colors. The usei interface of RED is rather intelligent and easy to learn. To get great images ... well ... with any camera it takes time to learn to push the best out of the equipment.

I think Lauri has a great point. While by all means there is somethig to fine tuning a custom preset to get a desired look, it's equally as great if not better to be able to simply record in raw and get whatever look you want.

Again, if you only plan on buying a camera to shoot movies then you should buy a Red. On the other hand if you only plan on shooting movies you probably should just rent a camera because you can get a pimped out package for a month or so for less then the cost of buying the red body alone. I don't think red is practical for running and gunning (maybe scarlet will be, whatever it ends up being) but for ENG I've had great results with the canon and obviously it can shoot a movie.

So while I think it's a fair comparison as far as strictly cine-style shooting goes When I buy a camera I want something that I can use for as many different things as possible, with the xl-series I've had that. If I shoot another movie with a budget over 50k I'll start looking at other options but until then the canon has been a great tool and a great investment for me. Hopefully one day I'll only shoot movies and never do another Doc, or event shoot or anything and then I'll buy a red (or whatever the equivalent is) but if I'm going to still try and cover all my bases the canon is the better choice.

But yeah the updates are still pretty week.

note: if someone wants to trade me a red with lenses and storage for THE xl-h1 that shot "the signal" I will retract all of my above comments and say how I love shooting ENG with the red ;)

If I may speculate, my guess is that Canon introduced this update to keep the XL-series product alive bit longer. If I remeber well it was one of Chris' wisdom that Canon never introduces new products in NAB. If so, this is an exception and may reveal they have made a strategic change. Such as extending the life of XL-series to win some time in developing a new approach, which I suspect will be with CMOS-sensor and EF-lenses. Who knows, maybe it's not that far way that the next generation of cameras will a fusion between a DSLR and a video camera. In fact, Nikon is not that far from it. Furthermore, the Canon Ixus series pocket cameras have already such a video feature. Just put a SD video taken with these new Ixus camera aside with the old XL1/XL1s footages and get surprised.

Ixus in Europe = Elph in the Americas. Agree with the point about VGA movie mode quality of those pocket cameras. Plus the new ones do time-lapse, which is a lot of fun.

The SONY EX-3 will be introduced by SONY soon. It looks like the Canon series as far as being shoulder mounted. Wait till NAB...you heard it here fiirst.

Sony EX3 discussion already underway at http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=119185

OOPS.....never go there that much. I know some of the particulars which I will keep to myself till the introduction.

Just uploaded thirty-plus photos of the H1S / H1A and menu displays... somewhat rough quality as they're only snapshots taken without any real planning. I had an opportunity to shoot these and wanted to post 'em up right away, since the next several days are gonna be really busy here in Las Vegas...

http://www.dvinfo.net/gallery/browseimages.php?c=55

In my view this is an incremental upgrade, and that's fine, but . . .

My expectations are that flaws are supposed to be addressed in an incremental upgrade and the biggest flaw in ALL XL series has been the stock viewfinder.
Yes, I know, there is an expensive and power sucking B&W option, but Sony
has come out with a stock LCD that works. This major problem should have been addressed and a suitable answer provided for Canon fans by now.

Off topic: hey Jacques, I'm not sure I have a current email address from you. Please contact me, chris at dvinfo dot net. Hope to see you Monday morning at NAB.

At the very lease you can buy the mrc1 for your canon in a few months.

I hope that we (current XL-H1 owners) are also entitled to get this firmware update. I am sure many of the feature of this camera can also be added to the current XL-H1 through a firmware upate. I would appreciate that.

People who will buy the new model will still get a better and improved lens, while loyal customers will get some benefits as well.

So Canon, please let us join the fun.

This is the general consensus of those who fly by the seat of their pants when it comes to tapeless acquisition. Sure, tapes break, it is extremely rare. I have shot more DV tape than anyone on these forums, THOUSANDS of hours and I have had no more than 2 or 3 tapes "break." When you lose a tape, you lose an hour of footage at most, when a HDD goes down, you may lose MONTHS of work and in many cases, an entire project would be lost.

If you havent had a HDD fail, you havent had many. Manufactures claim a failure rate of near 1% but in real world practice over the life of the drive it is more like 8%. I have a friend who owns a data recovery company who says for some drives in certain conditions it can be up to 15%.

The only proper way to back-up your HDDs full of tapelessly acquired footage is a nice RAID system which is frequently backed up to data tape. You are talking $10K pretty easy for a decent amount of storage. It is a myth that dragging files to cheap bargain clearance HDDs is an adequate way to preserve footage. The horror stories, while there, are more scarce only because we are still in the infancy of this type of acquisition.





ash =o)

I've shot thousands of tapes too and have never had a tape I couldn't play back years from the acquisition date. I have, however, seen three different firewire drives die for no apparent reason.

In addition to the insecurity of having original footage stored in drives, there is the time consuming hassle of doing it. If you shoot tapeless (at this time, anyway) you have to, at some point, stop production and load all your footage, back it up, then delete it from the cards so you can reuse them. Depending on how many cards you own, this might take an additional person on the crew with a computer system and backup drives. Or, you can do it yourself at night after the shooting days. There's also the possibility of data being lost during copying. I've heard about a few horror stories in that regard in the past couple of years.

I think eventually we'll have some sort of solid state acquisition that will be inexpensive enough so you can treat the cards like tape--ie., put them on a shelf or in a box until you're ready to edit, and store them as long as you like without having to reformat.

I agree with Bill and Ash.

I have had 3 Seagate drives fail on me last year. That's why I switched to Western Digital which works great so far (no failures, 10 drives). My uncle works at the IT department of a large company and they had the same issues with Seagate. But anyway, never thrust a mechanical harddrive. Why do you think there are so many issues with the Firestore, and before with the harddisk tanks that were used for digital photography (microdrives). Flash memory is so much more reliable then harddisks. But flash memory is really expensive at this moment to store large amounts of data (think HD content). So you back-up your reliable flash card to a non-reliable harddisk. To make this work, you basically need to back up everything to two seperate harddisks. Although this is cheap, the risk is not in those two drives failing on you, but in you losing track of what is on what harddrive and where do you store them.

Nope, I think only when flash memory reaches like $10 for 8GB, it will never be as safe as tape. Although capturing is more convenient, archiving and making sure you lose nothing (offloading to computer, then harddisk, takes a lot of time), so no, I don't think it works perfect yet.

I'll join the club too.

Seems like I remember when everything off of our computers was backed up to tape drives for safety's sake! Now we are looking to replace or back-up our tapes to the same mechanical media or drives we were trying to protect ourselves from failure from before.

In the not too distant future there will be better solutions available at reasonable costs, but for now nothing beats me holding that tiny little MiniDV tape in my hand and storing it in my desk drawers.

I have various format tapes here from a client/friend that I'm going to transfer to DVD for her. Many are over 20 years old. The reason they are being converted to DVD is that they are stored here in Florida where humidity and therefore mold is a problem, they take up a lot of room and have to be stored at a storage facility and the machines they will play on will not be around forever, U-Matic, Hi-8, Beta, VHS. I have not encountered one yet that has failed to play back, even some with mold on them.

For now----I'll stick with that cheap little tape. It will probably be good for another decade at least.

Mike

I have friends that have had Firestore hard drives fail prematurely. One friend had three fail. These had reputable hard drives in them, such as Western Digital.

I feel very strongly that these Firestrore hard drives fail because of heat.

I recommend using SATA drives from a reputable manufacturer and keeping them cool. If appropriate, add a fan to keep them cool. Five dollar fans from Wal-Mart work fine. If you have Firestore drives, add a fan to blow air over the case.

What I worry about, is that some hard drive that have not been run for a while (way over one year) may not spin up when you go to use them). Sometimes with the proper techniques, you can get them to start.

Instead of using Firewire drives, in a small enclosure, or using multiple SATA drives in a hot enclosure, I just stand the drives on their side, run a SATA cable into the computer, and run a small fan.

I buy quality drives with a five year warranty and have not had any fail so far using these techniques. (I realize that I have only been doing this for about two years, so it is really too early to tell.)

Using this technique, it is real easy to keep one or more projects on a drive, and then back it up to another drive, and then put both away for safekeeping.

I use Vegas for editing, so I backup the Project files to another drive on a routine basis. This could save me if I had a premature disk failure, or I make a serious mistake while editing.

I know it is off topic but I will add that my ten years in IT have shown me that hard drive are 10-20x more likely to fail than a tape. And as Ash pointed out, 1 tape= 1 hour vs. many hours on a hard drive. If you were smart enough to have it stored on a redundant drive then great....but if you forgot or there was a glitch.....oops!

I have also had a lot more success restoring a broken tape....you can physically take the cassette apart and move the physical tapr to another case and salvage the undamaged portion.

No doubt that flash media is awesome but there is so much extra work involved and if you flub up at any stage you put your valuable shots at risk.

There is always a trade off. For now I am willing to live with capturing until the they iron out all the wrinkles.

Have you ever done this with miniDV tape? I have & it's no fun at all. The springs & braking mechanism are near impossible. Tiny stuff :-\

Unfortunately I have (not for 5-6 years thankfully) and you are right. But what an exhilarating feeling when you recover your data! I had a tape that had been eaten by a sony GVD700? Mini DV deck. We were able to get the tape out of the mechanism, cut the bad part out and splice the remaining into a new cassete case. Surprisingly it worked! 45 minute recovered out of an hour....we could have gotten more of it back that was on the beginning of the tape but there was nothing critical there.

Let's not forget a major drawback of tape is alignment. I have probably a hundred old DV tapes (pre-HDV) recorded on my old partners XL1 that do not like to play in a lot of mini-dvd decks. There was something out of alignmnet on his camera and still his tapes a re a bear to get footage off of. Fortunately
I now strictly use an H1 and an HV20 and have had no problems.

Peace all.

Chris, I noticed in some of your photos there seems to be a bracket attached to the back of the camera. Just wondering if you had any shots of that. Hoping that is something I can attach some accessories to.

Hi Josh, that bracket is the same one included with all XL2 and XL H1 camcorder kits... there's a shot of it here: http://www.dvinfo.net/gallery/showimage.php?i=359&c=28

OK I figured as much but I wasnt sure as I did not see a bracket mentioned on the canon site in the Whats in the box section. Was hoping I could some how attach the NNovia Small camera mount to this bracket and hopefully add some weight to the back of the camera.

It is included in the box -- should be no big problem to rig something for carrying a QuickCapture drive, but it would be nice if nNovia provided a solution.

Well the small camera mount is designed to be mounted under the camer into the tripod mount but I dont think it would allow for shoulder operation. I don't have access to any of the XL cameras to try it on either.

The biggest dissapointment is the same old focus ring on the lens and the viewfinder.
Why can´t they give us a proper lens?

Sorry this "upgrade" feels like a bandaid to me.

Sony has just announced their new EX3 model. It has full 1920x1080 1/2" sensors, removable lens, solid state recording...

Yes its $4000 more but thats pretty insignificant for its spec.

I think Canon have dropped the ball.

$13,000. Really not worth the money. For that money I would rather buy a Panasonic HPX-500 or a Sony XDCAM (with the discs) and 2/3" lenses.

And do you really think this is it? RED will blow every other announcement away with the Scarlet today. Furthermore, Canon is always late but they will come with a worthy successor. Expect the next XL to fuse with 35mm lenses or maybe 2/3" lenses and of course it will be tapeless.

I really do not see why I would buy that Sony. It still feels clumsy (because that has not changed), the weight is all in front of your shoulder, so no advancement over the XL-H1 and the price... too expensive. You pay $4,000 for shoulder mount and some small updates.

No, no Sony EX1/EX3 for me.

Maybe Canon's waiting for the Scarlet everyone's so hyped about to announce the real XL-H1 successor? Seems like in current news, Scarlet blows away every other new designs announcements, like Sony's EX3. Maybe Canon wants the hype to die down a bit before it announces a worthy competitor?

Canon always proved to be a patient (albeit slow) cam designer. Look at what it's done with the XH-A1 model : they were last (or near last) to get onto the market, but they hit the spot right on. I don't think I ever heard any complaints about it, and even heard by a lot that it was the DVX100's successor.

I think time will tell if Canon really dropped that ball, who knows, we might be really surprised at what it got up its sleeves! :-)

Gabriel, I could not agree more with you.

And maybe Scarlett is a cooperation between Canon and Red.

canon's XL series has always been the last to market but the "best of its breed" when you compare apples to apples. happened on XL1, XL1s, XL2, XL H1, etc.

i don't doubt it'll happen on whatever future releases it is going to be, when you compare apples to apples.

The Red Scarlet is going to cost $3,000 with a fixed 8x zoom. The Scarlet is a 3k camera that will record to CF chips and will accept many of the Red One accessories. I believe I have found my next small camera to complement the Red One or the new Red Epic 5k. I will keep my XL H1 until the Scarlet is available. Sorry Canon, I guess that my only Canon's will be still camera's from now on.