A.J.;
There's still hope for us. I am sure the ED or L lenses are sharper, even though the old ones are pretty good. The comparison tests look fairly close,but, as you say, there is a difference.I assume the tests were done at different times and possibly different light conditions. That would affect the outcome also. Thanks for the prompt effort. Shannon Rawls is going to test also, after the holidays. You guys may come up with an answer before we hear from Canon.

Ron

We'll be testing with a set of Zeiss Speeds and a set of Zeiss Super Speeds. Don't know if that test will tell you much.

- ShannonRawls.com

Lenses
 

As far as I know, all current Canon digital (35mm body) will accept all the family of EOS lenses. All lenses are not the same sharpness, regardless of the brand or even within the same family. Fixed focal length lenses are generally sharper than "zoom" lenses. I have an XL1 and shoot (record onto digital tape) mostly birds for my own enjoyment and an occasional paying assignment. My primary lens is a Nikon 80-400mm coupled with an adapter (no glass) I purchased from SRB Film in the UK. It's a great lens, but gets ever so soft at the high end, so I have to back it off a bit to around 380mm. The sharpest lenses that I own, and also have used for macro work, is a Sigma 400mm APO and an older Tokina 80-200mm. I have even used a Nikon TC14A teleconverter with the Sigma with absolutely no loss in sharpness. Both these lenses are tack sharp. If anyone is interested, contact me and I'll be glad to send them a few video grabs of insects that I got with these lenses. I know people with XL1's that mainly use Canon, Tokina, or Nikon, and tell me that the Tokina out shines some of their Canon and Nikon lenses, and so on. It all comes down to trying different lenses until you find one that meets your requirements. That's what I had to, and I think that will hold true for the XL H1, regardless of all the techno discussions. Go out and shoot the real world, and then come back and look at it on a good reference monitor. Also, depending on light conditions, I try to keep the lens in the f16 to f8 range at 1/60th second and in manual mode.

As mentioned before by others, that's not the case: EF-S lenses work only with D-SLRs with APS-C sized sensors (300D/Rebel, 350D/Rebel XT, 20D, 20Da). These lenses were specifically designed for the reduced sensor size these cameras employ (with a 1.6x extension factor compared to 35 mm film), and would thus lead to serious vignetting and other artefacts when used on full-frame sensor D-SLRs. However, all EF (non-S) lenses work on the aforementioned bodies (with a few rare exceptions, I believe).

HTH,

Ron

To all of you who are interested, I just got my XL H1 and will now be able to make tests with the EF-adapter and EF-lenses. I'll post results as soon as possible

Great Lauri; Thats what we've been waiting for. Nice of you to step up!!!

EF Lenses
 

I should have said "Standard EOS Lenses", sorry about that. Ron is correct in that EF-S lenses are only compatiable within specified models of Canon's Digital SLR's. Next time I'll try and be a bit more alert before posting.

First sample
 

For those who wants to see something immediately, on my webpages:

www.luontovideo.net -> Special

you can now download two files. CNSL0002.MPEG is taken with XL H1 + EF adapter and Canon EF 70-200mm/f2.8 lens. CNSL0003.MPEG is taken with the new 20x lens. But, don't make too strong conclusion yet. I unpacked the camera, installed the Console program and took these two shots in the manual mode.

There was not enough light, and thus, had to add +3db gain. Shutter speed was 1/15s in both cases. CNSL0002.MPEG taken with the EF-adapter is still bit dark.

More will follow once have a chance to do the tests properly.

Hmmm... Was the aperture the same on both lenses? From the provided samples, it's darn clear to me who's the winner. EF loses, and badly at that! Now, I wonder if the EF-Adapter is degrading the quality, or whether the EF-glass is at fault (or both). Thanks for these tests, Lauri! Looking forward to more!

In the meantime, Hyvää Joulua ja Onnellista Uutta Vuotta!

First reliable test with the EF adapter
 

There's now results of a reliable test made with the EF-adapter. The files can be downloaded from www.luontovideo.net -> Special

The image is the backside of the sticker inside the box of Sony DigitalMaster HDV/DV tape. The text is deliberately slightly tilted.

The shots were taken with the 20X, Canon EF70-200mm/f.28, and Canon EF400/f2.8 lenses in PAL 50i mode with factory default settings. For each lens I carefully aligned the H1 perpedicular to the target, and had enough light to set reasonable apertures. In case of 20x it was f=6.2 (a value which still produces about the sharpest images with XL2), in case of EF400mm and EF70-200mm the aperture was set to f=9.0. The shots were recorded directly on the hard disk with the Console program.

At the first glance the results seems promising. So, at least there seem to be some material for which the EF-adapter works just fine. But, more tests are proper analysis is needed. There is a significant difference between something which works fine for some material and which works for all material. You know, the Christmas morning is not the best time for these matters.

(Canon, do you hear us? Why the company does not provide us with all this information? Why do we -the customers- have to find out these things ourselves? This modern economics behind engineering is really strange.)

Ron, you sentence in Finnish created a feel a joy. How come you've learned some Finnish?

Lauri, my wife and I spent some time in Finland in the summer of 2004. We arrived in Helsinki from Talinn, headed East towards the Russian border (after a stop in Porkkala and the University Bookstore in Helsinki), thereafter turned North and followed more or less along the border all the way in to northern Norway. Fantastic trip!

I have yet to see a people in the World living up to the way you Finns care for your environment and infrastructure in the public domain. Truly awe-inspiring!

To get my Holiday wishes right, I had to consult my dictionary, though ;)

Cheers, and thanks for posting your footage! I very much appreciate it!

Ron

Great results
 

Thank you very much Lauri !
It seems that there are less color aberations at the edge of the letters, with the EF-adapter and 70-200 & 400 lenses.
Is there any case where the standard 20x is better than the EF adapter ? I'm wondering if the definition of the 20x is not a bit sharper than the EF solution ?

Nice to see different lens EF options! Thanks!
The winter landscapes seems to be have much aliasing.
Maybe it´s my VLC player on a Cinema HD 23" Apple screen?

All the best

Carl

thank you for posting the footage, lauri. i'm wondering what your own conclusions are about your testing, to date. i thought the 400 looked fairly sharp compared with the stock 20x, but the 70-200 looked a bit soft to me. definitely the VLC player does not do justice to the footage, i think.

how do you compare it to your existing XL2? the little bird, while nice, did not seem necessarily an improvement over XL2 with a 35mm mount, which is quite sharp. but again, i'm pretty sure the VLC player which i downloaded is not the best delivery, so i'm finding it impossible to judge. i'd be interested in hearing your analysis as a result of having spent some time with the camera and in hearing your thoughts on how the 35mm lenses perform. thanks!

The VLC player does not show footages in 100% size. For this reason, I downloaded MPLayer from

http://mplayer.sunset-utopia.homeip.net/

to see the footages without scaling. A 100% footage does not fit into an ordinary display, but still, it's much easier to evaluate the quality, once you see even a part of the footage without any sort of scaling.

When you look at my examples, please take into account that I live on a latitude which is about 100 miles north from the south tip of Greenland. Thus, the footages were taken in very low light, and since it was cloudy, everything appears almost in black and white to the eyes. The "Great tit" footage was taken about 7-8 meters away, and thus, the depth of focus is almost nothing. But, when viewing the footage with MPlayer, in my eyes, the tit is amazingly sharp when it is in the focal plane.

I noticed already with the XL2 that the 70-200mm does not produce as sharp images as the 400mm or 600mm lens. With the XL H1 the same seems to apply.

The largest values of the iris make focusing difficult with all EF-lenses I've tested. It seems better to add some gain to get below say f8-f10, and then the outcome is just fine. So far, the amount of chromatic abberration has also been lower with the EF lenses compared to the standard 20x lens. (This is my first impression.)

If you look at the "Standard 20x lens" on my webpages, notice the magenta and green outlines on the trees on the left. In the "Wideangle 3x lens" footage the background snow is tinted to magenta whereas the snow on front is biased to green. This makes me bit hesitant to use the 3x lens.

Summing up, I find at least the fixed length EF lenses just fine. Likely, the 70-200mm is also useful in many cases. Compared to XL2 (PAL mode progressive 25P image with 576 horizontal lines) the XL H1 image is clearly sharper. I bought the XL H1, for in wildlife filming there are so often "once in life chances" and while filming you often know that likely you'll not be able to take the same again ever. So, I rather have the material on HDV than SD tape. The TV-stations also appreciate the HD material, for it has a longer lifespan. Second, in the past I've subconsiously avoided taking footages of birds showing simultaneously a larger portion of their natural landscape. After so many disappoiments, I was forced to the conclusion that the resolution of SD format is simply not high enough to show details. Now, HDV yields more latitude in thise sense and it should show up in editing.

The XL H1 is in wildlife filming a very good compromize. It's portable, one can shoot in HDV right now, SD is there if HDV will not work out, and one has also the advantage of EF lenses. Furthermore, in the future, most likely one will able to avoid the HDV by taking the shots directly to a portable system via the HD-SDI.

Thank you very much for your informative posts. Now I am beginning to have much more confidence in using the Nikkor 300mm & 600mm ED-IF lenses on the XL-H1.

Have you tried the 'old' Canon black 16X manual-focus lens on the H1? It would be interesting to see how (well or badly) it worked (in the real world - not on a test board) for wildlife etc, compared to the HD 20X lens.

It is such a pity that the 3X lens doesn't fare so well. I wonder how well the Optex .7X lens and Red eye .7X lens works on the HD 20X lens.

Thanks Lauri,

Finally someone has actually performed real world tests with EF lenses. You're an XL1/2 user, you film wildlife and you edit so your opinion is really appreciated. Thanks for taking the time. Interesting that you found the longer primes to be noticeably sharper than with the XL2. What have you decided on for a deck? Unfortunately you might have just set me back $9,000.

certainly, the primes are almost always sharper than the zoom lenses, although in shooting wildlife, especially, sometimes the zoom is a big help in simply getting the shot. there's always compromises to take into account....

thanks again for the info, lauri, it's great that you're taking the time to help us all...i had to laugh at your previous post where you were complaining about how these big companies depend on consumers willing to shell out big bucks to test their products for them. it's a bit ridiculous. at least quyen of letus35 adapter fame is discounting his product to beta testers. why aren't the big companies showing this degree of integrity? we pay them more and expect less than we do of the little guy.


now, do i or don't i?? hmmmmm.

The avoid misunderstadings, I meant, the HDV image is obviously sharper than the SD signal of XL2. To get an idea of the difference, download the test or the Great tit footage taken with the EF 400mm lens and export a tif image to Photoshop or equiv. Then interpolate the resolution to 576 x 720 (PAL) or to 720x480 (NTSC), and compare the images. I haven't tried to figure out the difference between XL2 and XL H1 in SD mode using EF-lenses. There should be no big difference.

No definite ideas of the deck yet. If some prortable tapeless recorded for the HD-SDI pops up, not sure if I'll ever get a HDV deck.

Another akward thing is the minimal information of technical specifications, which is why I started a new thread on custom presets. I suspect, there is literally no single user who knows what the custom presets really mean, and wonder, whether even the Canon USA representatives are able to define the custom presets. This is a ridiculous situation, and possible only because almost everybody thinks the problem is in them not in the manufacturer. I've invested rather much in Canon equipments over the years, and eventually feel justified to exploit the publicity of DVInfo to make this message to Canon. They should realize that the situation is reallly silly; how come they sell the XL H1 and market its properties without giving an informal content to their own jargon.

Warning prompt?
 

I saw another thread where Steve Rosen said that with a non-HD lens "you have to endure that annoying little 10 second prompt that warns you that it is not an HD COMPATABLE LENS"

Can any of you guys confirm whether you get the same warning message with the EF adaptor on the XL H1.

If you do then a little information would be appreciated - the key point would be do you have to wait 10 secs for the message to disappear before you can start recording.

No-one has mentioned it so far in this thread, so I'm guessing (and hoping) that it's not an issue, but it would be nice to have that confirmed.

Thanks in advance!

Yes, the XL H1 gives this warning with the EF adaptor. However, not sure whether it takes as long as 10 seconds.

Many thanks for the information Lauri. Does the warning message prevent you from recording? If it does then I can see that waiting even 5 seconds for the warning message to disappear is a major disadvantage. I think there would be quite a few occasions when it would make all the difference between getting a useable shot and missing an opportunity.

Any clarification on how long it lasts and whether it stops you recording would be very helpful.

Thanks again.

In my understanding no, at least I have not noticed that it blocked from recording. I'll check this and measure the precise time next time I attach the adapter to the camcorder.

OK thanks for that. It's good to hear that it doesn't stop you from recording. If you get chance to check exactly what it does that be very useful to know.

Once again thanks for your help.

Best Wishes for 2006

Hello friends,

I tried to record without lens at all (to capture a picture through a microscope via an empty toilet paper roll).

XL H1 announced "NO LENS" in red but it was recording fine. My guess is these are only warning messages. Thanks Canon to not lock the camera up.

I wish you all a HAPPY NEW YEAR from our snowy landscape with about 25 cm of new fresh snow.

the toilet paper roll lens! brilliant! i love it! that's the best use of an H1 yet!

yet another question for lauri: have you, by any chance, tried your 100-400mm telephoto lens yet? since it is telephoto, it is probably not as sharp as the prime, but is it sharper than the 70-200mm on the H1? i have been thinking about purchasing one of these for a still camera, it would be nice to know if it would be useful on the H1 as well....

This lens produced less sharp image with XL2, so have not even thought about it.

H1+100-400mm
 

Hello Lauri,
I would be very interested by more details on this lens and the XL-H1. Even if there is a loss of details, do you think this solution is efficient for wild life videomakers ?

If you, or someone else, can post a picture made with the standard 20X zoom at max (average 700mm in 24x36) and the 100-400 at 100 (average 700mm too in 24x36), that would be very instructive.
I suppose that above 200mmm on the 100-400, it becomes too much difficult to target the subject...

Thank you !

As you wish; I'll try tomorrow to take the shots you ask for.

That's very kind, Lauri. Thanks a lot!

Ronan, there's now a comparison betweeen the standard 20x and the EF100-400L lens at my webpage www.luontovideo.net -> Special.

The footages were taken indoors, for I've been working outdoors the few hours when there's some light. The settings were gamma=cine1, gain=+12db and some fine adjustment with the custom presets.

so whats the verdict, the only thing i can tell from the mpg is that the eos is darker...

do you have uncompressed stills to show resolution?

what are your eyes telling you?

is the eos adapter killing resolution on the h1 like canon says?

alot of questions ...thanks

Yes, because there was not enough light for the EF100-400. Verdict? If we are only able to tell that the eos is darker, that already suggests the EF adapter and the EF100-400 (in the 100mm end) is not bad at all.

I'm at the artic circle right now and don't have any monitor to view the footages in full rez. Consequently, bit hesitate to make definite conclusions. However, I did look at the footages in Premiere, and was bit amazed that the footages were so close to each other. (Still, in the 400mm end the EF lens is not as good as the 400mm prime.)

Summing up, so far I see no reasons why the EF adapter and lenses could not be used with the XL H1. The whole thing seems to work just fine.

Thanks again Lauri !

Very interesting. It's true both images are closes. However, even if the EF is darker, it seems that the contrast is a bit higher and I can't see chromatic aberration in the corners of the picture, on the contrary to the 20x's picture (magenta, in the left edge of the box, ).

So, for the moment, it appears that we may think about this EF 100-400 as a 720-2880mm lens (because of the x7,2 coef) for wildilfe filmaking.

Now there is another question : at the 200mm range, I suppose the 70-200 is better because, among others, it opens at 2,8. So the 100-400 is usefull only if it is possible to shoot in the range between 250-400mm, (which means 1800-2880 !)
In your opinion, what is the higher useable focal limit, when pan and tilt (with a good tripod of course). Do you think the 350-400mm range in useable at last for fixes shots ?

By the way, is it the same EF adapter than the one for the XL1 & XL2 or a new designed for HD ?