Good point! Just because you can change lenses on the XL1 just like the pro units, that doesn't mean everyone is going to buy the XL1 and not the pro ones.

There will always be features that cost money, and there is no way around them but to buy a more expensive model, that costs more to build. Piping 4:4:4 video out doens't cost them any more other than a simple design change and maybe some simple software.

If you were to use an MJPEG codec or something with a datarate
between 10 - 20 MB/s that would be doable to store on current
harddisks and increase colorspace dramatically... Uncompressed
SD is only 30 MB/s.

New Canon XL1 series coming soon?
 

Canon, Sony & Sharp Corporation have just signed a standards agreement for domestic Hi Def. Anyone know anymore? Cheers from Oz, Pete Constable

Well, you've hit it right on the button--there's a possibility the XL2 will use the HDV standard--which would be unfortunate, because Canon could surely come up with a better format free from the constraints of the MiniDV carriage.

Pete,

Where did you hear this? Was there a press release like when they agreed on the HDV def? Would love to see the link to this news...hopefully we are closer to the HDV world than we think!

Clay

Clayton, I think that's what Pete's referring to. There's even a domain dedicated solely to the September 30th announcement. http://www.hdv-info.org/

The official site is

www.hdv-info.org

but there are no details posted yet, just the press release.

Canon's involvement in this, together with the advent of lower cost CMOS sensors and the fact that the XL2 is not predicted to come out for at least a year or so, i'd have to say that this all points to it being HD.

I think an impressive new product that shows more or less what direction this all is going is the Kodak Pro14n(?) digital SLR camera. It has a CMOS sensor the size of a 35mm frame and captures something like 13megapixels, and costs somewhere around $4k.

<begin joke>
now, the burst rate is at least 3fps, so we should all chip in and get 8 of these, hookem together in front of a good lens and a mega beam splitter. voila.
<end joke>

Seriously, it would be nice if it had at least an analog video out but that created NTSC video using some of the chip resolution...but i think usually they just have a really low res(320x240?) output...might be wrong.

Juan

This camera has very few satisfied users. It's low light performance is dismal and suffers from a severe noise problems under some conditions. The Canon 1Ds is a much better camera by all accounts but is several thousand dollars higher and still only 3 fps.

Jeff,

What do you know about the Sigma SD9? Have heard some good things, but also have learned not to trust everything I hear! I know it only records in "Lossless compression RAW data (12bit)" where as the Canon 1D does RAW data 12bit and JPEG. Which would you recommend?

Clay...