Canon T3 and T3i Announced
 

I don't think this has been mentioned yet - official Canon press release below. T3 is limited to 1280x720p video. T3i is much more interesting from our videocentric point of view.

http://www.dvinfo.net/news/canon-usa...r-cameras.html

Full HD 3x and 10x movie crop features, at least, like Panasonic. Lets see if there is aliasing and moire at these modes.

Official T3/1100D and T3i/600D Launch Video
 

Official Canon Europe Video here for the T3/1100D and T3i/600D.

YouTube - Canon EOS 600D and EOS 1100D product walkthrough video

Official 600D sample video here. Plenty of aliasing in some shots...There is one for the 1100D on YouTube as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAi2Q..._order&list=UL

Thanks Andy. The press release came in at 11:30pm over here, after I had
retired for the night (a long day of yard work and the SuperBowl sent me to
bed early). Link replaced with the DVi source. Much appreciated,

Is it 3x, 10x

or is it 3x - 10x

anyone know for sure?

Assuming they are getting high quality images out of the crop, this gives some hope to those who have been saying we could scan less chip with less line skipping to control moire and aliasing- like in a cinemascope aperature. Would be cool to see an implementation out of Magic Lantern.

"You can also reach distant subjects using new Movie Digital Zoom function, which crops the centre of the sensor from 3x to 10x while still maintaining Full HD quality"
I took this from a press release. I guess it is accurate.

"...which crops the centre of the sensor from 3x to 10x while still maintaining Full HD quality..."

Was the sentence I read somewhere - which I take to mean just a 10X option is available (i.e. 3X being the normal mode for HD Video). I may be wrong but that's how I read it. Certainly the official press release outlines a crop mode, not crop modes.

I really wish we knew which shots (if any) in the Canon 600D/T3i official sample video might have been taken with this 10X mode. I see a shot with really horrible moire early on in it - the one with the TV aerials which I'm assuming was not taken with this mode - but who knows!

Well, the flip-out screen is nice, I guess. It has 10x crop in movie mode (like the GH2) which is cool. Is the DIGIC processor updated at all with regards to video? I assume we still have the 12-minute limit too.

Same DIGIC 4 processor. No change to the clip length limit.

I'm trying to find more info on the Scene Intelligent auto mode. Is this an improvement to the autofocus of the t2i? Using the t2i's autofocus for movies has been disappointing. I would probably continue to shoot in manual regardless, but it'd be nice to hear they were working on improvements ;)

The thing about the movie crop mode is that your wide lens basically becomes a telephoto lens which makes wide shots almost impossible in this mode. It is a step in the right direction but I would have preferred to just see them use a decent down scaling method. Scaling down high res to HD is not a hard thing to do with a bit more processing power.

I find the crop modes really exciting, because you can basically attach a fast prime like a 24 1.4 and withou swapping lenses in the field you can also shoot at 70mm and 200mm without losing low light capability.

Would noise from high iso values enlarge too?

If it is anything like the Panasonic crop mode then basically you get a 1:1 pixel crop of the center of the chip. You sample 1920x1080 pixels from the middle of the chip instead of down scaling every pixel to get 1920x1080.

This can make images a bit noisier since the down scale process sometimes cleans up a bit of noise. Sort of like when you take noisy HD footage and downscale to SD it can clean it up a bit.

The other downside to shooting in this mode is that you have to be very sturdy. Since you are sampling a much smaller area of the chip you will notice bumps and shakes a bit more. Sort of like zooming in to 100mm and trying to keep it sturdy.

Again shooting this way can have plenty of benefits but there will be many restrictions as well. Don't expect to be able to put the camera in this mode and be able to shoot everything.