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MillimeterProducts: Canon
Oct 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Dan Ochiva
Canon’s HDV move is big
While Canon is the last of the major camcorder manufacturers to make an HDV announcement, the September debut of its XL H1 shows it’s been thinking strategically about just what sort of HD camcorder the industry lacked. The word "industry" is key, because there’s no confusing the specs of this sleek, matte black-bodied unit with the prosumerish XL1 and XL2. The three 1/3in. 16:9 CCDs of the H1 work at 1080i, while delivering adjustable frame rates of 60i, 30F, and a useable 24F (Canon’s term for its generated 24fps signal). A newly designed 20X HD video zoom lens, meanwhile, delivers improved optical quality to match.
A new, integrated subunit, the "professional jackpack," offers the shooter a comprehensive bit of I/O: Built-in HD-SDI (allows output of uncompressed digital video), genlock, and SMPTE timecode enable broadcast integration.
The HD-SDI output delivers a whole new level of capability to the camcorder, since the HD-SDI signal comes out of the capture stream before the HDV compression, a shooter can now output an uncompressed HD image to HDCAM and other HD formats. Meanwhile, the Genlock feature allows multi-camera shoots to easily synchronize camera settings and SMPTE time-codes in-and-out allow for streamlined tape and edit management. www.usa.canon.com
