Canon says Take Your Camcorder Medicine at FreshDV

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Canon says Take Your Camcorder Medicine

Published by Matthew Jeppsen February 5th, 2010 in Cameras, News

Were you hoping that Canon would release an APS-C sensor equipped camcorder, a VDSLR wrapped in a proper camcorder body? I was. I was wrong. Oh so wrong. Why? To put it in nautical terms, Canon is a Battleship, and Red is a Destroyer.

Oh, and if you can’t be on-site to watch the SuperMeet in person, they are posting a live stream of the event here at 6:45pm (I assume that would be US Pacific Time).

6 Responses to “Canon says Take Your Camcorder Medicine”

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1 Joel Peregrine Feb 5th, 2010 at 10:49 pm

Great write up about disappointing news Matt. But you’re absolutely right - we were probably expecting too much. A week ago I had my XHA1’s all ready for ebay thinking they’d be boat anchors after Canon’s announcement.
2 Matthew Jeppsen Feb 6th, 2010 at 1:25 pm

Thanks Joel, always appreciate your feedback. So you’ll be sticking with the A1’s for a while, or are you still interested in these new models for the tapeless and codec upgrades?

-MJ
3 Joel Peregrine Feb 6th, 2010 at 2:26 pm

Hi Matt!

I’ve got three months to decide which way to go. If I had to decide now I’d stay with the A1’s for another season. The NeatVideo noise reduction plugin has given them a shot in the arm. I’ve picked up a 7D and an all-around lens for receptions though. For SDE’s I need a codec I can edit natively, but by the time the lights go down all that footage is in the computer so the 7D will be great for toasts and dances. I can see working the 7D into the prep if the MacBook Pro with an i5 or i7 arrives which can munch through the H.264-to-ProRes LT a lot faster than my core 2 duo can.
4 sove Feb 8th, 2010 at 7:30 am

I agree Joel.Thanks.
5 Peeter (Cube Productions) Feb 11th, 2010 at 4:32 am

NB! This was originally written for PVC article, but for some reason I didn’t receive my account activation email, so I post it here:

_ _ _

Dear Commenters,
Dear Matt!

I rarely comment on any of those topics but it seems you really are emotional - so to say \romantic\ - about this and have completely forgotten that it’s all business and nothing personal.

Corporations such as Canon or Sony or Nike have never been about launching the best product today. They have complicated business models and ROI calculations; as the matter of fact they have planned the development of features/models a decade in advance (I’m sure top engineers/developers at Canon already know those few extra features they’ll introduce us at NAB 2011).

Not to forget if they launched something that feature rich today they’d pretty much kill their camcorder product line and that would already hit them hard (decrease of volumes on current lines, need for new production lines etc - production lines are very expensive to set up and it takes time to make them pay off).

In a way you may call it \capitalist stagnation\ and RED is a protest act against it, trying to bring you directly the best product. As we can all see, it isn’t easy, but I appreciate that approach.
6 johndoereport Mar 1st, 2010 at 8:32 pm

I worked for SONY and that is how we did it. I was around during the DVD-R technology roll out we had we had 8x when we shipping 2-4X. I knew to the month when each new technology would ship. Thank god for RED. They are screwing the whole thing up.