NAB 2010: Canon Enters Tapeless ENG Market

Bows two solid-state camcorders at NAB

By Glen Dickson -- Broadcasting & Cable, 4/21/2010 9:55:29 AM

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Canon, a longtime supplier of professional camera lenses to the broadcast market, has stepped up its efforts in the professional camcorder arena with the launch of a new solid-state camcorder line at NAB.

Canon has sold HDV-format tape-based camcorders that use MPEG-2 compression with 4:2:0 color sampling for several years, and has netted some significant sales from small broadcasters and documentary filmmakers. But with its new XF305 and XF300 Professional Camcorders, the company is making a bigger push into the electronic newsgathering market. Both new models use a new, high-quality MPEG-2 4:2:2 50-megabit-per-second compression scheme, the Canon XF Codec, and record native 1920 x 1080 high-definition video onto Compact Flash (CF) memory cards.

The cameras, which come with two CF memory-card slots and are both priced under $8,000, also offer 35- and 25 Mbps recording modes using MPEG-2 4:2:0 compression.

The new Canon cameras combine video, audio and metadata into a single file and use the MXF (Material eXchange Format) file wrapper to provide compatibility with third-party nonlinear editing and storage systems from suppliers such as Adobe, Apple, Avid, and Grass Valley. They include a Canon 18x HD L-series lens and support standard professional features including HD-SDI output, genlock, and SMPTE time code (in/out) terminals for multi-camera productions.

Other features include a freely rotating 4.0-inch, 1.23-megapixel LCD monitor that can be positioned at either the right or left side of the camcorder body, a 0.52-inch, 1.55-megapixel color electronic viewfinder, and a built-in stereo microphone as well as dual XLR inputs for external audio sources. The new camcorders support 16-bit PCM audio at 48 kHz with automatic and manual audio level adjustment