Canon is a company renowned for bringing the imaging technology from its professional DSLR products to consumer and prosumer cameras that non-pros can actually afford. However the same cannot be said of Cannon’s current product range for video content. The company’s new Cinema EOS 300 – introduced at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles last week – takes Canon beyond the broadcast quality camcorder market, which it currently sits in, and into the realm of professional film production for the first time.
The EOS name and EF lens mount options, along with some of the camera-body’s physical styling, might suggest that this is an evolution of Canon’s renowned range of DSLR’s. But really it owes much more to the company’s camcorders, with the same processor, battery packs, and viewfinders as it’s much cheaper cousins. The C300 is also built specifically to be interoperable with professional film making workflows and equipment. It has a Super 35mm sensor with a 4206 x 2340 grid of pixels. However despite the image sensor’s size it ‘only’ captures video at 1080p and not the 4K resolution of other products in the pro-video space.
Right now Canon faces intense competition from smaller bodied micro 4/3rds cameras; such as the Olympus PEN and the Panasonic Lumix G Series, eating into the market for their low to midrange DSLR’s. Meanwhile, at the high-end, video (and audio) is becoming more significant and not just for dedicated film-makers, but for media production as a whole. RED has captured noteworthy mindshare and fanatical enthusiasm in the professional film market with the One, the Epic and now the new Scarlet X.
This is a market that Canon has, up until now, been competing in only incidentally, with products like the EOS 5D Mark II; but there are obvious limitations when it comes to film inherent with traditional SLR camera bodies, lenses and accessories.
Even so the C300 is, in itself, nether the ultimate still/video camera combination or even a potential RED killer. The first and most obvious reason for this is the price, $20,000. Available this coming January, it is Canon’s most expensive camera, making it very much a pro-only product. Secondly the lack of 4K resolution (available on the new much cheaper RED Scarlet X) is only part of the reason that it’s unlikely to convert many RED aficionados to the world of Canon. It’s also relatively heavy and complex. Finally it’s definitely not a great stills camera: it captures relatively low resolution images, has manual only focus and a camcorder view finder, so it’s never going to provide great workflows for stills or even produce the best images.
But what the C300 really signals is that Canon is taking the use of video seriously for its highest end users for the first time. It provides a true film camera for people who are looking to take video content very, very seriously. The C300 is a statement of intent that will appeal to a niche, but Canon is also introducing a range of EF cinema lenses along with the camera, and these lenses are clearly not just for the C300. As if to underscore this point an EOS 1-DX based 4K DSLR prototype was shown behind glass at the same Los Angeles event and should end up being Canon’s second camera in the Cinema EOS range. The best still images in the business married to a 4K-capable full frame 35mm sensor should be an awesome combination, if it comes to fruition, as Canon hope it will, in the next twelve months.
The most important aspect to take-away from the C300 is that it shows Canon wants to have a stake in the state-of-the-art of film production. It also shows a commitment to a new emerging world of professionally produced content (And this is something that RED should be keeping a watchful eye on).
But most importantly, for everyone else, Canon’s work here is certain to trickle down to the cameras we’ll all be using in the future: Imagine smaller, sleeker, simpler refinements of the C300 and you may be holding one of them a few years from now.
