I found an interesting report of a test of the Canon XH-G1/A1 from the point of view of the professional broadcast industrie:

BBC - R&D - Publications - WHP034 - Addendum 22 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp034-add25.shtml)

There are also evaluations of other prosumer cameras.

Edit: oops, I forgot to search before posting. Link was already reported: http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/canon-xh-series-hdv-camcorders/128359-submitting-ugc-broadcast.html
This thread can be removed.

It might be old news but I missed it the first time round. Don't know how.

This is really useful. Thanks.

I've got one of these papers for my Sony A1. I didn't know that they had done one for the Canon.

The author of that paper, and most of the other BBC camera evaluations, is Alan Roberts. He's a regular contributor to the DV Doctor forum (http://forums.dvdoctor.net/), and will be well know to one of two DVi regulars.

I've tried the XH-A1 preset mentioned in that paper. It has good, strong colours, but I found it biased towards the yellow. Alan's intent was to provide maximum colour information to help with grading, etc, rather than provide a strictly accurate balance straight from the camera.