I have seen a couple but they were more first impressions when can we expect to see some detailed reviews and comparisons (to other cams) start popping up?

Soon after the camera is released to the general public, the first buyers will start writing about it. Which is, as I've noted on my page "The Watchdog's Skinny on the XL2 (http://www.dvinfo.net/canonxl2/xl2skinny.php#price)," sometime around the first week or two of September.

David.

Stay tuned to this site. The reviews you get here, on any equipment, are the ones that you should pay attention to. The folk here are the REAL users. Not shills for a company. You will find out pretty quick what's good and bad about every thing in the industry.

Furthermore, I must add that putting together a full and detailed review of a given product (such as our review of the XL2 over at SimplyDV) is harder work than people realise. We got ours online in 48 hours, but that was tough going and we dumped all other duties! How Chris managed to get his stuff together (even with the advantage of a NDA) is beyond me!

Comparative reviews are even more difficult due to the process involved in comparing specs, stats and performance once the models themselves have been short-listed. In fact, I get asked about doing this regularly over on our site and I won't entertain it simply because of the work involved. I'm not that sure how valuable they are anyhow, since there's often disagreement regarding the comparison criteria and methods anyways.

Like Chris, I have my doubts about the majority of the sites who offer comparative "reviews" of products, especially when I know for sure that they've only had a model a matter of days. Even when reviewing consumer cams I like to take the thing out and about for a good couple of days before putting my impressions into words. There are lots of "review" sites out there who seem to pull reviews out of a hat after looking only at the spec sheet. Two sites that don't are this one and SimplyDV.

No names, however..... :-)

Colin