I hope there are going to be more steps for iris control then the XL1s. Not sure about the XL2, but I find the stepping when opening and closing the iris quite annoying.

I can tell you it stops down to f/9.5 before closing completely. Whether more discrete steps have been added in between, I'm not sure.

I noticed that the wheel is back on the H1 instead of the lever on the XL-2. That's good.

One of the things we asked Canon to do was provide a smooth iris
tranistion. Obvious image changes caused by stepping are a
'prosumer' alert and hard to edit around.

Well, if it's anything like the XL-1/s, then it still has steps however subtle. Why can't it just be a free moving wheel, the way it should be?

That was requested along with HD-SDI. At least they got that right,
but I hope the wheel is like the ring on a pro rig.

Sorry but it is not an analog ring. It's a wheel with a discrete number of contacts.

Hey Chris,

So it's the same as the XL1 and you see the iris changes
with each click?

Yes that's right Jacques. If there's any improvement here, I'm thinking that it would be the same number of steps as before, but since the f/stop range is not as broad as before that means each step is more discrete (that is, smoother) than before.

26 steps from f/1.6 to f/9.5 is smoother than 26 steps from f/1.6 to f/16.

0.2 stops per step as opposed to quarter stop steps (assuming they are uniformly spaced).

In the Sony world the PD-150/VX-2000 had only 12 discrete clicks which resulted in very noticeable manual changes. With the PD-170 they doubled this to 24. I don't know how this works on the Z1, but the wheel turns smoothly with no discernable clicks and the transitions look completely smooth - huge improvement. Let's hope Canon did something similar.