Hey there,

Anyone going to the B&H demonstration of the XLH1 tomorrow at the Hotel New Yorker? I'll be at the one from 3-5 if anyone wants to meet up.

Post a response on this thread if you're going.

They're raffling off an XLH1. Pretty cool...

Josh -
where is the info on this ?

Thanks,
J

Josh- I can't make it, but could you stuff my name in the raffle box?

The event invite was sent to me through email. Not sure why I was on the list other than being a customer of theirs. I bought the XL2 there, maybe they thought I'd be interested.

Didn't think of it until now to check the boards.

Unfortunately, to win the camera you have to be there...

I was there at the same session, but I didn't see this tread untill just now 7 hours after it ended. Haha. I hope I win the XL H1, but I don't think I will. I never win anything.

I looked at H1 and JVC HD100 at the store. I couldn't find my way around the HD100 as easily as the XLH1. But I own an XL2 so I may be more familiar with the general set up of the camera. The camera looks awesome and the 'watch maker' footage looked great, the Italy footage, wasn't very impressive though. But so far I'm liking this camera. I wish that B&H had a HVX on display to play with, but I didn't see one. Oh well, I'm not in the market to buy a new camera just yet. I'm just trying to keep informed about everything that is coming out and available.

So I went to the Canon presentation yesterday in NYC that had many of the major Canon people responsible for the XL-H1. They had a full presentation on the XL-H1 along with footage that was shown on these huge HD screens.

All I can say is DAMN ... what nice looking stuff. I'm certainly glad I purchased this camera.

But what was interesting was Scott Billups was also at the presentation and gave a mini presentation himself on his thoughts on the XL-H1. He surprised me a little on some of his comments in regards to the camera. He did a lot of comparisons between the Canon and the Sony F900, saying that going out of the HD-SDI to a high quality recording format from the Canon gave superior results than from the Sony F900 HDCam.

He also showed comparisons of the Canon alongside the Thompson Viper and said that the difference in quality is so little, it's really unbelieveable. And watching the footage from both cameras side by side at the presentation certainly showed what he meant.

Another thing that was interesting to me was that he actually said that the CCDs of the Canon are very comparable to the CCDs of the F900, saying that even though they are 1/3" chips, they are so new and represent the latest in this technology and they are very similar to the quality of the Sony's 2/3" chips. When someone asked him about the lattitude of the camera, he also said that the lattitude of the XL-H1 was pretty much equal to the F900, when coming out of the HD-SDI.

Regardless, he gave nothing but praise for this camera, and was seriously adament about its abilities, especially for work destined for a filmout. It was interesting to hear this from someone like himself.

Thanks Michael -
What amazing things to hear..
I cant wait to try the HD-SDI out

Momentum is building slowly but surely for the H1. SDI, however half *** implemented by Canon, (we need embedded TC and audio) is still a truly killer feature that sets it apart from the competition. It's amazing to get such a clean-DIGITAL-full raster 1080 image out of a 1/3" camera. And I have done numerous A/B comparisons with the HDV, and I am quite happy with what I get either way.

Nick Hiltgen knew Canon was doing something right when he used it for an HDCAM multi-shoot.

Can you believe what these cameras are bringing to the table and how we're already getting persnickety?!

Can you imagine getting a glimpse of the H1 a few short years ago?

He also showed comparisons of the Canon alongside the Thompson Viper and said that the difference in quality is so little, it's really unbelieveable. And watching the footage from both cameras side by side at the presentation certainly showed what he meant.

btw, what kind of Viper stuff did you see? Was it the actual filmstream stuff converted to HD, or the HD SDI output from the camera itself?

How did they present it? Hopefully a High Def projector or monitor with raw clip stuff. Was it WMV/H.264's etc. off a laptop to a projector? I'm very curious if they were showing anything close to the camera originals.

btw, thanks again for the report.

I believe it was out of the HD-SDI port, but I can't remember for sure. THey presented them on the huge HD monitors, but is was playing off of a laptop that was conected to them.

Cool. Probably playing Cineform files as that seems to be his favored HD codec for post. If not, I bet they were WMV's, which is great, but masks a lot of the true differences.