I think there is a large number of people waiting for Scarlet and I know a few people who are going to or have recently purchased the Sony EX3, which is now the camera of choice at that price point.
Our studio is about to buy two EX3s and hopes to buy two more if we can squeeze it out of the budget.
The reason for Canon to come out soon with a 5D on HD video steroids now is to make a product that many who are still going to buy will have a Canon choice. The longer Canon waits the more sales they will lose in both the short and long term; especially schools who purchase lots of cameras.

Oh well, our purchase order has been approved and we are now days away from purchasing SONY. When that happens, even if Canon comes out with a far better product, my next two cameras will also be SONY EX3s.

There is currently almost nothing (Maybe HPX300) that touches the EX-1/3 value and performance. They are a great choice.

Canon has a 100% track record of insanely slow camcorder development. They also have no pro-video following or market like Panasonic and Sony do. They have no SSD capture standards or equipment developed like SxS or P2.

Bottom line, don't wait on Canon. The H1& A1 were nice, but it could still be years before an all new system is developed and released. Then you still have to wait on the NLEs to catch up.

Jeff, do you care to comment of the image quality difference between your 150 and you A1?

Thanks ;)!

If you search, you can find the comparisons I did back in October 2008. Lots of others have made comparasons too.

10 months later my opinion is; they are both good cameras with strengths and weaknesses. Performance wise, the 150 has a definite edge in my use for wedding and event video.

Tapeless capture has been a total joy. Once you go tapeless, you can't even understand how you ever dealt with tape. The durability of a tapeless camera also can't be understated.

Why not have the the next XL-H to have a crop mode on the large sensor? crop it 1/3 and make it compatible with current XL-H1 lenses for applications where you don't need shallow DOF.

That being said, I haven't figured out the math on pixel density and whether a cropped 1/3 area will have enough pixels for HD.. prolly not.. bah!

The FFL of the EOS and XL lenses is probably incompatible.

??? What is FFL?

Flange focal length Flange focal distance - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I think.

Bingo.

The XL lenses sit much closer to the CCD than EF lenses, meaning if there is an EF mount (which there would have to be) then it would have to be removable and behind it would be an XL mount.

Of course, all of this is useless, because XL lenses wouldn't even come close to covering the full image.

Not the full sensor, just a crop of the full sensor..

that would be a difference of 7.6x resolution, so you would really need a 10mp sensor in there to do 1080 off 1/3

Most of that spec doesn't seem too wild, but 50Mbs AVC-HD? I didn't think the AVC-HD spec went up to such bitrates? I wonder if it should have been 50Mbs 4:2:2 MPEG2? (Same as the Sony PDW700/800.) Immediately accepted by most editing systems, EBU approved, and not need transcoding for most applications. (Unlike AVC-HD.)

You're right. If it's 50mbps, then it's not AVCHD. This is why these "a little bird told me" kinds of rumors do more harm than good. They're worse than useless, which is why I'm loathe to entertain them here.

It's probably AVC-Intra, no?

They would need a licensing agreement with Panasonic for it to be AVC-Intra.

Not impossible, but not likely either.