The Canon c100, c300 and c500 lineup

In the past few days i got a few people contacting me about the Canon c100.

They heard i had one in my hands, so they asked for some feedback.

So here’s my first Blog ever on the The Canon c100, c300 and c500 lineup ^^

So what do i think about the c100 or the c line in general?

In my Opinion Canon is pretty smart. They released the c300 first. Its a great cam and workhorse i really like to use. Its compact, the battery lasts almost forever and I can get spare lenses and CF cards almost anywhere on the world if some of my stuff would fail on  a shot. Due of the very good low light sensitivity I can travel with less gear which is also great.

You probably heard all of this stuff already, so lets keep the c300 a bit on the side and talk about the new stuff on the shelfs.

The c100 is even smaller and lighter then a c300 but gives you a similar handling, like we know from the c300. So it is really a joy to work with.

The new features like push focus and auto iris are nice in some instances. In case you use something like a f1.4 lense you will be happy to check between shoots if you are still on focus.

Not a must have feature, but a nice one if its on board.

Same goes for the auto iris which can be set to three different modes (If I remember right). But the only one that seems usable to me, is the fast option.

It still gives you a slow and nice change, but if you got a shot where you enter like from bright soneshine into a house, it will take too long to adjust.

But timing is something they could fix in a future firmware upgrade. They should really adjust the adjustement speed a bit.

The c100 records to SD cards and they use a different codex then on the c300. The AVCHD codec on the c100 is nice and gives you a good pic for the package. But the higher compression brings in some more artefacts and moire compared to the c-log of the c300. The new handle with the included stereo mic is a cool thing. Its a shame it can’t be used with the c300/c500 because of a different cable setup. This would have been just a great addition to work with the bigger ones with a even slimmer setup.

Would i use a c100 as a B cam for my c300? Maybe.. but if you would pay my bill i would prefer a second c-300 as the pictures ist still better.

You could use a external recorder to get a cleaner 4:2:0 image, but then the whole plus from the small formfactor would be gone. Plus adding the price of a remote recorder bats and stuff adds up to, bringing its price even furter to the c300.

So in my opinion the c100 should normaly be used as it comes out of the box.

So we have a entry c100 a good “pro” c300 and what about the c500?

I did not shoot with it much yet. About 20 minutes was all I tinkered with her yet when i got it in my hands on the Swiss Broadcast and Video days a week ago.

This is not really a long time, but long enough to talk about my first impressions and findings.

The first thing which i found was that you’ll need to remove a cover on the airvents/ports prior every shoot.

Its not that hard to do, but come on Canon… a screwed fixed cover?

Second thing was the function buttons still make a clicking noise when pushing them. Something i do not like on the c300 and c100 too. There are solutions for quiet buttons, so please use them in a future release.

Turning the cam on goes as fast as with the smaller sister which is very nice. But the spinning up fan is slightly hearable. You can adjust fans speed or set it to auto in the menu which is nice. But even in the low setting its slightly louder then the c300. So in a quiet shot you might get a slightly unhappy sound man on your side, Its manageable but still not perfect. When the fan speeds high you can hear it really good. So when recording 4K you might only get reference audio when adding a mic directly to the cam. But in a 4K production you will probably get audio anyway from a separate soundman ;o)

The new Sony seems to also have a pretty loud fan on the 4k recorder. And we all know Red’s aren’t quiet too. So this will be a technical thing to master for future cams. My guess is we will see slightly bigger bodies with larger, lower speeding fans.

Speaking of 4K. If you want to record 4K you will need a external recorder. This kills the nice small package, but allows you to play with the big boys too.

4K is just slowly running out into productions. Yes,  Red and others play with 4K since a while, but main production for most stuff is still around 2K and even broadcast TV is still just 720P.

Recorders are available, but currently still pretty pricey. The AJA KiPro Quad will be around $4000 – 5000 if i rember right. And they know you will need a crazy amount of storage to work with. So this is where it gets really expensive. Remembers me somekind of printer ink, where the ink cost almost as much as the printer itself…

A good thing is the c500 delivers the full 4K image on a single hd sdi port. So you don’t need to use 2 or more like on some other cameras.

Nino Leitner told me that you’ll get about 512GB data after 27 minutes of 4K 10bit-Raw arecording.

So proxies might be a good idea to work with. You might want to use the option for additional internal 1080P recordings on the CF cards for this ;o)

There’s a new Canon tool called  Cinema RAW Development 1.0 for Windows  . You probably won’t be surprised to see pretty demanding hardware recomandations. And probably will understand why Canon preferd to push a Windows version of it. I’m pretty sure a Mac Version will follow, but it will also depend on what apple will do with their workstation line in the future.

But hey, the c500 is not all about 4K. Its a beautifull cam that can record so many different nice formats. So you can choose which suits the need for the current project best.

Even the option of 2K 4:4:4 12 bit or frame rates up to 120fps are really nice features.

So thats about it…

But hey, one more thing ;o)

I’ve heard some rumors about a possible price drop (B&H dropped the c300 by 1k today) and that there will be a firware with feature upgrades soon.

I really hope they bring one push focus and auto iris to the c300 too, but i’ve been told this will not happen due of hardware differences.

But hope dies last as it is possible to controll these functions on the c300 when using a WFT-E6A remote module with it ;o)