Canon C300

I went to the Canon C300 event at Paramount which took up stages 1 & 2 plus the theatre.  First, let me say I rate everything by how good the parking and the food was and both were very good.  Now, about the camera.

The Canon C300 has the best picture of all the mid and low end ($20,000 and less) cameras I've seen and can easily compete with the Epic.  The only nicer picture I've seen is the Alexa.  It's the queen of latitude.

The C300 is without a doubt the cleanest looking camera I've seen at high ASA's.  While you might push other cameras to 1600 ASA, the Canon looks clean at 3200.  In fact, it looks pretty clean at 12,000.  Even 20,000 ASA only looks like 9db of gain.

The C300 only weighs 3.5 pounds, is built to use all the Canon EF glass and has everything a shooter would want in a camera including built in ND filters and full size XLR's.  It's the perfect camera, right?

Well, to start, how many times do you need to shoot at 12,000 ASA?  And look close, the XLR's aren't built into the camera, they're actually in the separate LCD screen.

I'm a real button pusher and I think I went through every single button and menu.  I got to meet one of the designers who asked me for feedback and as an operator my major complaint to him was you couldn't turn off all the info from the screen and leave the frame lines, it was all or nothing.

But these are all just nit picking.  What really surprised me was the 8-bit mpeg2 recording format... with no other outboard option. I really thought Canon was going to come out with some sort of Canon Raw, especially at the $20,000 price point.  And it's limited to regular shooting speeds, no high frame rates for slo mo.

The C300 doesn't compete against the Sony FS-100 (pictured above) like I thought it would.  The FS-100 is also 8 bit (and who cares because all monitors are 8 bit) but has the option or recording uncompressed 4:2:2 outboard.

At $20,000 it's competing against the Sony F3 and the Scarlet.  The Scarlet is recording 4K, both good and bad because I don't know any client who's posting in more than 1920x1080. The F3 can record 10 bit 4:4:4 outboard, but again, who's posting 4:4:4?  Maybe the 8-bit mpg2 format is what producer's need but I can get just about the same thing from a $5000 FS-100.

Finally, a quick word about the new Canon Cine glass.  These are primes that compete with the best lenses and are just about as expensive.  Each prime costs $6700 bucks so you can get a Zeiss CP2 for less than $4000 and for just a thousand more than the Canon you can have a Cooke.  Enough said.

So, do I like the C300.  Yes,it would be my first choice if it was $5000-8000 bucks but at $20,000 they may have missed the market.

http://cinemaeos.usa.canon.com/products.php?type=Camera&model=C300