Canon C100 – Will It Compete?
This past week Canon released their latest Cinema Camera at IBC. The Canon C100 (Vincent Laforte’s review here) looks to be promising, but Canon seems to be ignoring filmmaker’s desire for over cranked footage. I’m not sure why the king of DSLR video doesn’t include 60p as an option. They do this on almost all of there DSLR’s. It’s a mystery to me.
The rumored price on the new camera is $8,000. This seems to be a direct competitor with Sony’s FS700 (Philip Bloom’s review here), which offers 240 fps in HD. Talk about some serious slo-mo options. Sony is making an agressive move in their offerings to indie filmmakers while Canon seems to be depending heavily on their cinematic look. Both cameras have a S35 sized sensor. But Sony is also including a SDI out while Canon is limited to HDMI only. When it comes to specs it seems Sony is taking the lead, but only time will tell if Canon can compete in the mid range cinematic video market. I’m not sure image alone will work.
I’ve been playing with the FS700 over the past few weeks and hope to do a review soon. The next challenge is to get a C100 for side by side comparison.
Chris, here’s my take on it…
I tweeted earlier this week that “When Sony and Canon launched the FS100 and the C300 they pulled the carpet right from under the feet of the ‘convergence’ market started by DSLRs”. Many people jumped on this and retweeted it. That statement was one of 4 tweets, so when retweeted it can be taken out of context.
My point was a simple one. Once the big Camera companies saw the strength of market sales of DSLRs and more importantly the fact these DSLRs, these cameras that were sub $2000, were being used in Hollywood movies, and big budget productions they realised, Canon in particular that they left a huge slice of value on the table.
Enter the pro end interchangeable lens video camera; AF101, FS100 then the C300. As each one was launched the price point went up. But each one had different specs. But there was a clear trend. The big camera companies gave filmmakers a choice, but it came with a price tag. If you wanted to avoid all the DSLR work arounds, you needed to jump from $2K to $5K minimum.
So that is what I meant by my statement on convergence. Just as the stills and video worlds were coming together, so were the worlds of low budget filmmakers, and the big budget guys. Canon created a market with DSLRs by accident and did not extract the equitable value from the market. So they along with others are playing catch up.
Fair play to Sony. They waited and launched, in my opinion, 2 highly capable cameras by listening to unmet needs of their target customers (Den Lennie and co. inputs in the design phase). Say what you like about the build quality, put in the right hands the FS100 and FS700 are packed with features, high flexible and deliver stunning images.
Canon I feel have missed a trick, again. Canon’s strategy seems to have been to go straight to the high end with the C300 and then the C500. Then they launched the C100 and to be honest, this camera doesn’t deliver in terms of the specs I’ve seen for the price point versus the FS100 or the FS700. My observation is that Canon extend their product life cycles through firmware upgrades. So will more frame rates come in the future? Only time will tell. But this is not good marketing to the average indy filmmaker who is looking to invest. At $8000 rumoured price I would argue they need to know the options that will come from Canon in the future, and a commitment that Canon listens to their customers needs. $8000 for a camera with no 50(EU)/60(US)p seems like a huge oversight to me and restricts shooting options for the investor. This brings us to the key question for the C100, is the image quality enough to justify the $8000 price tag (the value Canon puts on its image quality)???….given the price of the Blackmagic camera, I’ll let you be the judge. Canon still have some work to do in my opinion to get the marketing right on their new product launches.
From a pure marketing viewpoint, you can’t fault Sony.
My last point – don’t underestimate Panasonic. They may have had 1st to market advantage with the AF101 but pitching a MFT camera to a professional target audience will have taught them a lot of (probably painful) lessons in product development for the next camera.
cheers Jon
Thanks for the post Jon. Your business knowledge far out weights mine. I completely agree with you on Canon’s approach. It seems they are banking on selling their cameras based on the image quality alone and skipping other key features. I hesitate to purchase a Canon camera just for the reasons you stated. I want a commitment from Canon they will provide firmware updates that will increase camera operation options, but they are not.
It does look like the C100 maybe priced lower than initially expected. Vincent Laforte posted on his blog seeing the camera priced at $6,700 (US) on some websites. Is that $1,300 worth less high speed options? It’s up to the purchaser. I’d love to do a direct comparison between the two cameras if I get a chance.
I guess we can’t complain. There are so many options out there now the hardest thing is deciding which camera to go with. Even then one can get a good image out of any of these cameras with the right amount of skill.
Thanks again for the post!
Chris