Canon's XH series raises the camcorder price/performance bar again, providing the most HD pixels per dollar available. The cameras replicate the performance of the XL H1 chainsaw in a more traditional handheld package. The same 1/3-inch sensors used in the XL H1 nestle behind a fixed 20x zoom, providing 800+ TVl/ph resolution for HDV recording, yet the XH A1 weighs fewer than 5 pounds and costs only $4,000.

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Design

The XH A1 is a fairly conventional handheld camcorder, yet it has a few unique touches. The lens barrel has three free-spinning servo rings: focus, zoom, and iris. The left rear body is a flat surface, providing the mounting for Canon's signature rotary function dial while allowing the rear bulge of the lens barrel to carry four operator-facing pushbuttons for important functions. A 2.8-inch flip-out LCD stores flat on the top of the body, rotating out and flipping up for viewing. The battery stows internally at the rear, just as in the Sony VX1000 that launched the DV revolution more than a decade ago.

The fixed 20x 4.5-90mm lens uses servo focus and zoom controls. Although there's still a rubbery feeling to the servos, the lens tracks control motions more predictably than on Canon's removable-lens cameras. Aft of the zoom ring, the servo iris ring encircling the barrel gives you accessible hands-on aperture control without fumbling for a tiny rocker or thumbwheel. The rings have no markings, but the viewfinder can display the status of each control.

A two-position ND filter is built into the lens, as is optical stabilization, auto-focus (including a separate Instant AF sensor), and Position Preset, allowing you to preset a single zoom or focus position and return to it with the push of a button.

Click To Enlarge Batteries load at the rear. Component and BNC composite cables connected.

The XH A1's rotary function selector lets you set full auto, shutter priority, aperture priority, full manual, spotlight, and night modes, as well as VCR mode and external control (see the "Console 1.1" sidebar). The control surrounds an LCD showing timecode, audio levels, battery level, and shooting mode (DV or HDV)-all of which can also be shown in the VF and LCD.

You use three slide switches to select auto or manual focus, gain, and white balance. A thumbwheel controls shutter speeds. Toggles let you select one of three programmable gain levels from -3dB to +36dB, camera or colorbars, and A/B/Preset white balance. A slide switch on the top panel changes the preset between tungsten and daylight settings or lets you use the thumbwheel to dial in color temperatures from 2800K to 12000K in 100K increments.

The rear of the lens barrel has four pushbuttons for display decluttering, peaking, focus magnification, and record review. As on the H1, peaking overrides zebra, while focus magnification enlarges the center of the image 2x both in the finders and on the camera's outputs, but is not usable while tape is rolling. Peaking combines with view-finder sharpness controls to give you enough peaking signal to be useful.

Two buttons are set aside for programmable functions. Another two buttons activate and select any of nine custom presets. A pushbutton opens the easy-to-navigate menus, while a rocker wheel at the rear of the camera runs through menu options.

The body-mounted handgrip has a small but usable zoom rocker. A slow zoom takes 55 seconds; the fastest takes 1.5 seconds. You can use the rocker in varispeed mode or pick one of 32 constant speeds. The single speed you choose applies to the carrying handle's zoom rocker even when the main rocker is on varispeed. The handgrip has both video and still-photo triggers: you can shoot stills to a memory card at resolutions from 640 x 480 to 1920 x 1080 even while tape is rolling. Stills can optionally capture all custom preset settings, making it easy to recall exactly how the camera was set up for a specific scene.

The carrying handle has a shock-mounted stereo mic built in, as well as a 3.5 mm plug-in mic socket. You can also select XLR audio: two inputs can be set for auto or manual gain, mic or line, and each input has its own 48 V phantom power and attenuator settings. The camera comes with a handle-mounted shock mount for a stick-type mic. This is an admirable selection of audio choices (I especially appreciate having built-in mics for grab Ôn' go situations), but I find myself wishing for the ability to set one channel for mic and the other for line level, or one for XLR input and the other for the built-in mic, or one channel for auto-gain and the other to manual. Two gain dials are best adjusted from the rear of the camera, by feel. If you look at them from the side, they rotate backwards-counterclockwise increases the gain.

The tape transport is a top loader, inside the handgrip. You need to press the elevator in and wait for it to descend before closing the door, or the door will catch the elevator and prevent it from closing. Tape transport controls are on the carrying handle, under a flip-up cover.

The battery slides in at the rear, behind a loading door. While Canon's batteries pop in and out easily, a third-party battery I had handy slid in smoothly but fit so tightly it refused to slide out. Five minutes of swinging the camera around at arm's length, plus careful application of gaffer tape, finally extracted it, so the story had a happy ending É just be mindful with slightly oversized batteries.

A BNC provides SD composite video output, while a rear panel covers a locking D-shell connector for analog component video, a 4-pin FireWire jack, headphones, LANC remote control, and a 4-conductor coaxial jack for a combined RCA composite video and dual RCA audio cable. There are no RCA connectors on the camera body, and there is no Y/C connection at all-SD is available on component or composite only. Although the XH A1 can output both HD and SD at the same time and it can letterbox SD output during playback, SD output is always full-screen anamorphic while shooting HD.

The VF and LCD are bright and sunlight-readable, though not overly detailed (250 to 300 TVl/ph resolution). Respon-siveness is better than the XL H1's LCD, which suffered from smear and lag. Either display can be toggled to B&W full time or when a focusing aid is engaged, and the comprehensive status displays can be pared down through the menus or eliminated at the press of a button. Status displays are also available on all analog outputs.

The XH G1 adds three BNCs: the professional Jackpack. The G1's HD-SDI output includes embedded timecode and audio. A genlock input and timecode I/O let the G1 play with the big boys in synchronized multi-camera shoots. The Jackpack adds an ounce to the weight and $3,000 to the cost, compared with the XH A1.

Performance and handling

The XH A1 is the size and weight of a Sony HVR-Z1-it's just a couple of ounces below 5 pounds when loaded with tape and battery. It's a well-balanced but heavy handful, so long-duration handheld takes are fatiguing unless you have supplemental support.

The XH A1's Instant AF uses a separate sensor alongside the lens. The sensor is likely to be blocked by any third-party lens shades or matte boxes, but normal through-the-lens AF can always be selected in the menus. When Instant AF is enabled, auto-focus takes less than a second to lock in, whereas normal auto-focus might take two or three times as long. In a couple of situations, Instant AF suddenly defocused the lens momentarily without any apparent cause (then it quickly and accurately refocused itself); switching to normal AF eliminated this problem. I don't know if this behavior is unique to the camera I tested or if it's a characteristic of Instant AF, but those using the momentary AF pushbutton instead of continuous AF are unlikely to see it in any event.

The unique placement of the flip-out LCD works well. When facing to the rear, it doesn't block visibility of or access to controls on the lens barrel. It can be flipped over and folded back nearly flush against the body for left-side operations, and can even be left upright and folded back for viewing from the right side, though if folded back all the way it will extinguish. Both VF and LCD show you 100 percent of the image vertically, cropping a few percent horizontally. You can display 80 percent and 90 percent safe-area markers, along with aspect ratio guides from 4:3 to 2.35:1.

Click To Enlarge One of the 20 sets of customizable functions.

There are different materials and textures on the three lens rings, though not very different-if you have time to explore them by feel you can tell them apart. I was concerned about the proximity of the iris ring to the zoom ring, but I never grabbed the iris by mistake. The iris adjusts extremely smoothly, making live exposure adjustments practical.

The XH A1 uses the same interlaced 1440 x 1080 CCDs with horizontal pixel shift as the XL H1. The high pixel count shows the XH A1 resolves 800+ TVl/ph. Test charts shot with the XH A1 look like the same charts shot with the XL H1; the cameras can be intercut with no apparent difference.

The XH A1's lens shows noticeable barrel distortion when fully wide, but beyond 6mm it's fairly rectilinear-and most other cameras in this market aren't much better. The maximum aperture of f/1.6 diminishes to f/3.2 as you zoom in, and there's a bit of portholing in the last 20 percent of the zoom range when fully open, but stop down to f/4 and neither issue will affect you. There's some red/green chromatic aberration when wide, as on the XL H1.

The Canon offers 24F and 30F modes in addition to 60i. F modes use the same vertical pixel shift as the XL-1's Frame Move Mode, running the green CCD a field out of phase with the red and blue CCDs. Aliasing sets in at 540 lines of vertical resolution, and fine vertical detail can show color moirŽ, but the image remains perceptually sharp, better than simple field-doubling would yield-if not quite as good as full-resolution progressive images. Image degradation is hardly noticeable on most real-world subjects, and most NLEs now handle 24F and 30F modes natively.

Click To Enlarge Important controls are readily accessible.

Sensitivity is comparable to other 1/3-inch HD camcorders, about 1.5 to 2 stops slower than 1/3-inch SD camcorders. Image noise is present but unobjection-able below 18 dB. The noise has a film-like grain to it, without excessive chroma noise. Usable dynamic range, measured with the Stouffer 41-step grayscale target, is on the order of 8.3 stops.

Shutter speeds range from 1/4 second to 1/15,000 second, plus clear scan.

Canon's HDV codec captures images with a minimum of nasty compression artifacts, but don't expect miracles-it's still a 25 Mb long-GOP HDV codec. I didn't see a huge difference in compression quality among the 24F, 30F, and 60i images.

The XH A1 also shoots DV25 in both 4:3 and 16:9 and can down-convert HDV to DV on playback, either full-raster or letterboxed. It can record incoming analog signals in SD, but not in HD.

Customizability

The XH A1 has a fully adjustable skin detail setting and a preset sky detail setting that reduces noise in clear blue skies (the camera is clean enough that sky noise is hardly noticeable on raw pictures, but aggressive color correction showed that sky detail makes a difference).

Nine separate custom presets let you tune the picture further. Two cine gammas flatten the overall transfer curve, bringing 100 percent picture levels in normal gamma down to 87 percent (Cine 1) and 82 percent (Cine 2). Black stretch and compress affect the tonal scale below roughly 40 percent. Low knee kicks in around 85 percent, and middle and high at 100 percent. High knee provides half the highlight that middle does. Auto knee varies between 80 percent and 100 percent depending on scene content, but can take 2 seconds to stabilize.

You can tweak sharpness over a broad range; pick low-, middle-, or high-detail frequencies (like the radius control in software sharpeners); change the H/V detail balance; and adjust detail coring to de-noise the sharpness signal.

Click To Enlarge Standard status displays in viewfinder.

The XH A1 has two noise-reduction methods. NR1 uses multiframe recursion; it works well but moving objects can leave a faint trail. NR2 works like a skin detail setting for the entire picture, but overuse of it erases fine textures. Both NR methods have three settings, so you can tune them to your liking.

You can choose any of three color matrices, and you can adjust chroma gain and phase. You can also tweak all nine color matrix elements individually for pinpoint color matching. On the XH A1, most color controls have 100 steps of adjustment; you can fine-tune very precisely, not just get into the ballpark.

Click To Enlarge XLRs with selection switches. The Instant AF sensor sits beside the lens.

If that's not enough, the XH A1 has a menu dedicated to customizing the viewfinder displays, letting you add, subtract, or adjust 21 separate classes of display info. A custom function menu gives you three setups for 20 different classes of function customization: the directions that rotary controls use, the length of time needed to activate certain pushbuttons, reference tone level, colorbar type, marker intensity, shockless white balance, maximum zoom speed, and more. You cannot use the menus to change the color of the camera body itself, but almost everything short of that is adjustable.

All of these customizations can be saved to SD cards and transferred to other cameras.

Conclusion

Admire the XL H1's performance, but not its form factor, weight, bulk, or cost? The XH series cameras may be what you've been waiting for. The XH cameras give up lens interchangeability but keep all the performance of the H1, and add finer control of picture parameters and more customizability. The XH A1 lacks the professional Jackpack, but costs less than half of the H1's price, while the G1 keeps the Jackpack and embeds audio and timecode in the SDI signal.

The cameras are a bit of a handful to handhold, and the servo lens controls still aren't as smooth or precise as I might like. The 24F and 30F modes degrade vertical resolution slightly. But these issues aside, the XH A1 resets expectations on what you should get for a $4,000 HDV handycam, while the G1 is the only handycam-style camcorder with HD-SDI. Canon's usual attention to control placement makes these cameras pleasurable to use while the crisply detailed pictures fulfill the promise of high definition. n

Console 1.1 Canon's Console 1.1 is a $600 Windows program that combines monitoring and control with disk-based recording, using IEEE 1394 to communicate with XL2, XL H1, and XH series camcorders. A live video window with settable zebra indications shows the entire image and can be scaled up to the size of your screen. A separate pixel-for-pixel focus assist window can show any part of the picture, but isn't resizable. A waveform monitor and vectorscope can measure the entire image or focus on a single line. Click To Enlarge Console lets you record the camera's FireWire data stream directly to disk (as an MPEG-2 transport stream for HDV data). Recording can be triggered by the camera or independently from the Console interface. A simple browser lets you organize and play back clips. Put the camera into external control mode, and Console can act as a full-fledged camera control unit (CCU). You can start and stop the transport; set shutter speed, aperture, gain, and white balance; and zoom and focus the camera. Even better, you can adjust any custom preset setting, and do it a lot faster and more easily than using the rocker wheel on the camera itself. If your shooting style allows tethered operation, a laptop loaded with Console gives you a fully capable CCU, an engineering monitoring station, and disk-based recording capability. Whether you aim to be a video shader or a digital cinema imaging technician, Console lets you geek out with style and aplomb. A 14-day free trial is available at usa.canon.com/consumer/.

Adam Wilt (www.adamwilt.com) shoots, edits, and writes the Technical Difficulties column for DV when he's not too busy reviewing cameras.