By Contributing Editor Chuck Fadely
We got our first look at the new C100 Mark II, an update to the immensely popular Canon C100 cinema camera.
The new viewfinder, lifted from the C500, is great. The viewfinder now works if you wear glasses and the image is big and bright enough to really use. The LCD screen now pivots around so you can see it from the side of the camera during interviews, and will flip so it faces forward if you need to do a standup in front of the camera. Face-tracking autofocus should make those standups look sharp.
The DIGIC 4 processor adds 1080/60P that the original C100 lacked (but no 4K); is supposed to give clean images up to 100K iso, and also allows you to downconvert footage from one card to the other, during or after a shoot. This is a feature I use all the time on the Canon XA25 to be able to send clips over a cell connection and is really valuable. No WiFi on the new C100, though.
They’ve added some buttons – it’s up to 17 programmable buttons now. They’ve added a mic to the body so you can still get a scratch audio track when you take off the top handle.
It’s the same basic camera and same sensor as the original C100 but the viewfinder alone makes it a tempting upgrade. That viewfinder and the more flexible LCD make this much better suited to run-n-gun shooting and one-man-band interviews than its predecessor.
The camera will ship in December at $5499 US.
In the video above, Chuck Westfall from Canon USA walks us through the new features. The official Canon info is in our previous post.
