Edwin Herdman said:
Dave said:
Mr Canon & Co did (and still do) their best to keep the semi-pro users away from vid cams with changeable lenses. And now can produce with a 500 Euro-Cam á la 600D (or even 1100D) much better movies than with a video cam that cost ten times as much.
While I do hear that many users have sworn off Canon camcorders for the time being, saying that DSLRs make much better movies is kind of ridiculous.
Okay, then how about those EF mount lens ergonomics? I just mentioned continuous focus as an example. If you are filming a movie with trained actors and preplanned stage directions (which, news flash, most camcorder / DSLR video users are not), pulling focus manually is perfectly acceptable. But trying to pull focus on an EF lens with a long focus path is absurd.
I'm sure that using the Zeiss CP.2 and LWZ lenses in EOS mount is a different matter and you still possibly gain some cost savings using (or renting) those over renting full-size equipment, not to mention it's more compact. But once again these things are more suited for traditional film-like applications. If that is your application then of course you know what you need and don't need to post here. If that isn't your application, I question whether the results will be to your liking.
Back on the original topic, one thing that Canon could do, I suppose, is try to make a large sensor with far fewer photosites, but I'm not sure it makes sense. The traditional path of sensor technology (more photosites equaling more noise) suggests that you really would still want a sensor with more megapixels and just bin the results together (of course that's expensive in terms of data rates). This is not a problem for the RED style cameras because they generally seem to record each unique incoming photosite as part of a pixel, as opposed to dropping information, in the regular shooting modes. However they also have huge camera bodies with stacks of hard drives attached - dealing with the bulk of data and physical equipment required is simply not feasible for the average DSLR shooter at any stage of the production process. Canon conceivably could do better than 1920x1200 with current or maybe next-gen technology and that would be useful, but I'm not sure they could go significantly farther yet (say to 4K resolution right out of the gate).