Angus Farquhar, Online Video Producer

Canon XA10 professional camcorder hands on

At the CES show in Las Vegas for the day job and I spotted this just unveiled Canon XA10 while filming some of the consumer cameras on the Canon stand. 
After a quick demo from the guy on the stand I got to play with the Canon XA10 for a few minutes and I was very impressed. 

I’d been looking for a compact pro camera to replace the aging Sony A1 for a while and recently settled for the Sony MC50E. Now, I do like the MC50 but it is too close to the consumer camcorder it is based on and the manual controls are quite infuriating, even if it does shoot nice images. 

The XA10 however has pretty much all the manual controls you could want plus proper XLR audio inputs with physical independent gain controls. 
This is real professional camera that just happens to be small.

The specs are impressive as well with 64GB internal memory and two SD card slots, full 1080p recording (MC50 is i), 10x zoom which starts at a reasonably wide angle and full shoot assist functions like zebra and peaking. 

On top of all of that control your also have a very compact chassis. The handle and audio inputs come completely off after unscrewing three thumb screws leaving a body as small as the MC50 but still with access to a 3.5mm audio jack.

All of the manual controls are accessed through the touch screen except for the manual focus ring around the lens. This slows things down a little but it’s leaps and bounds better than the MC50 which doesn’t allow you access to the manual controls independently, instead it opperates in a kind of apperture priority mode with all of the settings you are not changing adjusting themselves to compensate for what you are doing. 

The only limitation of the XA10 that I can see is the AVCHD codec. It is recording a high 24mbps which is fine for quality as far as I am concerned but experience with the MC50 has shown that editing that footage is a serious pain in anything except the most powerful systems. 

All in, the only thing that disappointed me about the Canon XA10 is the fact that Canon didn’t launch it 6 months ago to stop me buying the MC50. Now I need to find valid excuse to spend another £1500.