View the price drop on the C300 at B&H here
View the price drop on the 1D C at B&H here
C300 and 1D C drop $2000
This is an interesting move by Canon. The 1D C I expected really to drop further in price because of intense competition from Panasonic and Sony at much lower prices. The C300 however has been selling very well but now apparently Canon want to shift stock faster. Is this to make way for a replacement? Based on specs alone it is certainly due one. Based on the real world and how this camera has been accepted by videographers and filmmakers, people seem pretty happy with what they have!
Now with the Cinema EOS line Canon do have more margin to go offering discounts. With their DSLR bodies very rarely do they cut prices. Even on the used market cameras like the 5D Mark II and III have tended to maintain their value as other cameras depreciate heavily, which is a sure sign of demand. The point is – Canon don’t cut their prices unless they need to so maybe the competition is having an impact now. The Blackmagic Cinema Camera has seen quite a bit of use in place of the C300 for lower budget productions and smaller content producers for instance and then at the higher end there’s the Sony F5.
Above: the 1D C with Iscorama anamorphic lens
Competition hotting up?
Canon’s main vulnerability I think is actually the software side. Software is becoming more and more of a driving factor in every industry. Blackmagic have Resolve 11 and Canon have nothing to compete with it. It is not actually raw I have in mind here – future versions of Resolve and GPU accelerated H.265 editing are going to be huge selling points for a camera system. It is the better compression the majority of us actually want, not huge file sizes!
How this software handles the much more complex compression offered by H.265 is going to be key. It could make or break a software manufacturer and certainly if Resolve has the kind of performance advantage it currently has over Adobe Premiere for GPU assisted processing of raw and Cinema DNG then getting that bundled with a camera is going to propel sales and uptake of the camera system as a whole.
Meanwhile Sony and Panasonic, being all-round video and electronic giants are better placed than a photography company when it comes to the implementation of the more advanced codecs and software. Whilst Sony have been pushing into 4K and Panasonic have been developing AVC Ultra, Canon have stuck with the most basic possible – MPEG on the C300 and MJPEG on the 1D C. This has so far been to their benefit because of how undemanding these formats are to edit but with 4K we need efficiency, much smaller file sizes and better image quality.
So by my reckoning, the Canon C300 Mark II will be all about 4K and the codec it uses.
B&H to sponsor certain EOSHD reviews
The Sony A7S won’t arrive in Berlin until the end of July. Thankfully B&H are going to offer a huge helping hand which will result in EOSHD having in-depth camera reviews published sooner. In the interests of full disclosure, certain reviews starting with the Sigma 50mm F1.4 ART will be made possible by this item having been shipped from New York to Berlin by B&H. These are demo units but most of the gear I will buy afterwards for use in my own filmmaking. The only change you will notice is a link to view the product over at their online store.
I am also preparing a B&H sponsored EOSHD Gear Store which keeps track of new releases, news on shipping dates and recommended gear. This info on other sites I do find genuinely useful but where I want to do it differently is to separate it from the main blogroll and editorial. I don’t think a shopping channel belongs in the space for editorial, it’s not an honest mixture. So the separate Gear Store section is the perfect place for this. I don’t want EOSHD itself to become a shopping channel like so many blogs are becoming so the Gear Store will be different – advice on what camera to buy, what new stuff is being released and how much it costs exactly.
To kick this off I am preparing an article where I recommend the 10 best low budget cameras for shooting cinematic video.
If there are any other buyer’s guides you’d like to see on the EOSHD Gear Store do let me know in the comments!
