Canon "Goes To The Movies"

What does this mean:

The EOS 550D is the first in the EOS range to feature Movie Crop and gives consumers more flexibility to capture important moments which would otherwise be too far away.

 
Ian-T said:
What does this mean:

The EOS 550D is the first in the EOS range to feature Movie Crop and gives consumers more flexibility to capture important moments which would otherwise be too far away.

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Instead of down-rezzing like the 7D does (which makes for moire and aliasing), the T2i uses a 640x480 portion of the sensor which gives it a crop factor of 7x, thus providing "zoom"
 
seven.b said:
Instead of down-rezzing like the 7D does (which makes for moire and aliasing), the T2i uses a 640x480 portion of the sensor which gives it a crop factor of 7x, thus providing "zoom"
Click to expand...
Ok...that's what I figured. So I guess now the question is...will it have a better PQ in video mode since it does not have to skip lines? Also, light sensitivity...would it be negatively impacted? I'd imagine that shallow DOF will go down the drain. But if one is able to chose between the "normal" mode of shooting and using this feature for wides...then it would be sort of like what Barry mentioned the other day. That would be cool. Hopefully it's not just one mode for shooting movies.
 
Ian-T said:
Ok...that's what I figured. So I guess now the question is...will it have a better PQ in video mode since it does not have to skip lines? Also, light sensitivity...would it be negatively impacted? I'd imagine that shallow DOF will go down the drain. But if one is able to chose between the "normal" mode of shooting and using this feature for wides...then it would be sort of like what Barry mentioned the other day. That would be cool. Hopefully it's not just one mode for shooting movies.
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I'm under the impression that mode is only for 640x480 recording. My guess is that it still skips lines in 1080p.
 
You would definitely want it to be just one mode for shooting movies -- otherwise you'd have a field of view of about a, what, a 1/8" video camera?

Sounds like yes it'd be a moire-free way to shoot, but it'd be very very soft, probably around VHS resolution (640x480 out of a bayer chip is gonna result in around 400x300 of resolved de-mosaic'd data)... and it won't have any sort of shallow DOF because it's using such a small portion of the sensor.

Although -- how does that math hold up -- if it's a "crop factor of 7x", that's only about 4.5x more than the normal "crop factor" of 1.6... so -- sounds like it wouldn't actually be a 640x480 section of the chip, would it? That's 300k pixels, or about 1/60th of the chip's surface area, certainly not 1/4th or 1/5th...
 
You mean there's still more to come today?

Maybe it will be that long-rumored Canon projector we've all been hoping for. :D
 
Barry_Green said:
You would definitely want it to be just one mode for shooting movies -- otherwise you'd have a field of view of about a, what, a 1/8" video camera?
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The EF lens adapter for the Canon XL mount is about a 7.8x multiplier on 16:9 (http://www.dvinfo.net/canonxl2/articles/article04.php), so a 7x multiplier is probably equal to a little bigger than a 1/3" video sensor.

Michael Olsen said:
Very interesting. It will be good to see how it holds up in resolution tests, moire, and geometric skew. I noticed a max continuous shooting speed of under 4 fps, making me wonder if the sensor reads out rather slowly. Maybe they are using a crop, this time? Lots of questions, no answers!
Click to expand...

According to http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/content_page.asp?cid=7-10048-10482 the sensor in the T2i is very similar to the 7D but it has 4 readout channels instead of 8 on the 7D. The 7D also has dual Digic 4 while the T2i has one. The mirror and shutter mechanisms on the 7D may also be designed for the higher frames. But it could be that all of this extra horsepower on the 7D is for the high frame rates in still mode and not necessarily video processing.
 
Canon sells lenses

Canon sells lenses

"Users can also get closer to the action with a new Movie Crop function, which magnifies focal lenth by seven times without the need to change the lens, making long-range video possible without having to move an inch."

That tells me that this is not going to be good video quality. Canon would not give up the need to sell a telephoto lense. I believe this is a consumer gimic to sell more cameras to people who never intend on buying another lense. Soccer moms will love it.
 
Okay, so -- magnified 7x over normal? That makes more sense, in that if it was 7x horizontal and 7x vertical, then 640x7 = 4480, which is close to the chip's horizontal res. So, yeah, it does look like it'd be extracting about a 1/6" chip-sized image (because while the XL mount is a 7.8x multiplier as Tim said, we are probably now talking about 7x as magnified as the already 1.6x multiplier, for a total of about 11x).

I wonder if they could have done a full 1920x1080 extraction, instead of going for the consumer-friendly megazoom of the 7x more... if they could have read 1920x1080 at full speed out of the center of the chip, that'd be about a 2/3" sized chip... but ... since the still-frame readout is 3.5fps, a 1/4-size readout would probably be limited to 14fps... maybe 640x480 is the largest they could go and get full-speed readout.

But... does that mean the 7D, with its 8fps sensor, could do 24fps at 2/3"-sized moire-free 1920x1080? That'd be huge...
 
Well, we don't KNOW that they can do it, but ... man, even 1280x720, moire-free, that'd be a bigger-than-half-inch chip size, and at $1699... that'd be sweet...
 
This is going to get interesting. I don't think that there is any question that the processing power of these cameras is directed at the photo portion of the fuctionality. We'll find out REAL SOON IF:

This has the same (or very close to the same) video quality and fuctionality as the 7d. 1700 for the leading DSLR (for movies) was crazy....is it possible that we'll get the same for under 1000? WOW! These are exciting times!
 
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