Canon launches XC15 oddball camcorder

When Canon launched its XC10 camcorder / camera hybrid last year, no-one really seemed to like it much. It was a peculiar mix of cheap price and bizarre design decisions trying to make out it was a new form of media capture device.

Not to be put off, the company has now announced an additional model, the XC15 and really there’s not a huge amount that seems to have changed.

The biggest upgrade would probably be the addition of a bundled XLR audio adapter but the gist of the unit is still UHD 4K at 25p (/30), a 10x zoom lens with manual-only zoom and servo driven focus.

On the upside, that 4K is recorded as 4:2:2 (8 bit) intraframe at up to 305Mbps – yes, you read that right. It also has Canon Log and Wide DR gamma settings to squish more detail into high contrast scenes.

Hooray though – they’ve included a waveform monitor which is amazingly absent from the XC10.

The price is set to be around $2,3999 USD and yet weirdly is also showing up as £2,360 GBP inc VAT which is frankly a bit steep since you could just add a Beachtek XLR adapter to an XC10 and have almost as much functionality.

Still, there’s never been much fathoming Canon’s market strategy so why should that change now?

Details at https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/products/details/camcorders/professional/xc15