Canon XC10 compact Ultra HD camera

Canon has announced a new lightweight video and digital stills camera, the XC10, which can record Ultra HD (3840x2160) video and will cost £1,600 (about $2,400) when it ships in June.

Although it is not part of the Cinema EOS range, it does offer some of their features, and is designed to be suitable as a B camera for larger productions. However, it is essentially competing with a couple of established 4K cameras, the Sony A7s, which offers wonderful low-light capabilities with a full-frame sensor for about the same price, and the popular Panasonic GH4, which is slightly cheaper.

Atomos: Ninja comes clean on DSLRs - sharpens new Samurai Blade

Many users, particularly of DSLRs, might find the new lower price of the Atomos Ninja-2 (HDMI input) recorder appealing, as it can now take clean HDMI feeds from a lot more DSLRs, including the Canon 5D MkIII – thanks to a firmware update from Canon (Atomos also worked with Canon to develop start/stop trigger and timecode over HDMI).

The Ninja-2 now costs $695, and comes with a redesigned docking station, battery, AC mains adaptor, single battery charger and shims for Canon and Nikon batteries.

Atomos also launched the new Samurai Blade at NAB, with higher quality screen for monitoring, and reduced the price of the existing Samurai. For full details, and more Atomos NAB news, go to the main UrbanFoxTV technology blog.

C300 is most popular rental camera

Canon's C300 camcorder has topped Televisual's list of the most popular rental cameras in the UK for 2012

The full list is:

Ninja - shipping this week

We met up with Atomos CEO Jeromy Young at BVE2011 last week to find out what's happening with the Ninja. Well, it is ready and shipping this week.


If you haven't heard of the Ninja...it's a portable field recorder which plugs into a camera's HDMI socket. One of the main reasons for using it is to bypass the cameras usual compression system and record at a higher bit rate, using Apple's ProRes codec. It records onto notebook hard disk drives (HDD) or solid state drives (SSD) - which should also allow you to record for longer. You can read up on all the Ninja's specs on the Atomos site.


We recorded Jeromy demonstrating all the controls and menu items. The interface is very clean and simple. The Ninja comes with batteries, battery charger, caddies for the drive, docking station and cables in a sturdy carry case. There's plenty of information in our video.