An interesting development.

Note the lens – no noisy click stops for movie use.

When Canon introduced the Canon 5D Mark II a few years ago no one expected it to become a leading movie camera. Delivering high quality footage from its video mode at a bargain price compared to professional movie cameras, it quickly became a favorite for aspiring movie makers on a budget.

Canon has now created a full time movie camera which will revolutionize how many professionals work, the EOS-1D C. The first applications which come to mind include fashion and wedding photography. The reason is that this movie camera makes movie images whose stills are capable of delivering high quality prints. No more ‘decisive moments’ – just let the camera run then select the best frames for printing. For the wedding snapper he gets both the movie – increasingly demanded in the business – and the ability to print high quality stills for the album.

While this body does not deliver RAW quality images you can bet that is just around the corner, likely awaiting the development of faster GPUs to process all that data in-camera while still delivering the requisite 24 frames a second. Canon really should speak with nVidia on that one.

Although the video below is a Canon promotional piece, it is very much worth watching. This will change how many stills photographers work. What’s that? You rue the passing of the skill of timing in taking a good still image? Get with the action. Now you too can be Cartier-Bresson. The Decisive Moment is so yesterday, swept away by technology.

Click the image for the video.

The video is HD and repays watching on a large display.

Using the lower 4K (4096 x 2160) setting you need 8.85mp of storage for each frame. That figures to 221mp a second (!). The recording format is Motion JPG though an even higher definition H264 format, using the full 18mp is available. The above video states that the camera chews through 1GB of storage a minute (I come up with a different answer, but Canon doubtless knows what it’s talking about), but with 128GB storage cards now available and affordable, that’s not a big issue. The rumored price is $12,000 which is not much for a professional grade digital movie camera in a very compact package. Add a compact stabilizer of the kind used by aerial photographer Jason Hawkes and you have a Steadicam at a fraction of the cost and bulk of the real thing.

Price? The Epic-M RED camera, with comparable specs, will set you back $24,000, twice as much.