Canon Announces GL-2by Robin LissPublished on Jun 26, 2002 12:00 AM 
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Canon has announced the GL-2 camcorder, replacing the popular GL-1 camcorder. The GL-2 has 3 CCDs, a 20x optical zoom, digital still capabilities and other features.
The GL-2 is a MiniDV digital camcorder. The GL-2 has three 410K (380K effective) CCDs and a 20x optical zoom. The camcorder has manual shutter, plus a focus ring. The GL-2 has optical image stabilization and a Fluorite L series lens.
The camcorder includes an 8MB SD card for saving digital stills to. Stills are transferred to computer via USB. The camcorder produces 1,488 x 1,128 pixel stills. Instead of putting high resolution CCDs in the camcorder, Canon has decided apparently to use pixel shifting to increase the still resolution. It's interesting that Canon has decided to use pixel shifting. Panasonic made the same decision with the Japanese NV-MX5000. However they used three higher resolution CCDs producing 2048 x 1496 resolution CCDs.
The GL-2 also offers manual control over audio. The camcorder has a color viewfinder as well as a 2.5 in. color LCD. The camcorder includes a custom button which you can assign any function to. The camcorder also has control over color phase (from red to green), color sharpness, and color gain (saturation).
The GL-2 will be available in mid-july for $2,799.