Canon Japan Announces the VX-2 Japanese Version of the GL-2

by Robin Liss
Published on Jun 24, 2002 12:00 AM



Canon Japan has announced the XV-2, presumably the Japanese version of the GL-2, replacing the popular GL-1 camcorder. It is safe to assume the Canon will announce the same camcorder, or very similar camcorder as the XV-2 under the model name GL-2 in the U.S. We can very safely assume that the specs on the XV-2 are close or the same as what they will be on the GL-2.

The XV-2 is a MiniDV digital camcorder. The XV-2 has three 410K (380K effective) CCDs and a 20x optical zoom. The camcorder has manual shutter, plus a focus ring.

The camcorder includes an 8MB SD card for saving digital stills to. Stills are transferred to computer via USB. It appears that 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.

Other details we were able to pull from the press release is that the camcorder has LANC, independent right and left audio control, and a color bar generator.

The XV-2's most obvious competitor is the Sony DCR-TRV950. The first noticeable difference is the Mega pixel CCD's on the TRV950 compared to the 410K CCDs on the XV-2.

The camcorder breaks from the traditional GL-1, XL-1 and XL-1S white a red color scheme, going with a primarily black exterior. The Canon web site says the camcorder will be available in Japan in mid July. Please note that we pulled all this information from the Japanese Canon website using computer translations.