12 Reasons I Sold My Canon C200 to Buy a C70

 
 
 

I just sold my Canon C200 and bought a Canon C70 cinema camera to replace it, so in this video I'm going to explain why. I've owned a bunch of various cameras from Canon, Sony, and RED over the past ten years and have used Canon Cinema cameras as my main cameras for the past 6+ years running my video production company.

In March 2019 I bought a C200 used for $5,500 and have used it as my main camera the past 21 months.

Here is why I sold it to switch to the Canon C70.

⏰ — 12 Reasons I Switched to the C70

  • 0:00 - 10-bit 4:2:2

  • 1:24 - Better dynamic range

  • 2:38 - False color in camera

  • 3:24 - Full frame adapter for EF lenses

  • 4:34 - Ability to use RF lenses

  • 5:24 - Smaller body

  • 6:37 - Uses only SD cards

  • 7:28 - Recording full quality and proxy simultaneously

  • 9:19 - Better slow motion performance and settings

  • 10:27 - Touch screen operation

  • 11:20 - Timecode sync

  • 11:59 - Better battery life

⏰ — 5 Things I'll Miss From the C200

For my workflow (editing in Premiere Pro with my full-time editor living in another state), I tried to implement Canon Cinema RAW Light, but I never film in it on the C200. It just slows everything down for me. From the larger files, to slowing down my computer during the edit and export, to being slower to make proxies to send to my editor over Dropbox or Frame.io, to being more work to color grade Canon Log 2, it has never been worth the hassle to me.

The noise in the C200's Cinema RAW Light files has always bugged me a lot too. Even when you overexpose by two stops, this image is just noisy. For the kind of work I film I don't have time for Neat Video to denoise the shadows on hours and hours of exports.

Another issue with the C200 is you don't have the ability to accurately monitor CLOG2. On the C200, in RAW, it only shows you CLOG or CLOG3, so you effectively have to guess your exposure. On the C70 I can properly expose my image using false color and not have to overexpose by a stop or two to make sure the shadows are clean since DGO will provide a cleaner image.

I sold my C200 used for $4,500 and since I bought it used almost two years ago for $5,500 cash, with this "upgrade/sidegrade" to the C70 I'll only be out $1,000, so it is worth it to me.

Is the C200 a terrible, obsolete camera? Absolutely not. The 8-bit image out of the C200 is the best I've ever seen. If you're willing to go through the workflow of shooting Cinema Raw Light, you can get amazing results. The form factor is outstanding, the autofocus is amazing, and if you bought it today this 3 year old camera could still give you 5+ years of filming great 4K footage.

For me, the better camera is going to be the C70.

I hope you enjoyed this video. I'm going to be putting out a bunch of videos about the C70 as I open it up and test it out. Subscribe to see them. If you want to watch my full C200 review from a few years ago you can watch that here.

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