welcome to my unboxing of my new camera and I call this my new camera because uh
not because other people won't be allowed to use it but because they don't
want to I'm the only one who works here who actually cares that we just got
ourselves a Canon xa2 so the xa2 is the upgrade from the
XA 10 the the old formerly only camera
that we really had that was better than like a pocket point and shoot so it
comes with a massive user manual which I think most people probably won't look at
as well as a data import utility but quite frankly if you're using like
canons included you know Zoom browser equivalent or whatever it is that they
have these days you should probably just go find a new line of work um so let's
just put all of that aside and have a look at all the goodies that are
included in inside the box of the xa20 so in front of us we have the Fairly
large accessory package that comes with the xa20 first is a full four pole
adapter to composite video out as well as left and right audio next we've got
an AC power cable that goes with the DC
brick right there that we can use to power the camera for longer shoots in
the studio for example this is an interesting inclusion so they now
include an HDMI to Mini HDMI cable which
is great because it has a mini HDMI output I really wish they would have
upgraded that to full HDMI it includes one of their new even more intelligent
batteries and I'm going to take a moment to kind of rant about this because um
you can't use XA 10 compatible batteries with the xa2 Canon has basically
implemented a system whereby if you install an older battery into the newer
camera it'll say oh sorry it powers on right and shows you an image oh sorry
this battery is not compatible with this camera and it just turns off Canon dick
move you guys dick move uh because being able to reuse your older batteries and
upgrade your equipment is a very good thing and it could have just said hey
look the uh the the the level readings aren't going to be accurate with this
older type of battery but instead you just had it turn off um So currently
there aren't any cheap thirdparty alternatives to the Canon batteries
which are like a 100 bucks for an extended battery so once again dick move
Canon uh they've got one of those uh magnetic sort of or iron or whatever
they are anyway the theory is they reduce interference on cables uh in
practice I suspect your USB cable doesn't care if you install one of those
they've also got a USB a to Mini cable
for pulling data directly off the camera but that's not your only option more on
that in a moment a lens Hood which is really cool because it's got this little
flip out dudad right here that allows you to instead of installing a lens cap
just have a flip of the switch protected or ready to rock sort
of functionality which I think is fantastic they include a shotgun mic
shock mount however it's really nothing special that's very hard rubber as well
as a couple of screws to install it and finally a remote that allows you to well
remotely control the camera but that's not your only option for that either so
okay things you have more than one option for data transfer all of a sudden
Boom the xa20 has Wi-Fi I'm going to start pulling the camera up Canon also
almost got uh great points for environmentally friendly packaging but
they did include a little bit of plastic so it has Wi-Fi now which supports data
transfer even to an FTP which is
incredibly cool so being able to just kind of go look here's my FTP login
credal IAL automatically throw all my footage on there absolutely huge thumbs
up you can also use Wi-Fi to control the camera using a smartphone which is very
cool as well so you can adjust your focus or start and stop recording using
a supported phone it just says supported phones on their apps but I'm going to go
ahead and try a couple of different devices with it over the next little while here so that's in addition to the
remote not only that but it has a lan C connector so you can also use that to
control it using supported uh using supported accessories as well I haven't
actually found it yet but you can see I pulled out the body of the camera as well as
the handle so we're going to take a much closer look at them once I go ahead and
show you guys so that just slides into the shoe Mount right there the two
built-in screws at the back go here and I really don't recommend using the xa20
without the handle because it includes not only a handle for holding on to the
camera but also some pretty important functionality so right here it's got
your control for your microphone so you can either have phantom power or not
have phantom power you can switch the two different inputs on or off just like
that and then you can also switch to recording using the built-in stereo
microphones here and here but uh I mean
they're okay they're not great but they're okay and then next you have
analog controls for the levels on those two XLR inputs that are on the other
side over here last but not least you get ah yes okay so you get a pass
through for that shoe Mount as well as start and stop you can lock this off if
you don't want to accidentally press as well as Zoom control so it really is a
great little accessory it comes with the camera you should pretty much always have it on there so now we've got the
camera geared up it's time to take a quick tour of it so first things first
this is what this looks like installed on the camera it uh quite effectively
blocks out the light completely from being uh transmitted it's kind of a one
or the other with the hood and the lens cap because you can actually see right
here even if I wanted to put the lens cap in I wouldn't be able to so I
wouldn't imagine myself using the lens cap ever again again which means I'll probably lose it so here just guys
remind me if I ever ask where it is I put it in the Box for the xa20 so that I
wouldn't lose it all right so let's go ahead and have a look at controls to
start with so the menu is much much
better than last time around and the main reason for that is a couple small
tweaks and layout for where you can uh where you can change settings and the
biggest one is that it Now features a capacitive touchcreen instead of a
pressure sensitive touch screen so that makes scrolling through menus much much
easier compared to the previous gen product you don't feel like you're like
mashing on the screen in order to select anything or change a setting um it's
also just you know smoother to scroll through so that's that's more natural
they've also moved around quite a few of the adjustments that you can make such
as switching between autofocus and manual focus and part of the reason for
this is that they've changed that the way the that the way you switch between
manual mode and automatic mode so it used to be on the old camera the XA 10
the power button when you when you turned it on you actually had to decide
am I in auto mode or manual mode that's not the case anymore so now you've got
off camera mode and Media mode which makes sense is like how every other
camera in the world works the XA 10 had a button here for playback and review
which is random I don't think I've ever seen anything like that before now
there's just a switch for auto mode manual mode and Cinema mode so Cinema
mode we're not going to spend too much time on cuz basically all it does is
give you sort of some filters that you can put over top of your footage which
um I mean might help a little bit in postprocessing so filter one right here
is a cinema standard so it's just a bit of a flatter profile so you can play
around with color a little bit more on post Vivid you can actually see previews
of these over to the right here so we'll point out some stuff as you can see Vivid is much more Vivid uh dream just
puts kind of a goofy looking vignette around things and then there's a bunch
of other filters that you can you can set up um the next thing is layout of
the buttons makes things a little bit easier easier for you as well so the buttons are now user configurable they
have five programmable buttons two over here to the left of the LCD one on the
inside right here that's button number five and then two more back here at the
back of the camera so the fact that you can reconfigure those to whatever you
want is a huge huge upside to this
camera compared to the last gen product back are the dual SD card slots so these
support SD XC A and B and they support a
couple of cool modes actually a few cool modes so with the new dig 4 video
processor that's inside here you can not only do what you could do on the
previous product which was you could record simultaneously to both cards so
that you have an automatic backup or you could record to one and then the other
and you could actually swap them out in the middle so you could record continuously that's all supported now
you can actually record in two different bit rates at the same time so you can
have low bit rate working files or web ready files and then you can have full
bit rate ones one on one card and one on the other card which is a very very cool
feature it does have an infrared um mode
just like the old camera did moving further around to the back we've got a
little toggle switch here that actually allows you to change the functionality
of your focus wheel between focus and zoom whatever you prefer so if we go
around to the front of the camera that basically allows you to kind of go okay I want this to be Focus I want this to
be zoom in the menu you can configure which way is which for both of them and
then there's also aha this right here is a dedicated button for gain now you used
to be able to control that with the LCD screen but you had to choose between
gain and something else can't remember what it was anymore it's been a long time since I've used the XA 10
extensively but now you have a dedicated wheel for that so if you kind of go okay
my focus ring is focus and it's a it's an infinite Focus ring guys so you don't
you're not going to have like that muscle memory ability to focus which is
really unfortunate I wish they had just made it linear um anyway so you've got
your focus ring for Focus you can adjust gain on the fly right here and then you
can use the zoom rocker for Zoom which actually has a variety of different
speeds that it can operate at you can either have it be linear and you can select up to 16 different speeds or you
can press it harder for more and press it softer for Less uh whichever you
prefer this gives you a much greater degree of flexibility while you're
runand gun shooting compared to the previous camera so why did we go with
this versus something like a DSLR or a Blackmagic pocket cinema camera or
something along those lines there's a couple of reasons so that runand gun
aspect of it it makes it ideal for things like um you know event coverage
where you're not carrying around some bulky thing or external adapters you
just get one file at the end of it which might not be as flexible as what you
might get out of a DSLR it might not have that same cinematic look and
shallow depth of field like a DSLR it might not have the same uh codec support
as something like a black magic pocket Cinema but what it is is it's an
all-in-one the footage is ready to do something with it whether it's upload
directly to YouTube uh automatically wirelessly upload to your FTP or
whatever else the case may be the sensor is slightly bigger than the older XA 10
so it's a 1 over 2.84 in and it's a SEO
sensor so the older one was a 1/3 in SEO sensor so it's slightly bigger and I
think that that's pretty much all the justification I mean it's got other kind
of cool stuff it has a pre-record buffer which is really neat which means that
when you have it configured whenever you're rolling it's actually capturing
the last 3 seconds of footage which means that if you're kind of like you
know you're at Little Johnny's thing and oh holy H crap they started the race a
little bit early boom you press that button and you're actually going to get that previous 3 seconds so you're not
going to miss anything um continuous autofocus is really nice they've
actually got a few different modes for it so number one is you can do like a
facial detection uh continuous autofocus you can have medium speed autofocus
which will look more natural or you can just have instant autofocus which is
something that you would have to do manually on a DSLR although it's great
to have that manual control but again it comes down to Different Strokes for
different folks this lens right here has a 35 mm equivalent Zoom range that goes
from 26.8 mm all the way up to 576 MIM and the optical image
stabilization coupled with some of the fancy image stabilization that Canon's
doing with the dig4 processor actually looks pretty amazing so check this out
we're going to go ahead we're actually going to zoom in 20 times on my sweater
over there so I'm holding this like way out from my body you can see a little
bit of noise in the image just because that's very very low light but there's
actually surprisingly not a ton of shake you can see what an awkward position I'm
in right there and the fact that I can hold it that steady zoomed in that close
is very very impressive there's a viewfinder electronic viewfinder right
there that you pop out in order to enable it there's the start stop record
button here so that's in addition to the one on the handle there's aha this is
great so there's a little rocker here that gives you uh push button support as
well as directionality that you can use to navigate the menu if you prefer that
to a touch screen which people do as well as another button that's for
navigating the menu over here over on the right they have dramatically
improved things here so power in goes up here which I actually don't think is
better than the old one which had power in at the bottom and then there's also
your AV out but mostly you're not going to need that for anything and look at
this this little this little thing nothing here the old camera had like the
micro or the mini HDMI out down there so you actually couldn't handhold it and
have HDMI out at the same time which was ridiculous so what am I going to be
using it for I'm going to be using it for things like vlogging if you guys saw
any of our GPU 14 coverage where it was basically just like me hand camming
things running around that was all shot with the XA 10 the older camera it was a
bit of a test case for it are people going to enjoy this content at all how
how easy is it going to be for me to create when I have like a small uh
compact camera how good is it going to look so that's one of the reasons we
invested in one of these behind the scenes up until now I've shot all of my
behind the scenes footage on my HTC1 and while people have commented that you
know hey it looks not bad particularly the sound is really really terrible you
know whenever it's windy or anything like that so having a camera that
actually has you know a reasonable quality shotgun mic on it in a shock
mount with a wind sock is going to dramatically improve the audio quality
of behind the-scenes footage and because it's nice and compact it's the kind of
thing that we can actually carry around and and like quickly shoot things with
much like you would be able to do with a phone um it's for things like casual videos
where the cinematography of it isn't really important so if we were doing
like uh you know oh hey crap we just found this like cool setting in this
Benchmark and we wanted to just do like a short little video about it we grab
this throw it in full auto mode shoot a quick thing and upload it to the channel
obviously the quality of the footage is not going to be as good is what we can
get out of the fs700 which is what this is being shot on but I would like to at
least give you guys a little demo of what you can expect out of it and that
will run here at the end of the video so guys if you liked this video give it a
like if you disliked it give it a dislike if you have feelings that are
more complicated than that or you really don't understand why I you know wasted
my money on this camera or you really think it was a great idea and you can't
believe we ever bought anything else please do leave a comment under the video and if you want to discuss it
further guys there's always a link to the lineus tech tips Forum below the
video as well as a link for where you can buy one of these suck because if you
wanted to do so and as always don't forget to subscribe