I wonder if there is a LANC port on there and also supports A/V IN?

Canon seems to be taking a cue from Sanyo...

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/digital-cameras/sanyo-xacti-hd2...

...but their continued use of MJPEG as a video format is disappointing.

A 4GB SD card will only hold 13 minutes of HD video. What good is that???

Canon, DivX... DivX, Canon... now that the intros are done, perhaps we can stop fooling ourselves and get to business.

There is a detailed review of the TX-1 in Japanese with some sample files at http://66.249.93.104/translate_c?hl=en&u=http://www.watch.... although Google does not translate it very well. Is anyone here able to translate it?

so, what's so bad about putting an optical viewfinder into those things? Come on, guys, my eyesight is 140% on each eye, but I have to admit to being unable to get things into focus 100% on my Everio GZ MC500, and unless the little displays in your cameras will have HD resolution, it's going to be the same on every other camera on the block. Those displays are nice to get an idea about what the composition of the shots might look like, and autofocus gives you good results 98% of the time. But if you have ever made a movie with a few action scenes (insert porn joke here) autofocus is next to useless with fast moving images, especially at a range of less than 2 meters where big parts of the image move around too fast for the AF-algorithms to get a fix on them. Or shots with tiny objects and lots of surroundings, like trying to film a spider building its net. And a 10 minute viewing-experience can be completely marred if you leave one or two of those scenes in, or your heart will be bleeding if you cut them out, because those scenes would be the potentially most impressive in the whole oeuvre. Optical viewfinder together with manual focus, please!

I love the concept of these things. It's perfect for me to take on a Disney trip with the kids. I just need some reasonable recording system. 16 GB CF cards combined with some kind of portable Harddrive "downloader / media viewer" with at least 400 GB capacity would make this a powerful system. Now if they can get this to do 1080i or 1080p, I'll cut a check right now.

At 480p you could record for nearly a half hour on a 4GB card that means an hour on an 8GB card which you can pick up for about $50.

How much recording time do you need? Trust me 10minutes of home videos is enough for even the parents to want to kill themselves.

Given what I'm assuming is a FAT32 file size limit (4GB) on movie sizes, I was hoping they would provide a hardware compression option (eg, DivX, MPEG4, etc).

I can see this working well for casual home and weekend movies, but the ~14 minutes per 4GB card isn't going to fly for weddings, vacations, and kid's sporting/plays/etc where you need the camera to just be on for hours, with the expectation that you'll edit in post.

The other concern is the somewhat compact NB-4L battery (760mAh), and how Canon doesn't quote recording power capabilities.

The upside is that there's nothing else like it in terms of build quality and slickness, and despite my concerns, I'll most likely buy one. :p

I think the reason why Canon still has MJPEG as the codec is because any MPEG4 codec (such as DIVX) requires some extreme computing abilities at HD resolutions.
My 1.4Ghz G4 Mac can barely handle 480p h264. 720p in any decent codec is out of its reach.
Sure a DSP could be very capable but also very power hungry and very expensive.

Oh well, I'll wait for V2 to come with 4Mbps h264 at this resolution.
4GB at 4Mbps can hold 140minutes... Not bad!
an definitely viewable.
I wouldn't mind it going nuts however with 8Mbps h264. Not sure however what machine would be needed to play that back without dropping frames.

Any word on Mac compatability?

Are you asking about Mac compatibility with the video? Just about anything will eidt Motion-JPEG... iMovie, Vegas, etc.

I'm psyched to see the HD footage on this thing. If it's decent, I'll be first in line for one.

Canon's website has a MacOS X logo in the technology area at the bottom of the page.

nuclearlove

follow the link in the 3rd post to see sample files.

I'd love to see a comparison with the Sanyo Xacti HD2. Can anyone tell by the specs which would do better in low light?

Canon should with higher ISO and image stabilization.

I recently saw TX1 with a friend of mine! Wow this device is awesome! I already ordered one for me at amazon.com for $392. Eagerly waiting for the shipment. Will post more comments once I get it.

One of the things about its movie camera is when recording in HD it seems to need an SD card with high (i mean very very high) write speed. My friend had a Transcend 4GB 150x (write speed 16mbps). The one I ordered is a Kingston 8GB HSDC (write speed 5mbps). I am hoping this card will work at least for recording the VGA mode.

Does anyone know if this camera does zoom during movie mode?

Clarifying, OPTICAL zoom during movie mode..