First Look: Canon C500 Mark II - Modular Cinema Camera

Yesterday Canon introduced the second generation of its professional advanced Cinema Camera – the C500 Mark II. Nino from Cinema 5D was given access to information as well as the mockup of the body of the new camera and you can find his report in the video above.

Besides some of the technical updates including the (almost) 6K full-frame sensor and new processor, the new camera is now highly modular with currently 3 different available expansion modules to choose from (Canon is certainly not the first company to use this type of modularity and although this isn’t the level of modularity we see from RED for example – which might actually be a good thing if you consider RED’s pricing – it does give the user more freedom to adapt to his/her needs when shooting).

Here are some of the camera’s specs (you can find a lot more on Canon’s site):

Full Frame 5.9K 60p
DIGIC DV 7 Image Processor
Cinema RAW Lite (Internal Recording)
15+ stops of DR
4K 60p 4:2:2 10-bit
5.9K, 4K (60fps), 2K (sensor crop) 120fps
4.3″ LCD Monitor LM-V2 with Touch Focus
Internal ND filters (clear, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 stop – 8 & 10 with extension)
2 CFexpress media card slots + SDXC slot for proxies (when working with RAW).
Compatibility with EF and PL lenses + anamorphic and spherical lenses
Dual Pixel CMOS AF with Touch and Face detection AF
5-axis electronic image stabilization (works with any lens)
Canon Log 2 and 3 Gamma
4 channel recording (4 XLR inputs with the EU-V2 expansion unit)
The Option to apply custom LUTs
12G-SDI, 3G-SDI

The following are the shooting resolutions/formats, framerates and bit rates of the C500 MKII:

RAW 5.9: 2.1GBps 4K 1GBps. 2K 250 MBps
XFAVC – 4K/UHD 810MBps at 60fps
410 MBps 30 fps and below.
2K 60fps and above 310MBps
160MBps 30fps and below.

The new camera will be available in December 2019 for a price of $16,000 with the different modules ranging from $500-$1600.

B&H talks to Jessy from Canon to talk about the C500 MKII

Besides the C500 MKII Canon also introduced a 32″ 4K reference display with HDR. This unit meant for high-end production work has a whopping 2 million to 1 contrast ratio, ITU-R BT.2020 and ACES2065-1 Support, LAN Interface for Remote Network Control and even 8K input support (4 x 12G-SDI Inputs, 4 x 12G-SDI Outputs) although the monitor’s panel “only” goes up to 4K.

Pricing for the Canon DP-V3120 31″ 4K HDR beast is Hollywood level only unfortunately set at $40,000.

An official Canon DP-V3120 31″ video

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Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.