Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing of my new camera and I call this my new camera because 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 X a 20 so the X 820 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 so let's just put all that aside and have a look at all the goodies that are included inside the box of the X 820 so in front of us we have the fairly large accessory package that comes with the XA 21st is a full 4-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 gonna take a moment to kind of rant about this because you can't use x8n compatible batteries with the XA 20 Canon has basically implemented a system whereby if you install an older battery into the new merc amaura it'll say oh sorry it powers on right and shows you an image oh sorry this battery is not compatible disc Emily and it just turns off Canon dick move you guys dick move 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 the the level readings aren't going to be accurate with this older type of battery but instead you just had it turn off so currently there aren't any cheap third-party alternatives to the Canon batteries which are like a hundred bucks for extended battery so once again dick move cannon they've got one of those magnetic sort of or iron or whatever they are anyway the theory is they reduce interference on cables in practice I suspect your USB cable doesn't care if you install one of those they've also got a USB a two mini B 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 doodad 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 XA twenty has Wi-Fi and start pulling the camera Canon also almost got 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 credentials automatically throw 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 gonna 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 landsea connector so you can also use that to control it using supported 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 gonna 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 XA twenty 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 microphones so you can either have Fanta 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 I mean they're okay they're not great but they're okay and the 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 I 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 it 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 quite effectively blocks out the light completely from being a 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 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 X a 20 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 in layout for where you can where you can change settings and the biggest one is that it now features a capacitive touch screen 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 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 auto focus 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 x8n 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 me a mode which makes sense is like how every other camera in the world works the x8n 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 because basically all it does is give you sort of some filters that you can put over top of your footage which I mean might help a little bit in post-processing 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 in post vivid you can actually see previews of these over to the right here so we'll point it sometimes you can see vivid is much more vivid 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 the next thing is layout of the buttons makes things a little bit easier for you as well so the buttons are now user configurable they have five programmable buttons too 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 slot so these support SDXC a and B and they support a couple of cool modes actually a few cool modes so with the new digit for video processor that's inside here you can not only do what you can 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 can 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 bitrate working files or web-ready files and then you can have full bitrate ones one on one card and one on the other card which is a very very cool feature it does have an infrared 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 focused 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 ha 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 x8n extensively but now you have a dedicated wheel for that so if you kind of go ok my focus ring is focus and it's a it's an infinite focus ring guys so you don't you're not gonna have like that muscle memory ability to focus which is really unfortunate I wish they had just made it linear 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 whichever you prefer this gives you a much greater degree of flexibility while you're a run-and-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 run-and-gun aspect of it it makes it ideal for things like 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 might not have that same cinematic look and shallow depth of field like a DSLR it might not have the same codec support of something like a Blackmagic 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 automatically wirelessly upload to your FTP or whatever else the case may be the sensor is slightly bigger than the older x8n so it's a one over two point eight four inch and it's a CMOS sensor so the older one was a 1/3 inch CMOS 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 three seconds of footage which means that if you're kind of like you know you're at little Johnny's thing and no holy crap they started the race a little bit early boom you press that button and you're actually going to get that previous three seconds so you're not going to miss any thing 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 continuous autofocus you can have medium speed autofocus which will look more natural or you can just have instant auto focus 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 millimeter equivalent zoom range that goes from 26.8 millimeters all the way up to 576 millimeters and the optical image stabilization coupled with some of the fancy image stabilization that canons doing with the digit 4 processor actually looks pretty amazing so check this out we're gonna go ahead we're actually gonna 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 a 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 aa ha this is great so there's a little rocker here that gives you a push button support as well as directionality that you can use to navigate the menu if you prefer that to a touchscreen which some 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 a/v out but mostly you're not gonna 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 gonna be using it for I'm gonna be using it for things like vlogging if you guys saw any of our GPU 14 coverage where it was basically just like Mehan camming things running around that was all shot with the x8n the older camera it was a bit of a test case for it are people gonna enjoy this content at all how easy is it going to be for me to create I have like a small compact camera how good is it gonna 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 HTC one and while people have commented that it looks not bad particularly the sound is really really terrible you know whenever it's windy or anything like that so I'm having a camera that actually has you know a reasonable quality shotgun mic on it in a shock mount with a windsock 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 it's for things like casual videos where the cinematography of it isn't really important so if we were doing like 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 grabbed 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 as 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 Linus tech tips forum below the video as well as a link for where you can buy one of these suckas if you wanted to do so and as always don't forget to subscribe