Review: Canon XA25, Part 1

Navigating Features on the XA20/25

AJ: There's an AV out in addition to the headphones out on the XA20. If you're used to the XA10 and your buddy set the camera's only output to AV mode and you jack in your headphones, you’d find out real quick that's the wrong signal. If you're on a shoot, you're having to work less in your menu. And when you're in front of clients, doing corporate, fast-paced-type shooting, you don't want to sit there and fiddle with things. With a menu-driven camera it becomes difficult to find things.

AB: When I was in production using the XA25, trying to find the Zebra control was challenging. I've been working with all kinds of cameras for more than 15 years. I can find my way around 99% of cameras without ever opening the manual. I was just not able to find the zebra.

AJ: Zebra is inside the Manual Exposure menu, in a submenu called Zebra. Choices are 70, 100, or Off (Figure 6, below). I've had to memorize it.

Figure 6. Zebra controls found deep in the touchscreen menu.

AB: In a professional model, those things should not be buried.

AJ: It would be nice, like on some Sony cameras, to be able to change your quick menu to those functions you want to show up in your quick menu. With the XA20, the quick menu is set by Canon and you can't customize the quick menu. So you could have the first four things you see be the four things you use the most.

AB: For me, White Balance is a key thing, so I set that to button four. So this way, as I was walking around in different shooting environments I'd tap that, go right to my White Balance menu, and use the touchscreen to set my settings. I set #3 to be my headphone channels setting. But interestingly, the buttons don't always work the same way. Some buttons don't bring up a menu, others do. So tapping Manual Focus changes the functionality. Hitting the White Balance brings up a menu.

Getting back to the headphone volume, it would be nice if hitting a button for headphone also allowed me to use the joystick to adjust the headphone volume level up and down. Or also use the touchscreen, depending on the functionality you need.

Optical Image Stabilization

AJ: What did you think of the Power OIS on these XAs?

AB: The image stabilization, I have to admit, is quite, quite impressive. There's Off, there's Optical, and there's Dynamic stabilization. It crops into the center of the image so it's using electronic image stabilization on the sensor as well as optical image stabilization in the lens. I could be zoomed all the way in, 20x, which is very nice to have on this little camera, and there was just a little bit of movement. I started wondering if I had suddenly become an expert at handholding cameras. And I went and tapped the middle setting and it was a little worse, and I tapped the image stabilization off and it reconfirmed that I am not getting any younger.

AJ: The image stabilization in Canon's XA lineup has been amazing. With the XA10, you talk about how it crops the sensor. You do see one vignetting at full zoom, I notice. But I was also handholding, and the OIS was doing one thing and the sensor was doing another. But that's not as much on the XA10. We tried to do it earlier. But this one is solid. I don't feel like I need a big shoulder rig for this. By itself, it feels good in the hands.

AB: If you hold it just right with the Dynamic image stabilization and use the monitor as a little handle out here. It's pretty darn steady.

Zoom/Focus Ring

AB: One thing if you're coming from the higher-end cameras the XF300, the XF100: On the XF100, there are separate buttons for Gain, Shutter, and Exposure; on the 300, there are three rings on the lens. That's a given. Obviously, with the XA20, the lens is in the camera. There's barely room for the one ring that's on here.

AJ: And the one ring is not actually moving glass. Because there's a switch on tieback of the camera to switch the ring between between zoom and focus. But with so many different ways to zoom this lens, would you ever switch the ring to zoom? No. It's a focus ring.

AB: But there's a switch dedicated to the Zoom/Focus function of the ring (Figure 7, below). That was a surprise. I spent considerable time looking through the menus to find where to switch the function of the Focus ring. Then I'm just standing there, looking at the camera while I'm shooting something and I see it. This one function has a dedicated switch on the body of the camera, and it's nowhere near the lens itself. It's on the back panel of the camera. Why does that get a dedicated switch when there are already 3, 4, 5 different ways to zoom the lens?

Figure 7. This switch lets you set the ring to Focus or Zoom.

Custom Button

AB: On the very bottom edge of the XA20, where you can hardly feel it or see it, there's a little Custom button (Figure 8, below). When you're in Manual mode, which you should be, hit the Custom button to cycle between being able to adjust Aperture, Shutter, and Gain. You can adjust each one as you see fit. It's tough when you can't adjust more than one parameter at a time. And finding this tiny recessed button just by feel is actually harder than I expected.

Figure 8. The well-hidden Custom button.

AJ: On the XA10, the custom button let you choose between Tv, Av, P, and Manual. That's not all that custom. They've moved it from the back of the camera with the little scroll button to way up front. On some Sony cameras, they'll put the button right in the middle of the adjustment knob. So you punch in the iris and move it. On the XA20 it's still called Custom, but it's primarily for exposure.

If you're in auto mode, and you hit Custom, you adjust the exposure compensation. As in, here's where you'd like to expose the shot, now +1 stop, or -2/3. The nicest thing with the EV is that it freezes the exposure. It locks the exposure where you hit it, and now it's fixed there. And I pan around the room, across the window--exposure lock and compensation.

But in Manual mode, you have to cycle through, and I would have rather had it on the back. Because that is something I needed all the time. And trying to find that subtle button was a challenge. It would have been easier if it stuck out, or if it had a little bubble or nib on there so your finger could find it.