The 20X optical zoom is outstanding, and 100X digital zoom will take you so close to an object that you'll have to put the camera on a tripod to see anything, because there's no way any human can hold a camera steady enough to recognise the images at full zoom. But while we appreciated having the ability to zoom in that far if we needed to, we would never actually use it for an important production, because, frankly, the quality at 100X is just awful. At full digital zoom, our images were blurry and pixelated, as though we were looking through translucent snow. This is tolerable for espionage purposes when you just need to make someone out from a distance, but unacceptable to professional videographers who rely heavily on the clarity of their images. The 20X optical zoom, on the other hand, is very good, letting us zoom in and clearly read a license plate off a car more than 200 yards away.
The XMI's picture is among the sharpest we've seen in any miniDV digital video camera. It uses three CCD image sensors (each with 270,000 pixels) that capture the blue, green, and red colours independently. Canon is able to compete with cameras that have 410,000-pixel CCDs by using a proprietary technology called Pixel Shift. How Pixel Shift works is the green component of a video signal contains 60 percent of the picture detail, whereas the red and blue components compose only 40 percent. Canon's technology physically shifts the green CCD the equivalent distance of 1/2 pixel horizontally from the red and blue CCD, then electronically shifts the green signal 1/2 pixel vertically. What this does is increase the sampling points, resulting in a cleaner picture when shooting in low light, a wider dynamic range, and minimal vertical smear. But at the end of the day, the only thing people really want to know is, does it take a good picture? Yes, it does.
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