tugela

Higher end point and shoots have capabilities not too far of from prosumer DSLRs as well, but no one considers them as competition, or that they siphon off sales. The same thing applies when comparing professional products to prosumer ones. The competition standard used to set specifications are the products your competitor sells, not the ones you sell. What good is a product if you make it so that it doesn't overlap your high margin low volume products, but falls flat on its face compared to the competition it actually faces in the marketplace? If you do that you will end up conceding that part of the market to your competitor. That is already happening, especially when it comes to Sony products. Canon have to compete on even terms going forward if they want to remain in those market segments, and if there is specification overlap with their professional products, that is how it will be.

The 7D2 (or whatever their next camera is) won't be competing with their high end cameras, it will be competing with their competitors cameras. So, whatever features Canon's high end equipment have, they are irrelevant to the next iteration of the prosumer products. The real question is, who does Canon see as their competition? If it is Nikon then expect new prosumer cameras to have relatively primitive video capabilities. If they see Panasonic and Sony as their competition, then they pretty much HAVE to have advanced video, or they will fail.

Keep in mind that Canon still cameras use DIGIC processors, but the video cameras use DIGIC DV processors. They are not the same. I believe the hardware encoder in both processors is the same however, but the difference is in how the processors read and process the output from the sensors. The DIGIC processors are optimized for stills, with video capability as an extra, but they are not particularly good at that. It is a compromise, with video being compromised in favor of stills. The DV processors on the other hand are optimized for video. The image that is generated by the processor goes through the same H.264 encoder, so if the C100 provides high quality images while something like the 5D does not, the difference is in how the processor deals with the raw data, not Canon's implementation of the H.264 encoder.