DIGIC 5 is the chip Canon is expected to use in the Canon 5D Mark 3 and the new 1D. It has Canon’s latest noise reduction and video encoding technologies that the R&D division has spent the last few years working on. Unlike many manufacturers Canon have quite a slow refresh cycle on core technology like sensors and image processors so when they do take a step forward it’s a pretty big leap.
Now the first 1080/24p video clip has been posted online. It comes from the first camera to feature DIGIC 5, the PowerShot S100. Now essentially the same kind of scaling is needed to bring the full sensor down to 1080p on this camera as it is needed on DSLRs. The good news is there’s no sign of moire and aliasing!
EOSHD reader RichST (thanks!) suggests that it is 2×2 binning like the GH2, rather than line skipping. So if true DIGIC 5 looks to be the step for Canon we wanted.
I am also expecting the higher end $3000+ Canon DSLRs to feature MPEG-2 encoding like the XF305 camcorder. The clip isn’t representative of the encoding we’ll have on the DSLRs – it’s at a very low bitrate (10Mbit average, probably 17Mbit VBR) leading to some smeared fine details but this is a compact camera and the user doesn’t say what quality setting he had it in.
