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With ISO over 4 million, the Canon ME20F-SH is a video camera that can see in the dark

By Marcus Wong - 9 May 2016

First looks at the Canon ME20F-SH

 It's smaller and has lower resolving power, but has an ISO sensitivity that's unmatched for now.

What happens when you take the already-incredible lowlight capabilities of something like the latest EOS-1D X and ramp it up even further by essentially trading resolution for pixel size? Apparently, a camera that sees in the dark like no other if you’re Canon. Of course, we’re not saying that’s exactly what they did with the production of the ME20F-SH, but you get the point. 

We first covered news of the camera towards the end of July 2015, but today we finally got a look at the actual product. A modern day 2.2MP camera, the ME20F-SH has been dubbed a multipurpose camera by Canon. It’s been built to take high definition video and takes Full HD video even with a subject illumination of less than 0.0005 lux. 

Yes, the camera boasts a sensitivity equivalent to ISO 4,000,000.

The camera itself is fairly small.

The ME20F-SH uses an enhanced version of the 35mm full-frame CMOS sensor for Full HD video usage that was first developed by Canon back in 2013, with pixels that have an area of 19μm square, more than 7.5 times the surface area of each pixel in the top-of-the-line EOS 1DX.  This is paired with Canon’s DIGIC DV 4 image processor for crisp, clean full-color video. There's also another version - a ME200S-SH- that offers a higher resolution of 8.29MP, but that comes with a Super 35 format sensor instead.

You can use the full range of Canon's Cine lenses and EF lenses with this camera.

All camera and lens functions can controlled via this controller.

The camera comes with the same EF mount (Cinema Lock type) as Canon’s DSLRs and Cinema EOS line-up, and so will take lenses from both. In terms of ports, you've a 2.5mm stereo mini-jack and a round 8-pin jack for RS-22; the unit that was showed to us was being controlled by an RC-V100 Remote Controller, for example. Looking like a television remote, it allows full control over camera settings. 

As you might imagine from the pictures, there’s no viewfinder or rear LCD with this camera - it feeds video out to an external monitor. In fact, there’s no memory option too, as the camera pipes the video directly to an external storage device. In this case, the external display doubled up as the storage device as an SSD was installed within. 

All the ports you might need are in the rear.

With no viewfinder or onboard storage, you'll need additional add-ons like this display/storage unit from Odyssey for full operations.

It also has built-in motorized ND filters and a motorized IR cut filter for infrared shooting, as well as a built-in digital teleconverter to get even more reach out of the lenses mounted. All said and done, this is truly a professional camera and Canon sees it being used largely in cinema, documentary, scientific, astronomic, and even underwater purposes, with an underwater housing already available for the unit.

The demonstration shown to us was quite interesting as you’ll see in the videos below. All lights were turned off and the room was illuminated only by the light from a tiny LED device bounced off two paper cups. (Yes, it wasn’t even shining directly at the subject!) The operators then cycled through the gain settings to reveal a Canon staff member standing in the dark while we viewed the footage being fed out to a 4K monitor in front of us. Certainly most impressive!

A tiny LED light shining against two stacked foam cups - that's all the illumination used in the test.

What followed next was a demonstration of the infrared (IR) video the camera was able to capture. IR video is typically monochrome as most IR cameras generally replace the IR filter with one that filters out visible light for better sensitivity. Not so with the ME20F-SH though, as you can see the video below, shining a light on any object that isn’t black would return its true color. 

Here's what the pictures actually looked like.

And finally, here’s a video of the ME20F-SH in various applications.  

The Canon ME20F-SH will be available from May 2016 at recommended retail price of S$31,029.

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