The Messy, Bizarre Canon L1 Camcorder 

I am staring at my 1989 L1 as we speak. I used it recording over 400 High School Basketball, Football, and Hockey games on Martha's Vineyard in the early 90's for the local TV channel.. I can tell you for its time, the L1 was pretty special. The audio (PCM) was revolutionary for its era. Hi-8 tape was a step up from standard 8mm. I paid about 2,400 for the camera and 15x lens, adding the 3x wide angle later on. The camera still turns on, but the lens finder is caput. I will be replacing the "watch battery" that appears to power the sensors, I dunno. You are dead-on when it comes to design, although the images were great...a tripod was used 90% of the time with this clumsily put together over-priced doorstop because of the top heavy design. I will say that in 1990 it was the BOMB! In 2020? It's like a Yugo.

It's not a video camera lens but I have a nikon 28-300mm fx lens which is about 10x zoom. It's very, very sharp across it's entire range.

I work in the adult industry and in the early 90s this camera was on tons of sets.

For better or for worse, this is a GREAT example of true innovation. I get frustrated when people conflate improvement with innovation. I think there's a fruit flavored company that could take some lessons... Cough cough. It's also a lesson in how innovation isn't inherently good.

When I sold video cameras in the mid-90s, we were advised to steer clear of Canon. My boss called them, “Boomerangs,” and explained that, “they always come back.”

8:16 I used such a lens once, it was at an Hacker Conference and i was the camera man, the lens was a pretty old one from SD TV Times fitted to an HD TV Camera. Those lenses have a big feature and that is Parfocal ability, it stays in focus even if you change the focal length. This is very important for TV Production especially in Live TV.

Used an L2 for years in industrial video. It was a prosumer camera, with about 95% industrial video and 5% douchebag with too much money. I was trained up on full blown TV production (ENG cameras and studio cameras on pedestals both). This camera gave us what we were looking for and did it well. First, it was canon's first real video camera, but NOT their break into video. They were making the top of the line video lenses for the pro market, and that is what they were wedging in with, which is why they made sure that this lens was also interchangeable. I remember it being wildly successful because the glass was top notch canon work, it absolutely drank in light, and was tiny. The grip didn't matter much because we show 100% from tripods, and the odd SLR style grip was easier to use than some of the grip styles. (Don't remember if it had a top-mounted start/stop button, but those are the pro standard for tripod use.) It also had a surprisingly useful IR remote. On the EOS lens adapter, I didn't know anyone who had one because you didn't need one unless you were the mythical still photog you were talking about. That camera is EF lens compatible out of the box. You can take any full frame EF (red dot) lens and use it (unless it was so stubby that the handgrip got into the shot.) You didn't get all the auto (like the follow focus wouldn't always work right), but if you were using one, you usually had a special need and didn't care. Good glass plus the really good Hi-8 deck (which ended up giving you nearly the same results you would get from Beta-SP once you had edited it down to VHS, which is what almost all industrial video was delivered on) made it a hit. To put it into perspective, Sony was selling Hi8 decks to go with professional sony heads to make camcorder packages around the same time. I think most people would put Hi8 on the same level as 3/4 Umatic at the time (maybe more if you were using the digital audio.) There was complete media saturation at the time, but you aren't going to find it online. It was all in trade magazines and niche print magazines like Videography or Videomaker. If you could get your hands on those, that would be a fun rabbit hole for you. Also, you might be one of the few people around who has put together the equipment you would need to run a Video Toaster -- or even better, one of the mixers like the Panasonic MX-50. Just genlocking and timing/phasing the cameras would be a whole video. (And if you need it, I could walk you through how old-timers like me did timing/phasing for multicam live-on-tape EFP shoots without using scopes. All you need is an FX mixer with a horizontal wipe. The WJ-4600 was the workhorse for that kind of EFP.)

15:39 FESTOONED WITH BUTTONS i love when your language is /just perfect/ edit: proving my point: 17:11 LAMENT CONFIGURATION

This was used in The Jackal as the camera on his giant gun thing. I was watching wondering what the hell this weird blomby SLR-like thing was.

I've just recently discovered you and I'm loving all your videos. As a 35 year broadcast industry veteran I'm especially loving the broadcast related topics. As an Aussie, I especially love your use of the phrase "built like a brick Shithouse" in this video. Have you ever been down under? If you ever do look me up. I'd love to have a beer with you 👍🏻

I honestly was convinced that it was metal until you started crunching it around, looks like the metal they make lab equipment out of

I owned one of these. They look weird but the form factor made them great to operate. They were very unusual for the time in being a prosumer camera that had swappable lenses.

Low price of this fast lens is also helped by the smaller sensor, so the image circle doesn't have to be as big and the focal lengths involved are smaller making a fast lens smaller and cheaper to manufacture.

this camcorder looks so cool, it looks like tech used on moon or something :D

The 80s - 90s was a great time for electronics, it's was in between two times, one where pride in quality was distinctive (old fashion) where things were built to last, and the other is the the computer era where tens of thousands of what used to be separate electronic devices were getting balled up into a single system. Remember recording studios? Now it's a padded room with a mac.... anyone smell what I'm stepping in

A friends dad was a courtroom recorder in Southern California back when it came out.and its what they used for a couple of years...... it was less intimidating then an ENG. I remember him bringing it by and yeah the weirdest design ever.

I have been doing video and film production since 1987. I had one of the very first Canon L1's the week of release. I can tell you everything about it and it's design theory, as well as how it worked for me. I was the video and film producer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium from 1987 till 1995. If your interested Ill be happy to fill you in on some history, accessories, and the L1's benefits, and shortcomings.

i saw this thing several times now at our local museum and it never stops being messed up. Thank you for the lovely video, I love your style as always

I was able to get an EOS adapter for my recently acquired XL1 and it’s totally bizarre. I love it, and using modern EF lenses on that 20 year old camera is really fun, but it’s a super strange design.

Common misconception. F-stops have nothing to do with the amount of light that passes through the lens. The F-stop is simply the ratio between the size of the aperture and the focal length. While a lot of people use it as a short-hand to estimate the amount of light that comes in, that is not it's purpose. You can have two different 35mm F1.4 lenses that will allow vastly different amounts of light in. If you want to talk about light transmission, you need to talk about T-stops. F-stops are purely a focal length to aperture ratio, and have nothing to do with amount of light.

Your presentation style rocks. If I had a product I had to sell, I'd kill to have someone with your talent to present it.

In 1996 I worked Saturdays at a photoshop in West London, and the shop owner had one of those! He was mad about lenses and cameras so it was his perfect camcorder.

It is worth mentioning that there was also Canon Canoviosion A1, a camera with a very similar body concept, but feature set much more oriented towards the consumer market.

It never ceases to amaze me how bowelevacuatingly expensive pro video equipment is.

Early image stabilization in camcorders was interesting, I only took apart one older camcorder with this feature and it was a piezoelectric disk with quartz material on both sides of a thin copper wafer in the middle. The full diameter is about 50mm with a 15 ish mm hole in the center that contained an additional lens in the center. The piezoelectric disk would quickly modulate to adjust for movement to minimize shake/out of focus effects. I still have the piezoelectric disk for future optical projects requiring high stability such as touch free laser resonator assembles that can be tuned with simple inputs. I do wish optical zoom was possible in mobile cameras but that's an insane feat of engineering and most consumers don't need that either. I'd use a professional camera but I kind of fry cameras on a regular basis.

30:19 ive seen that symbol on the album cover for "black earth that made me" by white ring white ring makes witch house so its probably some edgy symbol that might have loose satanic meaning or something

31:45 quite impressive to have this on a 'cheap' camcorder. It looks to target a semi-pro market... like the XL1. Always felt like a camera the wedding photographer would use to provide an additional service, while gently the water with his toes.

Your comment on cameras not being ambidextrous hit home for me. As a lefty, that standard handle is pretty hard to get used to. My Canon XC-10 is SO heavy held in my non dominant hand.

I had an L1 for a few weeks because it was super cheap on ebay, it was weird and fun but I ended up selling it for what I paid for it because it wasn't a digital format. Planned to use it as a B camera but capturing was just too much of a pain in the ass. My first camera was a GL1, I loved that thing so much. Got it the summer before I started film/broadcast school right after graduating from high school with the money I made selling cell phones for Sprint when that market was first exploding (2002). ALL my classmates were constantly trying to borrow the GL1, and we ALL lusted after the XL1. I finally got my hands on the XL1 years later, after they were basically obsolete. It was such a weird layout but very easy and fast to use. Kinda wish I could get an XL1 layout camera today HD digital media. Thanks for the strolls down memory lane!

In therms of canon stills lenses all L lenses have the red stripe, but only the telephoto ones are white.

The L2 showed up in the 1998 movie Godzilla, where it was presented as a camera personally owned by a professional news camera operator played by Hank Azaria. It makes sense, given its prosumer status. Tracking that model down led me to your channel.

My video production teacher in high school had one of these cameras and swore by it because of the interchangeable lenses. I’ve never seen anybody else who knew what this think was or confused it with the XL-1

I've been binging your videos, you're fucking rad! You deserve the same amount of subscribers as behemoths like Techmoan and Technology Connections. Amazing presentation quality, and a friendly vibe

Titanic, Paxton has one when he's under water "vlogging" he says "that's enough of that bull shit" lol.....it's genius. Great video Ray dude!

I have two of these things including the system case, several lenses, a lot of accessories and the original documents like manual, receipt and warranty card. Yesterday I ordered the 300 capacitors to get these cameras completely working. Wish me luck.

You are slightly wrong about something...not all L lenses are white. Typically only the longer than 70mm telephoto L lenses are white. There are quite a few wider L lenses that are black, but retain the red stripe.

Like a good Christian 🤣

6:12 Yeah the effect of the super low resolution also quadruples when you shoot videos of UFOs.

I have a near perfect condition canon L1 and its sat for years and I finally got a battery for it today and turned It on and everything works but I am having a tough time opening up the cassette tray in the back , i dont want to break it but didn’t know if there was a trick to doing this if the eject button on the left side wasn’t doing anything . I was definitely surprised to see thru the viewfinder when I powered it on since that seemed to be an issue lots of people have with these cameras being older and most likely sitting around for years.

I bought an L2 in 1996. Canon had stopped making them and I had to call around to find a new one. It was used on the the space shuttle, plus some cinematic productions used it to shoot major films. It had great low light capabilities as it had a 1.4 aperture. They also made an awesome optical stabilized lens that was rock steady, only problem was it was $5000, when new. The biggest problem with the camera was they used miniature surface mount capacitors by the hundreds that eventually had issues with leakage which shut down the unit. That’s what happened to my camera after 6 years. I was able to find a guy that would replace the bad capacitors, but it cost me $500.

The XL1 is in a different ball park. A much better camera in all respects. It's nice to see where the series started.

Thanks for a great video. I have an L1 totally operational. Hardly ever used it. Don't know what to do with it now. Goodwill?

I owned a L1 many years ago!! It was such a cool camera, probably one of the best 8mm camera out there ☺️

They basically predicted DSLR filmmaking

23:00 talking to the side. While interesting info it distracts. Find a cheap teleprompter solution?

That lens would be perfect for the Pentax Q camera, the sensor is a similar size.

I have an XL-1, it's my favorite in my collection, but my friends call it the porno cam.

31:50 - At least it HAS a focus-ring on the front of the lens! A feature that disappeared from (consumer-grade) camcorders around 1993 :(

I had an EX1 which is what it was called in the UK, had it several years used 6 times before it failed...the problem was the circuit boards were tiny and thus the components could not be replaced....also the electrolytic capacitors were the main problem, they would leak, rendering the camera useless, replacement boards were practically non existant which turned a relatively expensive video camera in comparison to others in the day to scrap.... I also had the UK version of the cheaper version known as the A2Hi here....I had less problems with it and never got to see it expire....

that graffiti / spray-paint on the wall looks like an old german rune. look up "algiz rune" ... which apparently has meanings related to life or born. Nazis did usurp it like they did with a bunch of stuff, but it has meaning before and after that. Or someone just wanted to paint a chicken foot.

This was THE camera me and all my film school buddies wanted more than anything! (NYU UGF/TV 1989).

Yeah I just found this camera in a storage unit with the original canon case and manuals and warranty paper work with two lenses and a wide lens don't really know if any one would want this but if so let know

I had on of this in 90's early. Hi8 format. Bealtiful Cam but the image was very weird look. I sold this Canon and bought a Sony EVW 300.

hi:) i have it and i wanted to ask if i can use only the lens in some way? may be with a stils cam of cannon?

I love the ratio of information over set design. Never change.

Fun fact: this is the camera bill paxton uses in titanic to shoot his dive in the submarine

I had one of those for a while! Super expensive,,, over kill,, kinda unwieldily,, complex mediocre video quality,,, loved it! People knew you were not screwing around when you whip that thing out!

Bruh, this is the third time I've subscribed to you.... Wtf RU-vid???

lmao i wasnt expecting the f bomb but it was sooo welcome and properly used!🤣

2021: I drooled over the L series when I was younger (the old days) and of course priced way out of consumer range so never got to mess with one. LOL - I remember The Jackal. Great review. Thanks.

Thanks for making this. I have always been fascinated by this camera system. Canon made some image stabilized lenses for this camera. They even made a mirror lens like a small telescope, something they never made for the EOS line.

That lens could be so much cheaper because it's F/1.4 *on that camera/sensor* but not in 35mm equivalent terms. If the numbers I saw are right and I did the math correctly, that lens is actually an f/7.5-f/11 (roughly) in 35mm terms. (Saw online somewhere that the VL mount was about a half inch sensor, with a crop factor from 35mm terms of 5.41.)

So I remember reading about the camera when it first came out and I may be wrong but what I thought was revolutionary was the it had "eye control" you could access some menus through the viewfinder buy looking at them. Maybe Levi or Bill could verify this?

I bought three of them before I finally got a working one. Now if only I can find a working charger. I have three dead ones. I had an A1 Digital that I bought brand new in 1991 that I loved. I had it repaired twice to extend it's life but it finally became damaged from old age beyond repair. I always wanted it's big brother to carry on the legacy and now I have a working L2. These cameras were used extensively by prosumers and semi-pros to shoot corporate and wedding video type stuff. It's hard to imagine how difficult it was to shoot video in the early 90s with the hardware available to consumers. What I liked about my A1 is that 99% of the time I held it like a still camera and it didn't freak people out like a shoulder mounted video camera did. I have a copy of Videomaker from 1993 and this camera was on the cover as the best thing since sliced bread. I think you underestimate it's popularity at the time. All Canon cameras from the 90s are broken today because they all used substandard capacitors that leaked out and rendered them useless. I had all the capacitors replaced on my A1 and it extended it's life but eventually succumbed to mechanical issues. That smell is actually your camcorder leaking.

26:57 Paparazzi?

I still have an A1 and two L1s, they were the favorite of low budget and Indie filmmakers back in the 90s. The downfall of these cameras is the capacitors which dry out over time rendering the camera inoperable. In retrospect you can be critical of the design but they were about as good as it got in affordable prosumer camcorders.

Nerdish sidebar update... Samsung NoteUltra series phones have insane cameras compared to most others, Granted the one I have has a Fixed zoom 200mp, .6 - 10x 50mp camera, and a .6 - 100x telephoto 12mp array. Loving the zoom but wish it could get the sharpness if a real camera but what does one expect from a sensor under 1/4in across?

All the big white Canon lenses you showed where primes

i wish my a7sIII had a camcorder style attachable grip on the side xD I really like the design and modern videocameras are not really better with the placement of the buttons imho

Does this camera have an S-video INPUT.... I know it has the output for editing..

I wonder how popular this camera was among indie filmmakers back then, before MiniDV was around? This camera seemed to have been the next best thing to shoot on if you could not afford 16mm but didn't wanna rely on lowres Video8 or VHS-C. Kinda a "pre-Dogma 95" style camera for that genre.

Hey, I dunno if you're still interested in this... but I've managed to collect all of the lenses, adaptor, and 2x converter + a carrying case! Minus that one 100mm lens, you spoke of. I would love to send some videos/photos of these if you want to see them. The 250mm reflex lens is by far the coolest! Its aperture is managed the same way they do the vision test for glasses! Its four fixed stops and you change out this little lense to be smaller.

6:07 this sounds like you speak from experience.

I liked the video, it was very interesting, as I've never seen this camcorder before, just its younger brother, the Canon 'Chainsaw' (XL-1). What I don't like is you tell us you're gonne throw away this quite rare oddity. Both the fact that you're doing it and that you're telling your audience about it. People who watch videos like that are interested in video tech, and/or vintage video tech, most of them (including me) probably feels bad when they hear this poor thing will be recycled instead of displayed either in a private collection or in a museum. Even the completely dead one. Probably even that one could have been repaired, or served as a parts donor for this one to make the deck and the viewfinder working. I understand if you won't bother repairing or ask someone to repair something like the Sony camcorder you've shown in this video, because they are very common. But this Canon is really unique and quite rare, and should be preserved. I hope you did not throw away at least the lens. If you really don't need something, why don't you sell it or give it away? Pretty sure this one would sell on ebay, Craigslist, or Fb marketplace. Even in non working condition.

18:09 made my skin crawl.

Canon made top line super 8 cameras in the 70s and 80s. Ergonomics on those were superb. They must've fired the designers when the 90s came rolling around.

If you're going to throw it away I would really love to get it :-) especially if it comes with the battery and the lens I bet I can rig up a portable recording method for it using those outputs I would love to play with it

I had an L1 it was my first somewhat professional camera. My dad got the camera for me on ebay with a few lenses 15 and I think the 8 we even had the 2x converter. We bought a super heavy tripod one for a camera twice it's size. I was in middle school at the time and that camera enabled me to do so much. Mine unfortunately got stolen from school. I was super bummed but it was all covered by insurance they ended up replacing the camera with a brand new xl2 and all the same lenses and all they even replaced my fabric bag with a pelican. Still have the xl2 to this day and still use it. Upscaled to 1080 properly still looks great as long as you pull the single from the firewire. I remember using the 2x with the 15 on some bleachers in a high school gym it was a private school so the church had services In the gym. I could get really nice close up face shots of the pastor about 110 ft away. That fx fades and image hold stuff was awesome we used them to fade to another camera. We could only hard switch the camera but the fade outs helped hide thst so much. I really enjoyed that camera as a first camera for what it was. The unintentional upgrade was welcomed though. The xl2 was more appropriate to record high school stuff 😂.

I've begun personal videography with a Canon DSLR camera, and looking back i could say for sure that the grip alone made the footage much more shakier than what one gets with mirrorless or camcorders, especially when the hands are getting tired, and the only solution what pro videographers have is to use all sort of contraptions that change the grip. That really is a bizarre design. For most of the video i was thinking "why the hand grip is so unergonomical, is it also a battery holder?", at least that made sense. Even access to the lens seem awkward considering the plastic slab covering some of the rings. Also, while i'm not sure about lenses of the 90s, i'm pretty sure some of those EOS ones simply wouldn't have fit considering the plastic slab.

just found one for sale on fb market... please tell me $100 is too many dollars

I just bought two of these, both broken, do you have any idea? 1. Only a white image in the viewfinder, rest seems to work fine, no image on TV 2. No image in the viewfinder at all, when you power it on, it powers off after about 30 seconds, while it’s on it seems to work fine except for that viewfinder, not testet on the TV I think it could be dried out Caps... Sorry for my bad English, I’m from 🇩🇪 Here, the Canon L1is called Canovision EX-1 Great Video! By the way, I have some images from the inside of the camera, if you are interested I also own the original manual.

One thing I haven’t heard mention yet is aperture. Cheap zoom lenses have an incredibly tiny aperture. Nearly a pinhole. Want to buy a lens that can zoom 10x and still give you F4 through the ENTIRE zoom range? That’s some serious dough.

A guy walked into the camera store i work in with the lens from one of these. He thought it was an EF-mount L lens and was a little disappointed to hear that we didn't sell any cameras that could fit it.

Dudes with pierced nipples unite.

I just stubled on this video and realized I used to work with you. Awesome content. Ive always been curious about this model Canon.

It was as a result of seeing one of those weird things that I bought a Canon XM1 and later a Canon XL2. They were very much domestic cameras I could use for low budget commercial tasks.

A friend of mine had a L1 with a 2x multiplier and a huge telephoto lense. You could zoom with clarity an incredible distance.

I absolutely loathe the term "camcorder" and it is something the industry itself never really used. (It was an advertising copywriter that came up with the term). The correct term I was taught when I was in the industry was "video camera." Also: The L1, I believe, was the same one used by Bill Paxton as "Brock Lovett" in the Mir 1 submersible on the Titanic wreck in James Cameron's "Titanic."

this camera would be great for wildlife videographers that need to zoom in on something super far away and have that DSLR grip to move it around because the tripod is usual mounted to the lens rather than the camera body like shooting stills on a DSLR Edit: I googled image searched the phrase “canon L1 wildlife” and the 15th, ish, pic is of a brochure/add saying “WILDLIFE AS CANON SEES IT”

They maintained the same design all the way to this day with the c300

I purchased one for peanuts on ebay once, because it was missing the lens and the battery. But it came with a lot of bad capacitors. I ended scrapping it, interesting stack of circuits boards inside.

Your lens construction diagram caption had me dying with laughter. 😂

It's good for 1993

Japan has a totally different camera culture than we do. They have people who will spend a paycheck on the latest camera gear just for bragging rights. Ditto for stereo gear. I have a Japanese friend who jokes about her dads $3000 camcorder that has recorded all the family events for the past 2 decades.

I have an A1 that was used in the 90s at the TV station where I work. it was mounted on a stand shooting down to capture still images and photos. Money well spent :)

Almost looks like a more chunky version of my 645z body.

I’m an auctioneer and handled the estate of a former NASA employee down here in Florida- evidently, NASA was an early and VIGOROUS adopter of the L1. The guy have several bodies, all marked with lots of aluminized NASA inventory stickers, and some were labeled “NOT FOR FLIGHT” which was tantalizing to say the least- sort of implied there WERE some earmarked for flight, maybe even to space. At any rate, as a consummate camera collector and overall a/v nerd I was fascinated by the discovery, as I had likewise never seen or heard of the L1. Far as I could tell, NASA seemed to prefer the 15x and the 3x- but curiously, there were lots of the EOS adapters in the collection too. I was able to review some of the tapes in one of the bodies that powered up, but the viewfinder had become so horrendously degraded it was just a hazy white blur. From the scant documentation I found, they were primary used for filming training material in and around Kennedy Space Center.

Just a quick comment about sensor sizes: Isn't "half-inch" referring to the tube size? Like "what's the diameter of a tube that would have the same sensor size". In short, it's not even as big as half an inch

This looks like someone couldn't figure out if they wanted to make a camera or a camcorder and decided to just glue the 2 designs together.

I almost spit my fucking coffee out when I heard "f/1.4" because JESUS CHRIST THAT'S A LOT OF LIGHT ON A ZOOM