Who on earth is Alan Roberts?

Alan Roberts is a name in all probability a name you will not be familiar with.

But he is important

Very Important.

Rewind a year or so and Canon had launched the XF series of video.

On the face of it, the XF series was another video camera offering which was good, but not really a player on the field against the mainstream players of Sony, Panasonic etc?

Right?

Wrong.

It did all seem rather unlikely with its unfashionably small sensor (I admit I scoffed at it at launch), but with its high 50mbs bit rate and super sharp optics in a very useable package it was very good.

Canon did at last have a video camera which matched in most area's, and outperformed in others, competitor offerings.


But how to communicate this to a sceptical broadcast world where other manufacturers seemed to have an unassailable grip on the market.

Enter Alan Roberts.

He is not a cameraman but in the words of the 'Guild of Television Cameramen' whom he won an award with in 2009

'A leading colour scientist, working for BBC research and development, he has not only contributed to the technology behind the camera, with a huge number of white papers, but has directly helped untold numbers of TV cameraman to get the best images out of modern digital and high definition camera's'

He has now retired form the BBC but his word clearly still carries much weight.

So imagine the impact of a very positive white paper he wrote on the Canon XF300 and XF305.

It made the BBC approved list of camera's for independent productions.

People sat up and took notice and it sold by the pallet load.

Fast forward to 2012 and Alan Roberts has written a report on the Canon C300, you can find the PDF of his report here

Will it have the same impact as his report on the XF300 and XF305?

Probably not, as the world and his wife are singing it's praises.

An important milestone all the same.