Zoom Options for the Canon XH A1

"Now I'm going to talk about the Zoom. Everybody pretty much knows what the zoom is. Like, pretty much all camcorders, the XH A1 has this little rocking button here. Other ones has a 'T' which stands for telephoto, which means zoomed in and a 'W' on it which stands for wide angle, which basically means zooming out. It rocks back and forth, just like that, and it's actually what's called a variable zoom, which means the speed, depending on how hard you're pressing the button, the speed will slow or increase. So this is what the variable zoom looks like on our camera, kind of like that. So you kind of get the idea of that. This is conveniently right where your little hand held strap is right here. But, the thing with the XH A1 is, one of the key selling points for me when I bought this camera is a Zoom Ring. We've already talked about our Iris ring which was the first ring and this second middle ring is our Zoom ring. When I'm zooming on or out, I can use this ring to zoom in and out and I can kind of control how slow of fast it is just by my hand movements. This is the kind of zoom that profession cameras are using. One thing about the XH A1, though, this is actually a Servo or mechanical zoom even though it is a ring. It's not a true manual zoom, but I actually like it better because there's a little bit of give to it instead of just a real lose feel like other cameras I've worked with. Definitely, definitely, definitely, use the zoom ring but the little rocker back and forth button is there for you. Check out the zoom ring it's one of the coolest features on the XH A1."