A very important thing happened in the world of video production last week. And I was lucky enough to be there on the spot. The nice people from Canon flew me from Perth especially to view this momentous occasion – and make no mistake, it was momentous.

After the launch of its two new flagship camcorders, the XF 300 and XF350, it is safe to say that from beginners up to professional in the HDV arena, tape is now officially dead.

Sure, camcorders from Panasonic (with the P2 format) and Sony (with XDCAM) have had solid state memory cards for almost ever in the video world timeline of the universe, but Canon has gone the extra (and some may brave) step of embracing cheap – by comparison – high capacity CF cards. We were told on the day that 64GB Sandisk cards, of which the XF series can hold 2 in series allowing swapping without stopping shooting meaning in effect, endless memory, will sell for a little over a hundred dollars.

And of course they can be used in Canon dSLRs to shoot video if needed. Nice touch.

Sure, at $10K the top of the range XF camcorder is not cheap, but historically, these major changes have filtered down to domestic models pretty quickly.

This could also be the final death of the Sony Memory Stick format I predict.