Canon announced several new products today, the most interesting of which is the Canon T3i, a slight step up from the T2i.

I’ve glanced over the specs, and to be honest with you, this is about as close as you can get to a Canon 60D without being a Canon 60D. In fact, I am scratching my head a little, because the T3i can pretty much do everything the Canon 60D can, and it does so for a few hundred dollars less. Strangely, the only thing that the 60D has over the T3i that I can tell is it’s Resin Composite Body and the AF-On Button. Just about everything else the 60D can do, the T3i can do as well.

Things the T3i can do that the T2i Cannot:

– Articulating 3″ Monitor, just like the 60D
– Manual Audio Gain Controls for video recording just like the 60D (and the 7D still cannot, which is really weird).
– Built in Flash Transmitter just like the 60D and 7D
– New In camera processing tools, just like the 60D.
– New Easy to use Flash Transmitter menu.

And significantly:

– New High Resolution 10x “Zoom” feature for video.

This is the first and only Canon dSLR camera that can do this. Essentially instead of using a low Rez- “Digital Crop” Zoom, this is a true high def zoom. While it is a very subtle addition, this is a WONDERFUL idea, and should have some very interesting applications. I do not have all the details, but I’m pretty sure I have it figured out how it works and I will be explaining it in a post very soon- probably tomorrow.

One thing to note here which is significant: Canon is very aware of how video is captured and processed and this is shows that they are willing and able to tweak it for more features. What this suggests is that more features like this (hopefully RAW video…pretty please?) are coming.

Canon is saying they will ship in beginning of March 2011!

Canon T3i on Bhphoto.com