In favour of Canopus:

1. Matrox sell video cards and various other products in addition to video editing products. So do Pinnacle. Canopus do only video editing. That makes them specialists who know the video editing market very well indeed. True, they are not as big as Matrox, and don't have the market share of Pinnacle but there are advantages in being a comparatively small firm. (But see point 4 against Canopus at the bottom of this page)

2. Canopus are the only ones who use their own CODEC.  

3. Upgradeability: Historically, Canopus has offered upgrade paths where you didn't need to buy a new card to get added benefits. You could upgrade firmware on an existing card via buying an upgrade patch from Canopus. 

4. Do they have a wide range of products like the DVStorm bays, ADVC convertors etc., and are not restricted to manufacturing just the real-time video editing cards. 

5. They have excellent forums on their website. The Canopus staff monitor the forums closely and are quick to respond with queries. 

Against Canopus

1. We have found a lot of known incompatibilities between Canopus cards and a variety of other hardware (eg. for a long time the DVStorm2 didn't work with the Matrox Parhelia three-head graphics card, which is a popular video card for video editing) so you do need expert advice when putting together a video editing system based around Canopus products. There are also known issues with Canopus cards and certain cameras like this article illustrates.

2. Canopus have their own video editing software. Products like EZEdit are bundled with cheaper Canopus cards, Edius LE is bundled with others, and Edius is bundled with the better ones. So what's the problem with that? We feel it is a major departure for Canopus - and an unwelcome one - and it's worth examining the implications in some detail.

Learning a video editing program involves a big investment in time so you need to choose your software carefully. Programs like Avid, Adobe Premiere and Pinnacle Edition are industry standards, have been around forever, and are likely to be around for a long time to come. For those programs there is a lot of information, advice, reviews, tips, forum discussions etc around, a wealth of information is available on the web. This will be of invaluable help to you over the years. For Edius you do have Canopus' forum of course, but not that much else. Also, as a new program Edius (now 2.0) needs to establish itself. What if it turns out to be a bad experiment and doesn't sell enough copies? Would Canopus stop producing it? Would support for that product cease? Would you need to start from scratch and learn a new software suite in a few years? 

3. Unlike buying other items buying a video editing card + software is not a one-off issue. You do need to think beyond the warranty period. New cameras and camcorders will be developed that have  problems with existing hardware/software. New standards may develop (like DVD has over the last few years). New connectors (IEEE 1394b, and others) will become popular. New operating systems (Windows 2010?) will emerge. For all these improvements, innovations and changes you are very reliant on the manufacturers of your software and hardware to develop patches, updates and new drivers. They have to invest considerable amounts of time and money developing these solutions. It would be tempting for Canopus to limit such development work to only cover customers using Canopus cards with Canopus software, or to give such customers priority over those using Canopus hardware with a third party software suite.

Our preference would be for a video editing card that is not tied to any one software package. Canopus may not insist that Edius is the only editing software to work on their cards but logic suggests that if they have their own software they are likely to want to push customers towards that, and maybe even modify the hardware product to work best with their own software. Perhaps at a later date they may want to examine the commercial advantages of ceasing support for Canopus cards used on non Canopus video editing suites.

But the main reason we can't recommend Canopus is:

4. We are very disappointed with the level of customer service - or lack of it - that we have experienced with Canopus. They seem to be less concerned about the customer than the largest, faceless MS type corporations are. They don't reply to emails, don't ship stock when we need it and don't seem to care when they don't deliver. We are therefore not using Canopus as our preferred supplied of video editing cards.

The main Canopus video editing cards are >>