HDV camera buying advice

[Walter Graff]

- the cameras can be made to look like each other

 

The 'look' of most all cameras is easily emulated by pro engineers so if you want to cameras to match that can easily be done.

 

 

and

 

- the HVX200 rears its ugly head

 

The HVX by itself can look great. In my tests (et al) we found that it's when you see outputs of the HVX vs its competitors in side by side controlled environments that you see what an underperformer the HVX is. Pixel shift is great. It's an inexpensive way to manufacture an HD camera without much engineering. But like any facsimile, eventually circuitry can only do so much. As Adam Wilts tests also showed, pixel shift did not perform as good as dedicated HD chips. My point was that by itself, it's great, you just don't want to try to start mixing it with cameras that make better HD pictures or it starts to show it's ugly head. I had an instance six months ago where I had to do just that. It took far longer to edit because we had to dumb down the looks of the other cameras we used to match the HVX's soft picture. ANd last month aclient insisted on a Varicam/HVX mix. We had to send both cameras off to be matched. The engineer said he had to do a lot to dumb down the Varicam so they would look closer. Of course your experiences may vary.

 

http://www.adamwilt.com/HD/4cams-part2.html