Kyuss

The FX1 as far as I can see shoots only 25fps so cannot do 60 @ 480p.

i can help in an experienced way on only a couple of points "Down Convert" to me is HDV to DVD (ie 1440*1080 convert down to 720*576) Yes can up-convert again, but quality will be lost in the down-convert that cannot be regained without re-capturing. Can't really give an educated comparison with PD170, but HDR doesn't have XLR or DVCAM but significantly does have twice the resolution of the PD170 and its 16:9 is native as opposed to the PD170 supporting 4:3 natively. Transfer to film - yes possible, no idea who would do a conversion TO film as opposed to from, but search hard enough and you would find one for sure... In DV mode i would guess that the DVX100A is the equal of if not the better of the HDR, but when you factor in the HD, the sony has the edge...

Pretty sure that the HDR-FX1E (the Pal version which works in Australia, Hong Kong, Norway, most of Europe - amongst others) can be bought internationally from Hong Kong distributors for considerably less than the retail. In Australia, they retail for AUD$6999 or $7999 and sony stores will sell them for $5800 or a little less. You can buy them on fleabay.com.au for $4500 ish distributed from Hong Kong - ie. No local warranty but for $2500-3500 in savings who cares? Kyuss

Agreed, being that porn is so much of the film output and it is so video oriented, you could say that film is dead apart from the very specialised Hollywood and Music Video areas - Just the highest profile outputs. IMO film will be around for ever (basically) because of the aesthetic of it. Video can come close to emulating film but has never really hit it yet. It is likely to be like vinyl to my mind because although TECHNICALLY, CD audio and DVD audio is of finer quality (higher fidelity, more durable, greater duration of audio per disc, and importantly more channels per disc in the case of DVD audio) there is still the aesthetic of holding 12 inches of plastic in your hand. I can not go past the pleasure of holding the huge cover art work, being the owner of one of only 1000 of these items in the world, and technically of the possible wholly analogue production process removing the lack of fluidity present (though debatably imperceptible) in having 44100 interruptions to the music per second. I can see a parallel where all other applications of short and feature length presentations become technically superior to film, but to many never quite capable of capturing the "feel" of traditional 35mm - hence a specialist or cult market resulting from a shrinking global demand for film (but importantly never a disappearance of it). In a way, despite that I can never see myself using film, I hope like vinyl it doesn't disappear entirely. Kyuss

for my purposes it suits me to either a) shoot in HDV and down convert my output to DVD quality for distribution OR B) shoot in DV until such time as HD removable media is more widespread

sorry to quote the whole message but... whatever. I have used the HDR-FX1 for some months now and the major issues that i experience are: HDV is extremely resource intensive to process. Equivalent to processing DVD video on a PIII 500 or thereabouts. Many hours to process only a couple of minutes of footage. Additionally, most TVs dont support HD resolutions, and almost no LCD monitors support it natively either (although some do support it in a down-converted to 1280*1024 res sense - cant remember the geek-term for that) So yes, you are right that there are some limitations on it ie. most people have to buy an HD receiver which can down convert to normal DVD/TV resolutions for viewing at the moment. Also, there is too little in the way of removable HDVideo media. Blu-ray is kind of available if you are Japanese, HD-DVD also (maybe - i havn't looked at this for a while) but basically it is difficult to do anything for removable media apart from down convert to DVD and store your original on data-dvds (spanned across multiple dvds) until such a time as HD is more commonplace... Kyuss