Love my JVC HD110, it's the HDV I could do without

[pixelator]

Yup. Months have passed. I love my JVC HD110. It's the HDV that I don't like. Form factor. Excellent.. Just what I wanted in a pro-sumer camcorder for years now. Dynamic range, color, adjustments etc. good. Aftermarket battery by IDX, Great. Compression of HDV on tape, sub par. In short on a static image, artificial surfaces (Say a flat wall with flat medium color) the compression codec handles the wall differently frame by frame. Also Reds are pixelated at the edges. This is from the compression, not the camer it's self. If I had a laptop and component inputs and exterior hard drive to capture live it would be great images.

How bad is my opinion? Well in JVC's defence it looks 5 times better than DIRECTV HD DISCOVERY HD Channel. Yet as everyone knows, it's best to keep the best possible signal from the begining and all the way to the end, not start off with a decent image, because by the time you get downrange, it will have fallen apart sooner. I hope some day JVC will give an upgrade to the codec, or even say H264 but at the higher bandwidth at the max the tape can handle as a new firmware upgrade. Who knows, it could happen.

Anyway a friend asked what to get for a series of TV pilots for the OUTDOOR LIFE CHANNEL. I told him the HVX200. When I outgrow this JVC in a couple years I'll probably go up to the HPX-500.

Of course I will experiment more with turning down the detail, keeping the aperature wider to have more of the background out of focus and hence make it eaiser for the codec to keep up and keep things looking better. Any other suggestions out there, or is it just how we live with HDV.

Who knows..... maybe FocusEnhancements will make a portable drive that accepts component inputs and record to it's drive with a less compressed codec. Probably more likely than a firmware update that has H264 at a High bit rate... not the consumer H264 at a lower bitrate...

Otherwise in a year or two I'll get the HPx500 type.

[Capt Quirk]

I have the 100U, and I have discovered it doesn't like the beach. Shooting HDV, the waves really come out funky, I haven't tried it with DV yet. Other than that, and some other surfaces, the HDV looks great. As far as design, I think there are some flaws... like putting the deck controls directly under the ear piece. I also think it's too long in the back for a tripod. Your 110 is a bit longer, isn't it?

[pixelator]

I bet its the same size, but with the IDX battery, it doesn't want to balance on my Bogen 501 head. It should get tripod plate to put the camera farther forward, and on a better tripod regardless. Well just spent about 2 hours balancing out my new samsung HDTV. Results are far better now. Started off with the JVC color bars as well as having my mac plugged into the same LCD via VGA and balanced out that input as well. Results are fairly close together, of course any real color correction will need a Matrox MXO for serious color work, but it's close enough. The real surprise was to discover that Samsung defaults to having the NR and other filters on that degraded the video picture. I'm sure they help out for over the air broadcast in fring area, but good signals, all the filters degrade the image. So now I'm 90% happy with the JVC image quality. Funny what a properly calibrated monitor will do. In other news with lots of research online. The biggest issue that I was having (that is now lessond by calibrating the monitor) was large flat areas macroblocking even with no camera movement. Others have stated this issue with ALL HDV type cameras including up to Sony XD-Cam reportedly. So the best way around it is to vary the light (if possible) with a spot or a flag to help break up the background. Another answer is to turn down or off the detail. Sounds like edge enhancements. I'll experiment with Detail Settings low to OFF and see what I think.

[pixelator]

doing some experiments today in case anyone is interested. Turning the details off the lens mushes out. The stock lens I think should be kept around detail -2 through -5. If I had the better 13x wide angle zoom for $6,000k I believe I would have the detail OFF. I used that lens about a month ago. It's only a little sharper at the center, but it's just as sharp at the edges through out the entire zoom and even nearly closed down. My 17x stock lens gets some slight fuzzies the last 10% or so on either size especially zoomed in regardless of aperature... Medium it looks pretty good.. zoomed all the way wide it's fairly soft. My Sony 3 chips DV and DV-Cams never did this good. Side note, I hear nothing but good things about Canon's HDV optics. It's important to remember that the stock lens is NOT a $5,000 lens... but it's still a decent one. I suppose I could spend the rest of next week adjusting H & V Frequency along with Detail over all balance.. but I think somewhere between -2 and -5 with the H (stock setting) middle and the V (stock settings) high gives a better image overall. As far as gama i'm doing my advanced process as follows: Cinelike OFF, Color Matric Standard, Gama Cinelike, Level normal, Gain +2.. then programming User Keys 1 & 2 as black stretch 1 & 2 and User key 3 as Black compress 2 so I can quickly play with my shadows on the fly in the field. White Clip 108% Knee settings at manual 80%. Anyone doing a good project with this camera should budget some money for a rental of the Fujinon 13x lens. Well worth it. I'll have to check local rental prices.

[Capt Quirk]

Between my eyes and the backfocus, I'm working hard to get sharp enough details. To help compensate, I have my detail set at -1, I took it out to the beach this morning, and got a beautiful sunrise. This is when I could have really gone for the wider lens! Either way, it came out pretty nice from what I've been able to see. Premiere has been a problem lately, and I'm only getting to see bits at a time.