4-cam comparison -- initial response

Kholi said:
The article even states that people want to outright hate on the Canon (not verbatim, but basically).
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That's not what the article was saying at all. The article was saying that people leveled charges that the Canon had been discriminated against. Which is not at all what happened; what happened is that we didn't have as expert an operator on the Canon as we would have liked. Shannon made some discoveries in the manual that may have improved the Canon's performance, things that the rest of us didn't know about, but it was too late to implement them.

Adam will be doing a comparable test but with much more time (three days) in connection with Mike Curtis and Chris Hurd, and they will be able to take everything we learned here and go forward, hopefully getting a much more useful set of tests too. They plan on getting real-life scenes, staged scenes, motion, all sorts of things that we couldn't get this time around.
 
holyzoo said:
I'm just saying I've seen better resolution from the HVX than what I'm seeing in the report clips posted so far.
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That's why he put in there that we're not sure what we saw is a representative sample, and why I haven't said anything until I saw the results of his report. We all thought it was odd; the resolution on that chart was lower than we were expecting, and Adam reporting 540 lines doesn't match up with other reports and other charts, so I believe Adam asked Panasonic for a second sample to compare.
 
Barry_Green said:
That's not what the article was saying at all. The article was saying that people leveled charges that the Canon had been discriminated against. Which is not at all what happened; what happened is that we didn't have as expert an operator on the Canon as we would have liked. Shannon made some discoveries in the manual that may have improved the Canon's performance, things that the rest of us didn't know about, but it was too late to implement them.

Adam will be doing a comparable test but with much more time (three days) in connection with Mike Curtis and Chris Hurd, and they will be able to take everything we learned here and go forward, hopefully getting a much more useful set of tests too. They plan on getting real-life scenes, staged scenes, motion, all sorts of things that we couldn't get this time around.
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I stand corrected. But, can't argue that there's still bias. But I guess that's a given anyway.
 
PappasArts said:
This kind of microscope analysis is great for us technical DP/Director types, but once the film is made no one ever notices these differences. When backed 8 feet away from a big 60" HDTV, it will all look the same to the viewer.
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That point was driven home while we were there, and Adam makes that pretty clear -- they all did really well, and the gap between $70,000 camera and $6,000 camera wasn't very big at all. Simple fact was, when we had 'em all four hooked up to the switcher and switched between 'em, they all looked great. They all looked high-def. I'm guilty of geeking out over numbers and specs more than most anyone, but I was the first to say -- they all look darn nice, and it's amazing that you can get this kind of quality at these price tags!

I think our testing will help Adam and Mike and Chris to focus on tests that the viewers will find more informative -- less "egghead" labwork, more actual-scenes. Even so, I still maintain that the deciding factor on these units is to determine what features you want, and go with the one that offers those features. They all offer quite different feature sets, and I think that will help someone to determine which suits their preferences best. But nobody can bag on any of 'em based on image; they all delivered the high-def experience!
 
Emanuel said:
You're welcome Sanjin! And you can tell us your thoughts about all. I and many others, we appreciate your useful posts. You just must be careful with your words and not rating, please! That's all! You are a free man and this community is a free forum.
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Thanks Emanuel and of course I am back just like Phoenix. And I promise again no more provocation. Just a free opinion. Also I will get HVX200 when would be affordable price in Europe.

SJUSER
--------------------

http://www.sanjinjukic.com/index_panasonicHD_P2.html
 
SJUSER said:
Thanks Emanuel and of course I am back just like Phoenix. And I promise again no more provocation. Just a free opinion.
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A free spirit like you is always an asset to any community. I'm glad with your return from Barcelona... Well, after that, all the dvxuser.com users would like to be banned...:grin:

But if you didn't do it, I'd invite you by e-mail and I would post this request here. Your non-sold opinion and your contribution is too important to us.

Also I will get HVX200 when would be affordable price in Europe.
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I'm sure of that, as PROUSER like you are.
 
Barry ... what was your overall, personal impression of the HVX, as such. From your review, I 'feel' you were a little reserved about HVX. ...
 
Sorry I did not see there were already over 40 pages in the thread. Excuse me if it has already been covered.
 
A few notes about the .jpgs of all the cameras at the end of the Adam Wilt article.

First....the Cinealta........WOW.....no wonder this is the cream of the crop.

Second.....I see a lot of edge bleeding on the XLh1 footage.(red fringe on white/black edges) I don't if this is Chromatic Abberation or not but I can say I saw a lot of this with my XL2.

three.....The 1080P shot from the HVX200 looks out of focus to me. It is so soft that I have a hard time believing this is from the camera ( i know it is). Not looking impressive at all. I wasn't looking for uber sharp but this looks almost out of focus.

Anyone else notice these things?
 
icicle,

I noticed the same thing and posted about the "out of focus" problem in another thread.
Sure, it has nothing to do with the camera capability but with the difficulty of properly focusing in HD when you are in a rush.
Now, does this tells also something about the reproducibility of some of the test results?

Piero
 
I also noticed the out of focus thing - a few of the cameras seemed to suffer that but after closer inspection it seems that for each of the cameras focus was set to the back focus chart in the upper left which (depending on depth of focus) might explain why the girl appears out of focus on 2 or 3 of the cameras.

I was actually disturbed by a couple of things about those stills - like why they weren't all from the same moment in time (she's frowning in some, smiling in others). And I wasn't quite clear on whether the stills were supposed to be from each camera at the same f-stop (seems like that's what was implied, but I'm not sure). I use the Varicam quite a bit and that still just doesn't do it justice. I've also used the f900 & 950 which truly are great cameras.
 
I was told to focus on the Fuji backfocus chart, so that's what I aimed for.

As for exposure, they were aimed to get the 18% gray card (lower left) to 50% on the waveform monitor.
 
The HVX200 does look soft...

The XLH1 looks a bit soft too, but it also suffers from the image appears to be grainy. I imagine this was set to 0dB. I believe the Canon might of been cleaner at -3dB but would of traded "seeing the shadows".

The HD100 actually did a decent job.
 
philarno said:
I think everyone agrees (outside Panasonic) that the cost and lack of storage is a problem for the P2 cards. Any camera Panasonic wants to sell to non corporate buyers (the kind of buyers that would be interested in a $5500 HD camera.) is going to be hindered by the cost of P2. If Panasonic made this camera with affordable HD recording options there would be no good arguement against buying one.

Panasonic has a long history of coming out with tech advanced equipment that dies because of bad business judgement by the company. As a news photographer I can remember that Panasonic beat everyone to the camcorder for news market. They had the M format, the recam, and M2, all of which lost to Sony and the Beta format and went extinct very quickly costing a lot of TV stations a lot of money. Panasonic never did have a serious image in TV news after that. Most of my friends that are still in news react the same when I tell them I am getting a fancy new high tech Panasonic camera. The common phrase is "Panasonic scares me, they don't support their stuff".

Dispite large initial interest, unless they address the P2 problem sooner rather than later, the HVX200 may not sell enough units to sustain the line for the long haul and buyers will be stuck with another orphaned Panasonic line.

I know I had to think long and hard about how I was going to afford HD recording with this camera before I ordered one. That question still has not been resolved, so I am just hoping that this investment will not be a big mistake.

The type of shooting I and most other guys I know do is more run and gun than the "take your time, always be near an outlet, and carry you laptop with you" kind of shooting that I'm sure many of you do.

I am hoping that we will learn that indeed there is a way you can take a small 1394 portable hard drive for $200 or $300 and direct record, or that some memory company like PNY will come up with an aftermarket P2 card that they could make a ton of profit on and still be way cheaper that Panasonic.
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is an 8gb p2 card really only $1k in parts? if so, then i would agree completely with the above statements. I would love to see P2 be the future video medium:beer:
 
Barry_Green said:
I was told to focus on the Fuji backfocus chart, so that's what I aimed for.

As for exposure, they were aimed to get the 18% gray card (lower left) to 50% on the waveform monitor.
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Barry,
I don't doubt that you focused on the backfocus chart but how far were you zoomed? I ask because my experience with the DVX at the widest setting is that more of the image should be in focus. It would seem that the HVX was zoomed a little to create this shallower depth of field.

Just wondering.

THanks
 
I don't remember what the zoom setting was. We were pretty far away. All the cameras were zoomed in to frame approximately the same image. I know I couldn't fill the screen with the gray card even at full zoom. But I don't expect we were too deep in the zoom range.

I've told Adam he should have a dedicated note-taker along on his next test, because it's questions like this that we just don't have the answers to.
 
Barry,

I second that, taking notes during framing and testing is needed. But it takes time and patience, and apparently you had not enough time. 6 cameras is too much. I suspect that if you don't repeat the shots and do statistics some of the results can be at variance (also with the resolution charts, but in m opinion they are really not so meaningful).
Thanks for the help. In Europe is a little bit early to know how the PAL HVX will work.

Piero
 
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