Hello Panasonic, selling my FX1

Too bad D-VHS type ideas ( using exsisting VHS cassettes for digital recording) didn't take hold. Personally I like lots of room on a tape for redundant data and a thick mil. not miniDV....too wimpy. Bigger cameras are more my style anyway.

As for the Sony,

I just read an article in Highdef magazine about a guy with a Z1 that loves the images& camera. He cuts it with images from his $100,000 + F900 Sony HD camera. The Z1 must do pretty well to get such a strong endorsement.

There will be plenty of people happy to own such a camera. I tend to believe the new HDX200 will be much better for me but there are those that will want it.
 
Finally having the opportunity to handle the Z1 this week, I'll say I was really surprised/impressed with the way it handled. It just "felt" good, you know. The zoom servo was really responsive and the widescreen monitor was in a pretty good spot when camera was on sticks. I never saw the output from tape, but it definitely had a "professional" appearance that (and everyone should know by now my preference for Panasonic, the DVCPRO-HD system, and VariCam) well, the HVX200 didn't. The HD100 even had the appearance of a professional product. Maybe it was just the colors. Maybe subliminally, I just don't respond well to blue or aerodynamically-shaped camcorders and prefer black, old fashioned gear better, but the competing products did appear to be more expensive looking. Of course, the proof is in the pudding. A friend of mine in New Orleans bought a Z1 after attending a VariCamp this year.. says he's pretty happy with it with some tweaking. Of course, for me and the type of things I need to do with a camera, an HVX200 and MiniDV with be a perfect match..

brian wells
 
10s said:
I just read an article in Highdef magazine about a guy with a Z1 that loves the images& camera. He cuts it with images from his $100,000 + F900 Sony HD camera. The Z1 must do pretty well to get such a strong endorsement.


I'd imagine that footage from a Z1 would cut well with the F900. It is obvious that the HDV was posted on HDCAM and not on HDV. That's the problem I have with the HDV format. If I had all the money in the world (or just a lot more than I have, I would buy a Z1 now and get an HVX when it comes out. I bet the Z1 is very cool. But econmics ya know.
 
Barry_Green said:
JVC had live feed from the cameras, and then they had one station that had a plasma TV hooked up that was playing back ProHD footage that had been recorded onto a D-VHS deck.

Why do you think they showed the video this way?

Has anyone seen footage from the JVC cam played back from tape?

I wonder how well HDV or at least JVC's flavor of HDV handles the pulldown?
 
This is only a guess, but they never claimed the footage from D-VHS was a dub from HDV. They only said it was from the HD100. My conjecture is they may have recorded directly to D-VHS through the analog outputs of the HD100. Why? Maybe the cameras didn't have a working tape mechanism at the time of the show and also because D-VHS uses 50% more data than HDV. If the HDV looked bad, they might have chosen D-VHS thinking no-body would notice the difference and write D-VHS off as a consumer format, as opposed to recording on whatever JVC offers for highbitrate HD.. DigitalS-HD? I don't know. This is only a guess and is really, come to think of it, pretty malicious. The point is, we don't know what that footage was coming off of, and it just looks a little suspicious to me, that's all. It would seem that if they wanted to be "above board" they could have just playedback from a camera. This would make sense to me. Why appear so close to the edge if you don't have to? The pulldown is an interesting question too. Was it 24p footage playing or 30p? I don't have the answer to that question. Can D-VHS support 24p and 30p? I don't have the answer to that, either. You bring up an interesting question, Rosestar.

brian wells
 
I have no actual idea why they chose to display it this way. I can take guesses...

First, they probably don't have a running ProHD deck, and the footage they were showing was 24p (which means ProHD), so they probably captured it through analog. But why not play it back on the same device that captured it?

Second, the plasma was a big screen, 50" or so. But if that's the reason they chose for using it, I think it was a mistake -- the CRTs looked so much better. Part of that may have been because of the size of the CRTs too -- the smaller the display device, the less noticeable noise/grain would be, so showing it on a 50" screen may have exaggerated those artifacts.

Or it just may have been a lousy screen.

Or it may have been suffering scaling artifacts; maybe the plasma wasn't native 1280x720.

No idea, really.

Finally, JVC's ProHD doesn't use pulldown, it stores the native 24p frames as 24p, as near as I can tell.
 
Like I said before, I don't think it'd be fair to judge the camera based on this footage. If for no other reason, because this footage looked pretty bad, and the live output coming from the cameras right next to it looked very, very good. So I don't think this would be a fair way to judge it. I'm more than content to wait for a shipping camera, so we can control the variables that go into producing the footage and displaying it, and therefore know what it's truly capable of.
 
I have a question.
All you people who say they are going to sell there DVX or FX1 or what-have-you in order to buy this HVX200 when it arrives.... How much do you think you can get for these used cameras respectivly? I am just curious, cause I have an XL2, DVX100, sony TRV900 myself - but I would sell them all for a camera that claims to be this good. ... So, How much do aftermarket XL2's , FX1s, DVX's and other cams usually go for on E-Bay or something? ... cause, I just cant belive you could make much ... maybe Im wrong. ???

Tyson
 
Your DV equipment will be valuable for some time to come.
You can search completed auctions on eBay to get an idea of what stuff sells for.
An original DVX100 (non a) sells for right around 2,000 - 2,200 most of the time.

Hope this helps.
brian wells
 
Back
Top