HF100 vs HV30

J

Johny-115

Member
Hi ... i was doing some research a narrowed choice to HF100 and HV30 ... but i really cant decide which is better

from what i now
HV30 has tapes, focus wheel, more fluid movement (is this even recognizable ?)
HF100 has AVCHD (worse for edit), better image quality

ive read a lot of theory, whole camcorder.info reviews and seen a lot of clips, but still cant decide, i really like SDHC concept because of non tape pc copying, but ive heard of problems with ghosting, motion trailing (on HF100)... is it real problem or just rare ? oh and iam from europe and pal has only 50i/25p choice ... thats bad because i think 30p is just way better when i want to project it on PC .... i just simply dont know anythig about these camcorders and their workflow in practical way
 
I've never heard of ghosting on the Canon HF series. I have heard of it on the Panasonic SD9.
Also, keep in mind that both HDV and especially AVCHD are very processor intensive. Make sure you have a fast dual-core processor.
Also, the HF100's image quality isn't better overall, it's just sharper. Right now, HDV is superior in terms of compression to AVCHD. That's probably going to change soon. Canon and Panasonic are both coming out with cameras (HF11 and HMC150, respectively) that shoot at 24mbps, very close to HDV's 25 mbps. And, since AVCHD is a more effiecient codec, those images should look beautiful. (I'm sure know all of the above, but I'm stating it just in case.)
At this stage, your choice should hinge on the workflow you have in place. Most NLE's accept HDV, only some accept AVCHD. What NLE are you using?
 
iam planning buying quad-core cpu / vista64 with cam, so i think that wont be problem
about compression ... so if there wont be much detail in image and movement, than the diferrences between HDV and 17 avchd also wont be recognizable ?

i mainly use Premiere, i heard about some plugin that gives support for avchd, but still i plan in beginnings to donwscale video to half or at least 720p into something else, so i wont care much about some loss of detail ... and with the time ... support of avchd will be just better and better


recently i found guy comparing HV20 and HF100 saying:
1. the HV20, given any movement at all, still has a slightly better ability to resolve fine detail. In bright indoor shots and in in reasonably but not overly detailed outdoor shots, not sure I can tell the difference. However, the moment I have a backdrop with lots of pine trees on distant hills, there is a very noticable difference. The HV20 simply seems to resolve a lot more of the distant pine detail. The HV20 did (and does) create a "wow" factor with those kind of shots. The HF100 does not. The 100 is not bad, but I lose the ability to marvel at the distant detail. Of course, thousands of pines mean millions of needles. That's a lot of detail.
2. Movement is more fluid with the HV20. With the HF100, I noticed that I found even reasonably slow pans bothersome - there was blur and greater "blockiness" to the scenery. The HV20, on the other hand, seems both more fluid and to present more of a solid image as I pan - really allowing my eyes to track the scenery during a pan.
3. Medium to low light shots are dramatically better on the HF100. With the HV20, I tried to do all kinds of things to compensate any time it was evening in doors (even with a few hundred lux of light) or nearing twilight outdoors. The colors seemed overly reddish on the full auto settings, the image got noisy, etc. I used cineamode to try and offset both to some reasonable effect. By comparison, I have found I never need to take the HF100 out of the "Easy mode" and the quality is far better than what I got with all my fiddling on the HV20. (I should note I do all my filming in 60i - so bear that in mind). This is no small quality difference. It's huge.

INTERESTING NOTE
I took my Colorado HV20 footage and encoded to AVCHD (17Mb/s). I used Pinnacle Studio 11 - probably not the best encoder. But the important point is that, even though TWICE compressed with the re-encoding, the resulting footage was, in general, better than the AVCHD from the HF-100 for the highly detailed nature scenes described in point 1. That's really surprising and is good news for the standard. It suggests any quality trade-offs I'm seeing today may be more a function of processor limitations (doing it all in real time) vs. the protocol(s).



i think il choose HF100, iam little worried about fluidness of movement, especialy when progressive on PAL version is only 25frames, but avchd looks better for future, because i dont plan to buying new cam in couple of years ... recently i also read that it takes video with dull colors, because TV has all colors rgb only 16 to 235, so on pc it looks less contrasted, but that probably apllies to all cams, and dunno if its even true
 
Hi John,

did you finally purchase your HF100? what's your take on the motion fluidity. is it a problem with 50i? how about indoor and low light?

cheers,
Pierre
 
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