ALL: New ac130/160 vs used hpx170?

J

Josh Bass

Veteran
I know we touched on this in another thread, but I wanted to reaffirm. . .

I'm looking into getting a new cam soon. The ac130/160 have caught my eye, but I know someone who might be selling an hpx170 as well. The HPX would have to be just about the sweetest deal ever for the cost of additional p2 cards not to invalidate any savings against a new 130/160.

I realize the obvious:
-DVCProHD vs AVCHD
-p2 card vs SD cards (i.e. price, length of record time)
-22x zoom vs 13x
-(maybe some others that I know of that aren't coming to mind right now)

but, those aside, what about the look of the footage from the two cams?

I've heard several times "I like the look of the HPX but I like the lens on the EX1" (I realize I never mentioned the EX1 before, but it's something I've heard in regards to the HPX's softness). . .meaning the "pansonic look", the way it handles color and contrast, maybe more appealing than the EX1, but the lens is considered to be somewhat soft on the HPX, in comparison. Also read the HPX is somewhat noisy.

So, are the new 130/160s noticeably sharper than the HPX, more noise free, etc.?

Someone on here basically said that codec aside, they would recommend one of the ACs over an HPX. Still agree?

Thanks.
 
Here is a video of the hpx 170 versus ac 160 it's not a good footage to compare but it all i have that on my pc.
First clip is the 170 than the 160. I think the ac 160/30 is better in low light and color. These footage may make you hungry :Drogar-BigGrin(DBG)

 
Personally I'm a huge fan of both AVCHD and SDHC cards- it's a great codec and dirt cheap media. DVCPROHD and P2 are also wonderful P2 management requires both more gear- i.e. a reader or a computer with a PCMCIA slot and costs a lot more for the media. For my money AVCHD/SDHC/XC is the sweet spot of price/performance and the AC130 really nails it.

-Noah
 
Thanks. Also curious about the LCD. I've used the DVX series quite a bit, and the HVX200 a few times. Almost seems like the same quality/resolution flipout LCD on both. Is this the same one as on the HPX? And now, as I understand it, the AC cameras have a totally new genuinely high res LCD, much improved over the older cams?
 
It's still not as sharp as say a good outboard HD monitor (or an iPhone 4)- but it's more than enough to check focus- especially if you master the focus assist tool.

Noah
 
Josh Bass said:
Thanks. Also curious about the LCD. I've used the DVX series quite a bit, and the HVX200 a few times. Almost seems like the same quality/resolution flipout LCD on both.
Click to expand...
I think the LCD on the DVX and HVX was the same.

Is this the same one as on the HPX?
Click to expand...
HPX170 or HPX250?

On the HPX170, the LCD itself is the same as the one on the HVX200, but the peaking algorithm has been adjusted so it makes focusing 10x easier. It's vastly improved on the HPX170 over the HVX200, even though the base resolution of the LCD panels is the same.

The LCD on the HPX250 is at least 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 times better. It's 4x sharper, and it has an infinitely wider acceptable angle of view (i.e., rotating the HVX LCD off-axis made the picture turn to mush at very minor angles, but the AC130/AC160/HPX250 LCD can be rotated quite a ways and still holds up.
 
Barry_Green said:
The LCD on the HPX250 is at least 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 times better. It's 4x sharper, and it has an infinitely wider acceptable angle of view (i.e., rotating the HVX LCD off-axis made the picture turn to mush at very minor angles, but the AC130/AC160/HPX250 LCD can be rotated quite a ways and still holds up.
Click to expand...

Barry-

The new LCD sounds so much better than the HVX200's which I found impossible to use.

Does the 130/160/250 all have this same fantastic LCD?

Thanks in advance.

Be well.

Rob
Smalltalk Productions
 
NoahK said:
Personally I'm a huge fan of both AVCHD and SDHC cards- it's a great codec and dirt cheap media. DVCPROHD and P2 are also wonderful P2 management requires both more gear- i.e. a reader or a computer with a PCMCIA slot and costs a lot more for the media. For my money AVCHD/SDHC/XC is the sweet spot of price/performance and the AC130 really nails it.

-Noah
Click to expand...

Just a small point of clarification: You don't need a card reader or PCMCIA slot to read P2, you can use the cam to read the cards AND or run an externally powered HDD. Don't know if the new cams will up load to a drive.

I have both a AVCHD cam (HMC40) and a HPX170. The full raster HMC40 can be seen as slightly sharper than the 170 and the new cams, no doubt are as well. However, the color is better on the DVCProHD 170, and I prefer the way motion is handled as well. The long lens on the new cams give me lens envy. Even though there is a slight loss of sharpness, I would still choose the 170 for the codec if that were my only cam, your mileage may vary. Now the HPX250 using intra would be a whole different story.

Grant
 
Explain what you mean about the color on the 170 being better than the new ACs? I'm assuming you mean something that's just a quality of the camera, not something that could be tweaked to match in menu/scene file settings?

Also, for purposes of this thread, HPX ALWAYS refers to the 170. . .250 is way out of my league. Or my wallet's league.
 
Ah, but David, read it again -- you are *agreeing* with me.

Now, if you'd said it was 999,999,999,999,999,999 times better, then you'd have been disagreeing... :thumbsup:
 
Josh Bass said:
Explain what you mean about the color on the 170 being better than the new ACs? I'm assuming you mean something that's just a quality of the camera, not something that could be tweaked to match in menu/scene file settings?

Also, for purposes of this thread, HPX ALWAYS refers to the 170. . .250 is way out of my league. Or my wallet's league.
Click to expand...

This is mostly to do with recorded codec. DVCProHD is a intra frame codec, and has more color information recorded. AVCHD, while pretty amazing, is a much more compressed codec with less color information.

Grant
 
ggrantly said:
This is mostly to do with recorded codec. DVCProHD is a intra frame codec, and has more color information recorded. AVCHD, while pretty amazing, is a much more compressed codec with less color information.Grant
Click to expand...
How does this specifically manifest itself? Can you give an example ("When looking at skin tones....")
 
Josh Bass said:
How does this specifically manifest itself? Can you give an example ("When looking at skin tones....")
Click to expand...

Color correction will work better. If you don't color correct, it may not make much difference. Green screen should work better, though many say it works fine in AVCHD. Motion will have less artifacts since each frame is a discrete entity. AVCHD is a long gop codec so significant motion will not be as smooth since the changes between frames are "averaged". That is a simplification since AVCHD is pretty smart, but a long gop codec will never be as good as a intra frame codec IMHO.

Grant
 
ggrantly said:
Motion will have less artifacts since each frame is a discrete entity. AVCHD is a long gop codec so significant motion will not be as smooth since the changes between frames are "averaged".
Click to expand...
This isn't an accurate assessment of how a long-GoP codec works. There's nothing about motion rendition that would be any different! There's no averaging going on. Motion on a long-GoP codec and motion on an intraframe codec are both going to be represented identically.

The issue with long-GoP is that it's used to reduce bandwidth, and it's a valid technique, but sometimes codec designers ask too much of it. A long-GoP 180mbit MPEG2 will perform perfectly well and pretty much indistinguishably from a 220-megabit intraframe codec. But 25 megabits of long-GoP MPEG2 can get horribly artifacted if too much changes between frames. You can see this happen on your HDTV when the signal gets too complex briefly, footage will go blocky for a half-second (the duration of a GoP) and then clear up for the next GoP.
 
Maybe "averaging" isn't the correct term, but there is no doubt in my mind that DVCProHD, I-frame codec, is less easily defeated by motion than AVCHD.

Grant
 
DVCPRO-HD records every frame discretely, so there's never a chance that what happens in any other frame will affect what happens in the current frame.

In a long-GoP codec, if there's too much detail over the course of an entire group, then the entire group can be overwhelmed. What happens in frame 13 can affect how frame 2 gets encoded, for example. Each "group" is encoded collectively, as a group -- and if too much happens during the group, then all the pictures in that group will be degraded.

Each and every frame in a long-GoP codec is treated the same as an individual frame -- i.e., it's rendered off the sensor and presented to the codec as a full, entire, complete frame. It's then up to the codec to be able to compress it, and the codec compares that frame to all the others in the group and notes similarities and discards them, and then encodes the differences.

If there are too many differences, there won't be enough bits to go around to encode the entire group. So what happens in a long-GoP codec is the same thing as what happens you save a JPG with too high of a compression level -- it gets blocky because there's not enough bandwidth to properly encode the picture.

Point being -- it's not motion that does it, and it's not that a long-GoP codec can't encode motion properly, because clearly it can. But when there's too much changing from frame to frame, the codec can get overwhelmed and turn to "mush" because there's not enough bits to properly encode all the detail in the frame.
 
So is all this actual issue, or is it an inflated issue like the rolling shutter that only manifests itself while one is whip panning madly in front of a picket fence, in a way that one would almost certainly never have any reason to do on any shoot ever?What sorts of real life shooting situations would actually be enough to overwhelm the codec?
 
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