I've been playing with my new xh-a1s for a couple of weeks now, playing with various configurations, and I thought I'd share a few observations. Some of them are things that are probably obvious to most advance users, but a lot of these issues are things I searched for through different forums, couldn't find, and finally had to just learn through trial and error.
1) The out-of-box preset is garbage. I played with about half a dozen custom presets in various conditions, including Panalook, VividRGB, Vision, and others. The best one out of the bunch finally ended up being "TrueColor." I found a lot of people complaining about this custom prest producing too much blue, and I too saw this problem - until I performed a custom white balance, which made everything perfect. To perform the custom white balance, I simply held a piece of plain white printer paper in front of the camera while outside, hit the auto white balance button, and voila. Same thing should be performed under tungsten/indoor conditions as well, on a different white balance preset (there's an "a" or "b" option switch on the side of the camera). If you choose to use another custom preset, be wary of the fact that the CineGamma modes seem to be different between the Xh-A1 and the Xh-A1s, and you'll have to compensate in some way. This isn't an issue with the TrueColor preset because it doesn't employ the CineGamma mode in any way (set to off).
2) I kept getting grain/video noise in my early footage under various conditions. I eliminated this completely by flipping the AGC switch to "off" and making the menu preset for the "low" gain setting "-3db".
3) I kept noticing a significant quality difference between my indoor and outdoor footage, even though I was using sunlight for both. The indoor footage was crisp, gorgeous, while outside footage was foggy and looked like SD rather than HD. I finally narrowed this down to shutter speed. Running 1/48 while outdoors in bright conditions is no good. When shooting extremely bright conditions, I got the fuzz when on 1/48. I cranked shutter speed as high as 1/15000 on an overcast day, and the results were night and day. I started getting the crispness that I saw in a lot of the YouTube demo videos that had inspired me to buy this cam to begin with. I basically started making it a rule of thumb to raise my shutter speed as high as I could go while still getting light with my f-stop at around 2.xx. Great results (so far) but I'd love to hear from anyone who advises against this for whatever reason.
Hope this helps the introductory xh-a1 or xh-a1s user.
1) The out-of-box preset is garbage. I played with about half a dozen custom presets in various conditions, including Panalook, VividRGB, Vision, and others. The best one out of the bunch finally ended up being "TrueColor." I found a lot of people complaining about this custom prest producing too much blue, and I too saw this problem - until I performed a custom white balance, which made everything perfect. To perform the custom white balance, I simply held a piece of plain white printer paper in front of the camera while outside, hit the auto white balance button, and voila. Same thing should be performed under tungsten/indoor conditions as well, on a different white balance preset (there's an "a" or "b" option switch on the side of the camera). If you choose to use another custom preset, be wary of the fact that the CineGamma modes seem to be different between the Xh-A1 and the Xh-A1s, and you'll have to compensate in some way. This isn't an issue with the TrueColor preset because it doesn't employ the CineGamma mode in any way (set to off).
2) I kept getting grain/video noise in my early footage under various conditions. I eliminated this completely by flipping the AGC switch to "off" and making the menu preset for the "low" gain setting "-3db".
3) I kept noticing a significant quality difference between my indoor and outdoor footage, even though I was using sunlight for both. The indoor footage was crisp, gorgeous, while outside footage was foggy and looked like SD rather than HD. I finally narrowed this down to shutter speed. Running 1/48 while outdoors in bright conditions is no good. When shooting extremely bright conditions, I got the fuzz when on 1/48. I cranked shutter speed as high as 1/15000 on an overcast day, and the results were night and day. I started getting the crispness that I saw in a lot of the YouTube demo videos that had inspired me to buy this cam to begin with. I basically started making it a rule of thumb to raise my shutter speed as high as I could go while still getting light with my f-stop at around 2.xx. Great results (so far) but I'd love to hear from anyone who advises against this for whatever reason.
Hope this helps the introductory xh-a1 or xh-a1s user.