Alright, so I was working at WEVA and Panasonic was throwing a party with free food and drink ( I don't drink alcohol, but free food pretty much guarantee's my attendance :P ).
I was also interested to see how this AVCHD DVX style cam would do, so I looked at it, it had basically the same design as the DVX100 that I enjoy shooting my DV stuff on. I was however disappointed to hear that it has the same front end as the HVX ( IE color stretching is being employed by it which gives me concerns for chroma keying as I've tried working with HVX Green screen footage, and I can't seem to get a very clean key from it like I can with other cameras that I won't mention ). It records at 21mpbs avg. on its highest quality, but does hit 24 if its encoder deems it necessary so it sounds like an AVCHD VBR codec that's 21Mbps as an average. I had people coming by the booth telling me how wonderful it was, how it was doing very well in low light ( don't know how they knew that because it wasn't very low light in the convention room :) ). never the less when I got to the party I was looking at the camera and got to get my hands on it ( very light btw ), and I looked, and they were running the shutter down at 30 and the gain up at 6db ( not much noticeably added noise which is always a good thing in case you have to have it ), and the guy at the table was bragging about this wonderful camera and was spouting off about how well it does in low light and how this is just how they have it set up in the booth, it came off as a little shady to me since it was set to a shutter of 30 and I've never found that to be a good look really ( a little blurry in the hand motion for interviews etc...) . The one thing I was surprised to see ( and let me preface this with saying that I don't have a lot of experience with AVCHD ), and I don't know if it was the tv or what, but there was a demo reel and it seemed like there was blocking on all the edges of everything in the demoreel, and a lot of what I'll deem "digital noise" in the skys etc... where there was blocking jumping around all the time in the gradients. Perhaps this is just AVCHD, or maybe it's just the TV, but it seems to me that that the overall image quality was very underwhelming. There were a lot of good things to say about this cam too, like the fact that it's SDHC card recording format ( like you can't find those just about anywhere ), and it was very light, and it had a nice feel overall. Though I didn't like the cover they put over the volume adjustments as it made it hard for me to turn the knobs, but it did have screws which made it removeable ( thank you for giving me a choice panasonic ). Overall, I'm guessing a 3.5K street price and it's going to be a fine addition to the low price range market and will do very well I think in the sub 4 K market, especially since there is basically nothing that is tapeless HD in this market that runs at any kind of professional level.
I am, overall, underwhelmed. Again, it could just be the TV, but thus far, I'd save the extra $2K and get an EX-1 unless you can't, even if it does use expensive Express card tech. ( at least in comparison to the SDHC cards this HMC camera uses )
Thought you all might be interested in my opinion since there might be folks out there interested in this cam and not able to get their hands on it yet.
Dave
I was also interested to see how this AVCHD DVX style cam would do, so I looked at it, it had basically the same design as the DVX100 that I enjoy shooting my DV stuff on. I was however disappointed to hear that it has the same front end as the HVX ( IE color stretching is being employed by it which gives me concerns for chroma keying as I've tried working with HVX Green screen footage, and I can't seem to get a very clean key from it like I can with other cameras that I won't mention ). It records at 21mpbs avg. on its highest quality, but does hit 24 if its encoder deems it necessary so it sounds like an AVCHD VBR codec that's 21Mbps as an average. I had people coming by the booth telling me how wonderful it was, how it was doing very well in low light ( don't know how they knew that because it wasn't very low light in the convention room :) ). never the less when I got to the party I was looking at the camera and got to get my hands on it ( very light btw ), and I looked, and they were running the shutter down at 30 and the gain up at 6db ( not much noticeably added noise which is always a good thing in case you have to have it ), and the guy at the table was bragging about this wonderful camera and was spouting off about how well it does in low light and how this is just how they have it set up in the booth, it came off as a little shady to me since it was set to a shutter of 30 and I've never found that to be a good look really ( a little blurry in the hand motion for interviews etc...) . The one thing I was surprised to see ( and let me preface this with saying that I don't have a lot of experience with AVCHD ), and I don't know if it was the tv or what, but there was a demo reel and it seemed like there was blocking on all the edges of everything in the demoreel, and a lot of what I'll deem "digital noise" in the skys etc... where there was blocking jumping around all the time in the gradients. Perhaps this is just AVCHD, or maybe it's just the TV, but it seems to me that that the overall image quality was very underwhelming. There were a lot of good things to say about this cam too, like the fact that it's SDHC card recording format ( like you can't find those just about anywhere ), and it was very light, and it had a nice feel overall. Though I didn't like the cover they put over the volume adjustments as it made it hard for me to turn the knobs, but it did have screws which made it removeable ( thank you for giving me a choice panasonic ). Overall, I'm guessing a 3.5K street price and it's going to be a fine addition to the low price range market and will do very well I think in the sub 4 K market, especially since there is basically nothing that is tapeless HD in this market that runs at any kind of professional level.
I am, overall, underwhelmed. Again, it could just be the TV, but thus far, I'd save the extra $2K and get an EX-1 unless you can't, even if it does use expensive Express card tech. ( at least in comparison to the SDHC cards this HMC camera uses )
Thought you all might be interested in my opinion since there might be folks out there interested in this cam and not able to get their hands on it yet.
Dave